It’s a well-known fact that dogs don’t always have the strongest sense of boundaries. These are creatures that like to lick strangers’ faces and sniff their crotches, after all. The latter behavior ...

Humans are often embarrassed when a dog trots over and starts sniffing at their groin, or pokes its snout in their butt. The dog has no idea that placing its nose in these parts of the human body ...

Dogs are often hired to perform seemingly impossible tasks because their noses are so powerful. At airports, they smell luggage for narcotics and explosives. At crime scenes, they can sniff out human ...

In a series of previous essays, I summarized the five major senses dogs use to navigate their social and nonsocial worlds either singly or by combining them into what ethologists call composite ...