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As both wolves and our modern-day canine companions evolved from a common ancestor, we can presume that they share many of these inherent abilities to use olfaction for a variety of tasks. Wolves rely heavily on their sense of smell to function in the world around them, using it to identify each other, mark their territories, and to locate prey. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The video recordings do not include any additional data relevant to the findings that were not included in the Supporting Information dataset.įunding: The research was supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA 01 031) ( ) and Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA K 84036) ( ). All identifiable persons appearing in the two demo videos included in the Supporting Information files have granted permission for the videos to be open access. In addition to this, video recordings of the trials were taken and are available for scientific purposes upon request (researchers who meet the criteria for access may contact Zita Polgar at Due to the ethical and legal restrictions of the confidentiality contracts signed by the owners, these videos cannot be made publicly available. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data used for analysis are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Received: DecemAccepted: ApPublished: May 6, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Polgár et al. Overall, we revealed measurable differences between dog breeds in their olfactory abilities and suggest that the Natural Detection Task is a good foundation for developing an efficient way of quantifying them.Ĭitation: Polgár Z, Kinnunen M, Újváry D, Miklósi Á, Gácsi M (2016) A Test of Canine Olfactory Capacity: Comparing Various Dog Breeds and Wolves in a Natural Detection Task. In the retested samples wolves improved their success however, dogs showed no change in their performances indicating that a single test may be reliable enough to assess their capacity. In the most difficult level, wolves and scenting breeds performed better than chance, while non-scenting and short-nosed breeds did not. The results showed that breeds selected for scent work were better than both short-nosed and non-scent breeds. A subsample of both dogs and wolves was retested to assess reliability. There were five levels of increasing difficulty determined by the number of holes on the container’s lid. Subjects were led along the row of pots and were tasked with determining by olfaction alone which of them contained the bait. The procedure involved baiting a container with raw turkey meat and placing it under one of four identical ceramic pots. This study aimed to create a simple procedure that requires no pre-training and to use it to measure differences in olfactory capacity across four groups of canines: (1) dog breeds that have been selected for their scenting ability (2) dog breeds that have been bred for other purposes (3) dog breeds with exaggerated short-nosed features and (4) hand-reared grey wolves. Indeed, there is no standard test for assessing canine olfactory ability. Whether dogs bred for this purpose have higher olfactory capacities than other dogs, or even wolves with whom they share a common ancestor, has not yet been studied. Many dog breeds are bred specifically for increased performance in scent-based tasks.