Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren vogel Bomb here with another classic podcast episode.
Speaker 1: In this one, we delve into the important topic of
Speaker 1: why some dog ears are so heck and floppy and
Speaker 1: how it benefits them in the field. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum Here. When two convicts pulled a shawshank redemption
Speaker 1: in and tunneled out of the Clinton County Correctional Facility
Speaker 1: and upstate New York, a two year old bloodhound named
Speaker 1: Jinny was hot on their trail. Working with James Pedolino
Speaker 1: from the Rensselaer County, New York Search and Rescue Team,
Speaker 1: Jinny and a number of other canines used their noses
Speaker 1: to scour the vast Adirondack region hoping to pick up
Speaker 1: the escape e scent. Pedolino said of bloodhounds in an
Speaker 1: interview with an Albany, New York television station, they never
Speaker 1: make a sound on the trail. All this loose skin
Speaker 1: helps hold the scent. Bloodhounds, with their flop skin and
Speaker 1: gangly ears are the quintessential tracking dogs, and there's good reason.
Speaker 1: While all types of dogs, including German shepherds and labrador
Speaker 1: retrievers can sniff out convicts, cadavers, and victims of disasters.
Speaker 1: The dogs with floppy ears seem to be the best
Speaker 1: at what they do. For one thing, regardless of breed,
Speaker 1: dogs have amazing noses, with more than two hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty million olfactory receptors. Experts say a dog's sense of
Speaker 1: smell is thousands of times more sensitive than a humans.
Speaker 1: In two thousand nine, researchers at Pennsylvania State University created
Speaker 1: a computer model of canines nose to better understand how
Speaker 1: dogs smell. They reported in the Journal of the Royal
Speaker 1: Society Interface that each nostril pulls in air about five
Speaker 1: times every second. The dog, it seems, knows which nostril
Speaker 1: is pulling in the scent, allowing them to turn right
Speaker 1: or left when tracking. Moreover, receptors continue to hold onto
Speaker 1: scent molecules even after the dog exhales. But that being said,
Speaker 1: dogs with floppy ears, such as bloodhounds, coonhounds, and bassett hounds,
Speaker 1: are exceedingly good trackers. That's because their long ears act
Speaker 1: as catchers mits scooping up invisible scent particles on the
Speaker 1: trail and sweeping them towards the nose. The scent particles
Speaker 1: also get trapped in the folds of wrinkly skin on
Speaker 1: their faces, allowing the dog to carry reference samples as
Speaker 1: they hunt. Long ears also tamp down a dog's ability
Speaker 1: to hear far off sounds, forcing the dogs to rely
Speaker 1: more on their sense of smell. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article why decent hounds have long floppy ears
Speaker 1: on how stuff works dot Com, written by John Paritano.
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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang.
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