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If you’ve ever watched a dog sniffing another dog’s butt, you know that dogs rely heavily on scent to gather information. The bigger question is are they learning? Are they only identifying the other dog’s sex and health, or can they tell if they other dog is happy or sad? With the heightened noses and scent detection that dogs have, they’re getting Many information through sniffing. But can dogs smell each other’s emotions?

Researchers have already shown that dogs can recognize human emotions. Dogs can even detect human stress through scent alone. If they can read us, why wouldn’t they be able to read other dogs. Now, studies suggest that dogs can do just that: they may be able to identify emotional states in other dogs through oder.

Can Dogs Sniff Each Other’s Emotions?

A great deal of scientific research on canine communication has focused on what dogs see and hear. This is because those senses are largely what humans rely on. Graduate student Alice Wang and Dr. Alexandra Horowitz of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College wanted to explore a different question. How much emotional information is carried through scent?

There’s no doubt that dogs have feelings. In fact, their brains are wired for them. So Wang and Dr. Horowitz thought it likely that dogs could smell each other’s emotions.

“Given that dogs are recognized to experience emotions and possess the neuroanatomical structures necessary for basic emotional processing, it is plausible that dogs also produce chemosignals linked to their emotional states and use them for instraspecific communication,” their paper writes. Essentially, since dogs can experience and process emotions, it’s possible that they can produce chemical signals that allow other members of their species to communicate their emotions to one another.

How Do You Collect Emotional Doggy Odors?

To test their theory, Wang and Dr. Horowitz needed odor samples. They’d need to be associated with different emotional states. They used joy, stress, and a neutral mood to serve as a control.

The samples came from a spayed, 5-year-old female mixed-breed donor. Joy-related odors were collected after a two-minute game of fetch with her owner. Stress-realted odors were collected after a two-minute nail trimming session. Neutral odors were collected after the dog spent several minutes resting quietly on her own.

For each odor, the owner collected the dog’s saliva by wiping the inside of the dog’s cheeks and gums with a sterile cotton pad. The same pad was then used to wipe sweat from the dog’s paw pads. Finally, the owner flipped over the cotton pad and wiped it near the dog’s anus to collect additional scent materials from the anal glands. The sample pads were frozen until experiments began.

Can Dogs Tell Emotional Smells Apart

To see if other dogs could tell the odors apart, Wang and Dr. Horowitz put 43 purebred and mixed-breed dogs through a scent discrimination test.

They used what’s called a “habituation-discrimination paradigm.” This is fancy way of saying that the dogs were allowed to get bored with one smell, before being presented with an additional one. If the dogs couldn’t tell the two odors apart, they would be bored with the new one too. If they could tell them apart, they would show interest in the new smell.

And that’s exactly what happened. The results showed the dogs could tell the difference between neutral and joy odors, and between stress and joy odors. These findings suggest that emotional states alter a dog’s scent profile, and that other dogs can detect those differences.

However, recognition alone doesn’t mean those odors carry meaning for dogs. The next step was determining whether dogs actually respond behaviorally to emotional scents.

Do Dogs React to Other Dog’s Emotional Odors?

In a second experiement, 24 of the original test dogs were randomly assigned to smell the joy odor, the stress odor, or a blank cotton pad, which served as a control.

The dogs entered a small room containing the scent sample, their owner, and a stranger. Each dog was free to smell the odor and explore the room while the researchers recorded their behavior.

As expected, the dog’s behaviors and body languagesuggested they picked up on the donor dog’s emotions from scent alone. For example, dogs exposed to the blank control odor displayed fewer stress-related behaviors than dogs exposed to joy or stress odors. These include flattened ears, lip licking, and yawning.

The dogs also spent more time close to their owners when exposed to the stress odor, compared to when exposed to the joy and blank odors. Their body posture also varied depending on the emotion associated with the odor.

Interestingly, the test dogs stayed farther away from the stranger in the stress condition compared to the blank conditio. This suggests that the smell of one dog may influence the behavior of another. In other words: the stress seemed to be contagious.

“Exposure to stress odors elicited the predicted attachment-related behaviors,” researchers wrote in the paper. “[These are] characterized by inceased proximity to their owners and reduced proximity to strangers, suggesting a response to conspecific emotional states that may reflect emotional contagion.”

Can We See the World Through a Dog’s Nose?

As humans, there’re likely whole elements of canine communication we’re unaware of that impacts our dogs’ wellbeing. If odors can cause emotional transfer between dogs, it makes sense that my dog “Chi Chi” was nervous the first time we visited a new veterinarian. Although he had no prior experience in that environment, he could probably smell the stress of the dogs that had visited before him.

“This study opens new avenues for investigating the impact of conspecific odors on dog behavior in environments with multiple dogs, such as shelters, multi-dog households, training facilities, and veterinary clinics,” the paper notes.

Although more research is needed, the findings highlight the importance of paying attention to your dog’s emotional state. There are many places beyond the vet’s office that might be “contaminated” with another dog’s emotional odor. Think about dog parks, dog daycare centers, training classes, and even the sidewalk in front of your home.

If your dog appears anxious, watch for signs of stress and take steps to help them feel more comfortable. That could mean leaving an environment, or creating distance from a trigger. You may also want to discuss supportive options with your veterinarian. Some options for anxious dogs are anxiety vests, CBD, or calming diffusers or sprays. Even if you don’t see anything to worry about, trust your dog’s nose and help ease their stress.