Ground Scenting in Slow Motion!

Here is a very short video clip of Lusi ground scenting in slow motion, (10% original speed): We had been playing on the playing fields at the school when Lusi suddenly broke off from her game of chasing a plastic bottle, and started to ground scent. The field was snow covered except for a few patches where the children had been rolling their snowballs in the process of building their snowman. 


The bare ground proved to be a scent sink of little childrens' footprints and got the following response from Lusi as shown in the video! You can see that Lusi follows the scent along the grass and determines that it is restricted to the patches of grass and does not extend over the snow. The motion of her nose on the ground is akin to a vacuum cleaner as it takes in, what is to her, all new scents. I have also noticed how she delimits the scent zone; no, she says, it does not go further along there, and so she turns, and then does the same ground scenting in the opposite direction. After she has determined that the tracks are limited to the one location and do not lead off anywhere, she breaks off ground scenting, and as suddenly as she started she finishes and goes back to her game with the plastic bottle!


LUSI GROUND SCENTING (SLOW MOTION VIDEO)

I discovered from a recent TVO program: The Science of Dogs, made by National Geographic 2007, that the average canine olfactory system is made up of more than 220 million olfactory centres, in contrast to 10-20 million that a person has! The dog uses its olfactory system to analyze the landscape.