Every Day Is Special: April 28 - National Sense of Smell Day

April 28 - National Sense of Smell Day

(Last Saturday of April)

Posted on April 28, 2018

Like other animals, we have senses for a few reasons:

To see, hear, or smell danger! That's a biggie.

To see, hear, or smell a potential meal. As in food, fruit, roots, shoots, or perhaps prey to hunt. We modern humans often look for things like carne asada tacos, chicken teriyaki, or In 'n' Out burgers rather than roots or shoots.

To see, hear, or smell a potential mate. We humans often call "a potential mate" something like "my crush," "my girlfriend," "a hot guy in my science class," or a million other variations of "hey, I'm interested."

We humans love to smell things! Like cookies warm out of the oven, freshly cut grass, star jasmine flowers, and cinnamon bread....

But we also hate to smell things. Bad, stinky, disgusting, awful smells, I mean. Like a pile of manure, or rotting fruit, or a camel's breath. Yitch!

Luckily - and unluckily - for us, our noses aren't nearly as sensitive as many other animals' noses. There's a reason we use bloodhounds to help us find missing people - dogs' noses are, on average, from 10,000 to 100,000 times better than ours!

So, that's like comparing us being able to smell a rotten apple in a small, nearby bag of apples to a dog being able to smell a single rotten apple among two million barrels of apples!!!

Here are a few real-world examples of dogs' amazing senses of smell:

A drug sniffing dog was able to detect drugs in a plastic container in the middle of gas tank full of gasoline!!

A dog is able to smell orca poop a mile away in the waters near Seattle, Washington.

A dog trained to smell cancer once smelled cancer cells in a patient that the doctors insisted was cancer free. The doctors respected the cancer-sniffing dog so much, they went ahead and operated - and discovered that the dog was right!

So - we humans are practically blind (smell-wise) compared with dogs. But we can still enjoy and use our sense of smell on this special day! What are your favorite smells?