Every dog owner secretly wishes that one day, Fluffy will waken from a nap and do something extraordinary. Maybe their dog, who up until now was only interested in napping and licking itself, will try to communicate some urgent message. “What is it, girl? It’s Timmy? He fell down a well? His leg is broken?” Okay, so maybe Lassie-level heroics are a bit much to ask for. She was a special case, and she set a standard that few other dogs could hope to live up to. While other dogs were chasing their tails in a circle, Lassie was fixing the plumbing and doing her owner’s taxes. I bet that if she had had opposable thumbs, Lassie could have cured cancer.
Manual dexterity aside, even if dogs can’t cure diseases, they might be able to help diagnose them. We already know that dogs are especially intuitive to their owner’s moods and emotions, but there is also mounting evidence that dogs somehow have the uncanny ability to tell when people are sick, helping to identify people with cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, and other diseases.
Scents-itive Sniffers
A pair of English dermatologists were the first to suggest that perhaps dogs could smell cancer. They were inspired by a female patient whose dog would constantly sniff at a mole on her leg, and once even tried to bite the mole off. Upon removing the mole, the doctors discovered that it was actually a malignant melanoma.
Scientists don’t have it fully figured out yet, but the secret weapon might be dogs’ superior sense of smell. Their noses are up to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human’s is and they have the added ability to smell multiple things at once, including complex chemical combinations. Compared with humans, dogs also have a greater portion of their brain devoted to smell, and more nerve connections between the brain and the nose.
It’s not just skin cancer that dogs can detect. Experiments have shown that dogs can diagnose bladder cancer simply by sniffing a patient’s urine and a study published in 2006 by the Pine Street Foundation, a California cancer research organization, found that dogs could identify patients with both early and late-stage lung and breast cancer simply by sniffing their breath. Dogs also helped doctors discover that ovarian cancer has a certain scent that distinguishes it from other gynecological cancers. Even more remarkable is that dogs are up to 97 percent accurate with their diagnoses.
