A note on the supposed olfactory hunting-responses of the dog.
Year: 1914
Type: article
Abstract: Our present inability to measure or control olfactory stimuli may have some bearing on the fact that the dog's sense of smell has been avoided by careful experimental investigators.A number of problems in this field are highly interesting even though they do not lend themselves to treatment by quantitative methods.The supposed olfactory responses made by the dog in hunting are especially puzzling.At present the only available data are purely anecdotal, and these are meager, conflicting and untrustworthy.Various assertions have been made as to the ability of the trained hunting-dog to trail his quarry.The belief is widespread that the bloodhound can follow a trail over 24 hours old without back-tracking Let us accept provisionally a seemingly conservative statement; that a fox-hound can follow a threehour-old trail of a rabbit without back-tracking, and assume that this is very near the limit of the dog's ability, _A casual examination suffices to show the difficulty of explaining the dog's behavior.Many hunters have said in effect that the dog follows the trail in the direction taken by the rabbit because the tracks made recently excite more intense smell-processes than do the older tracks.This explanation is not satisfactory.Suppose that in each of a series of tracks, a, b, c, etc., a like quantity of the same single sme'l-substance had been deposited by the rabbit; that the tracks had been made one second apart, and that a was made three hours ago.It is evident (changes oj chemical composition
Source: Journal of Animal Behavior
DOI: 10.1037/h0075561
Author: H. M. Johnson
Institution: General Electric (United States)
Language: English
Subfield: Sensory Systems
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2071223689