We tend to plan a dog’s day around their legs, the walk, the run, the game of fetch, and forget the organ that actually runs their life: the nose. A dog’s sense of smell is so far beyond ours that it is genuinely hard to picture. Dogs can detect stress and fear, sniff out certain cancers and even some viral infections, and be trained to find drugs, explosives, and people buried under rubble. For your dog, the world is mostly a landscape of smells, and most of us give that landscape almost no thought.
The argument here is straightforward: if you want to enrich your dog’s life, feed the nose. Sniffing is not a detour on a walk, it is the walk, at least from the dog’s point of view, and there is real research on which scents dogs are drawn to and how smell can calm an anxious animal. Build a little of that into your dog’s routine and you give them something a longer walk often cannot: mental engagement on their own terms.
Just how good is that nose
The numbers are almost comical. A dog’s sense of smell is estimated to be tens of thousands of times more sensitive than ours, and dogs carry up to around 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, against roughly six million in a human’s. Whatever pleasure you get from a favorite smell, walking into a bakery, catching a familiar perfume, your dog is getting a version of that turned up many times over, constantly, from surfaces you cannot smell at all. That is the backdrop for everything else: smell is not a minor sense for dogs, it is close to their primary way of knowing the world.
The scents dogs are drawn to
To find out what dogs actually like to smell, researchers presented 32 different odor samples to a group of dogs and used cameras to track how long each dog investigated each scent, counting a sniff longer than two seconds as genuine interest. A handful of smells rose to the top.
Dogs showed the most interest in lavender, blueberry, blackberry, peppermint, and rose. Lavender stood out, and not only for being pleasant: it has documented calming effects across species. Research has linked the scent of lavender to a lower heart rate in dogs and to more rest and settling during car rides, which is why it turns up so often in calming products.
And, to nobody’s surprise, food beat everything. The smell of food was preferred over every other scent whenever the two were offered together, a reminder that the fastest route to a dog’s interest still runs through their stomach. The study’s author also stressed a bigger point: smell is not just a highly developed sense in dogs, it plays a real role in their welfare. In dogs as in humans, scents can trigger memories and shift mood, which is exactly why they make such a useful enrichment tool.
Turning smell into enrichment
You do not need special equipment to put this to work; you mostly need to stop rushing your dog past the good parts. Let walks include real sniffing time instead of a brisk march from A to B, since a slow, sniff-heavy amble often tires a dog out more thoroughly than a faster walk with no stops. At home, scatter a portion of kibble in the grass or hide treats around a room and let your dog work the space with their nose. Rotate a few objects with interesting, safe smells so there is always something novel to investigate.
Shelters have taken this further as a welfare tool. Some have used scent enrichment to calm stressed dogs, with staff spraying diluted essential oils around the grounds to vary the environment and lower the tension of kennel life. The logic is the same one you can borrow at home: a new smell is a small, cost-free bit of novelty, and the right smell can actively settle a nervous dog.
“When people ask me how to tire out a high-energy dog who is already getting plenty of exercise, I almost always add nose work before I add another mile,” says Dr. Priya Nair. “Letting a dog spend fifteen minutes solving a scent puzzle engages the brain in a way a walk doesn’t, and I see it calm anxious dogs noticeably. The nose is the most powerful tool your dog owns, and most of them are bored because we never let them use it.”
A real safety caution on essential oils
Enrichment through scent comes with one firm caveat, because “dogs like smells” is not the same as “all smells are safe.” Many essential oils are toxic to pets, including cinnamon, peppermint, pine, tea tree, and several citrus oils, and the risk climbs sharply with how concentrated the oil is. Keep concentrated oils well away from your dog, never apply them to your pet or let them lick them up, and check any oil against a reliable pet-toxicity list before using it near your animals. Note the wrinkle that peppermint smells appealing to dogs in a controlled study yet is on the caution list as an oil, which is exactly why concentration and access matter so much. Diluted, brief, out-of-reach diffusing is a different thing from a dog nosing a bottle.
The poison-control guidance is measured rather than alarmist: running a diffuser for a short period in a secured area your pet cannot reach is generally not likely to cause a problem. The safe move is to keep the source inaccessible, keep exposure light, and lean on food smells and safe natural scents for the enrichment itself.
What’s new in scent enrichment
Interest in canine “nose work” as everyday enrichment has grown well beyond the study that kicked off this conversation. Sniffing-based activities have moved from a niche dog-sport into mainstream advice, with snuffle mats, scent-scatter feeding, and simple find-it games now widely recommended by trainers and behavior professionals as a way to lower arousal and build confidence, especially for anxious or under-stimulated dogs.
The welfare framing has firmed up alongside it. Researchers studying working and companion dogs increasingly describe allowing a dog to sniff freely as a small act that supports emotional wellbeing, not a nuisance to be trained out of a walk. The practical bottom line has not changed, but the confidence behind it has: giving your dog structured chances to use their nose is one of the cheapest, most effective forms of enrichment available, provided you keep the genuinely risky scents, the concentrated toxic oils, safely out of reach.
References
- Kokocińska-Kusiak, A., et al. (2021). Canine olfaction: physiology, behavior, and possibilities for practical applications. Animals, 11(8), 2463.
- Odor-preference study presenting 32 scent samples to dogs, Animals (2022).
- Graham, L., Wells, D. L., & Hepper, P. G. (2005). The influence of olfactory stimulation on the behaviour of dogs housed in a rescue shelter. Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
- ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center. “Essential Oils and Pets.”
