How Can Dogs Recognize Their Family Members?
For human beings, recognizing familiar or familiar faces is a more or less simple task, largely facilitated by our own neurological development. But perhaps we have not stopped to think how other animals, such as dogs, recognize their own species or other close beings. In this article we give you all the details.
The dog and its senses
There is no doubt that the dog is one of the most faithful and inseparable companion animals. It is very likely that he will be the first to hear you arrive home, and then he will receive you enthusiastically. It is by all known that part of the speed of recognition has to do with the excellent sense of smell of dogs.
You could say that smell is the most developed sense of dogs. An example is in the amount of olfactory receptors they have: it is estimated that between 200 and 300 million, a huge number if we compare it with the five million that humans have. The smell of dogs, without a doubt, is one of their most reliable ‘tools’ when it comes to recognizing objects or people.
But it is evident that, apart from smell, hearing and sight, they are also important senses in canids. And it is precisely by combining smell and sight that dogs can recognize different people or animals.
How do dogs recognize us?
With regard to this issue, there are several studies and investigations that affirm that the areas that are stimulated in the cerebral cortex when a dog sees a face are the same as ours. This implies that dogs use their eyesight to discriminate between familiar and foreign faces.
If we go further, there is scientific evidence that dogs use purely facial recognition: that is, it is enough for them to look at the face of anyone to know if they are known or not. In this sense, it has also been known that they have more difficulties to discriminate faces when their owners have it covered. Perhaps it is in these cases that your advanced sense of smell comes into play.
Beyond mere facial recognition, dogs can also discriminate between the different expressions that we are capable of expressing. And, what is more curious, it is known that dogs prefer to see the faces of beings of the same species before any other.
Do you recognize your canine relatives?
Once we have solved the ‘mystery’ of how dogs are able to recognize us, the next question is whether this ability carries over to members of their canine family. And to answer this we must turn, once again, to science and research.
The procedure began when puppies were placed in front of two adult female dogs, one of them the mother. The results showed that a high percentage of the time the puppy preferred to get closer and spend more time with its biological mother.
But what if the puppy grows into an adult? To test whether this recognition was still true, garments with the scent of the biological mother and of specimens of the same breed and age were impregnated. The result was again positive, since the juveniles – around two years of age – continued to recognize their mother’s scent, despite being separated.
The biochemical mechanism behind this phenomenon is still not very well understood, but it is certainly further proof that dogs are capable of recognizing their loved ones.
