Your dog makes a noise. It happens at the food bowl, or when they’re excavating a particularly promising spot on the rug, or when they’re licking their own leg with the focus of a surgeon. It’s somewhere between a sniffle and a snort, and it is, objectively, funny.
The internet has decided to call this snurfling, and if your dog does it constantly, they’re almost certainly fine.
But here is the thing the cute-noise articles skip. Dogs make several distinct sounds that all get filed under “he snorts a lot,” and only one of them is harmless. Two of them are the audible signature of an airway that isn’t working, and pet parents routinely mistake them for personality. Learning to hear the difference takes about a minute and is genuinely one of the more useful things you can do for a flat-faced dog.
First, the harmless one
Snurfling isn’t a clinical term. It’s a made-up word for a real behavior: the wet, snorty, in-and-out sound a dog makes while doing something scent-heavy.
Mechanically, it’s a dog clearing the nasal passages so they can load in new scent. Dogs sniff in rapid bursts, and between bursts they push air back out to flush what’s already in there. Add saliva, add excitement, add a lot of swallowing, and you get a sound like a small pig has taken up residence in your kitchen.
It shows up most at mealtime, during a good long investigation of a new smell, and when a dog is grooming themselves. It shows up more in flat-faced breeds, but also in perfectly long-nosed dogs. Big drooly Labs snurfle. Great Danes snurfle. It is not a brachycephalic monopoly.
And it makes sense that dogs are noisy about this, given how much information is in play. A dog’s olfactory system is orders of magnitude more sensitive than ours. When they’re snurfling, they’re processing something at a bandwidth we simply don’t have.
The two sounds that aren’t cute
Now the part that matters.
Stertor is a low-pitched, wet, snoring sound. It comes from the throat, from soft tissue vibrating in a floppy airway, most often an elongated soft palate. It’s the noise a lot of people describe as “he snores even when he’s awake.”
Stridor is a high-pitched, harsh, whistling or wheezing sound, most obvious when the dog breathes in. It comes from higher up and tighter, a narrowed larynx or trachea. Stridor is the more urgent of the two.
Both mean the same underlying thing: air is not moving through the airway cleanly. Stertor is the noise of a partly blocked airway. Stridor is the noise of a significantly narrowed one.
Here is the ten-second version:
| What you hear | Where it’s coming from | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Wet snorty bursts while sniffing or eating, stops when they stop | Nose, on purpose | Snurfling. Fine. |
| Low, wet snoring, present at rest, sometimes constant | Throat, soft palate | Stertor. Get it examined. |
| High, harsh whistle on the way in, worse with excitement or heat | Larynx or trachea | Stridor. Get it examined soon. |
| Sudden loud honking, dog braced and inhaling violently, ends abruptly | Reverse sneeze | Usually harmless, but count how often. |
That last row deserves a note, because it’s the sound most likely to send people to the emergency room unnecessarily. A reverse sneeze is a dramatic, alarming, honking spasm that looks like the dog is dying and is over in twenty seconds. It’s generally benign. What’s worth tracking is frequency: a reverse sneeze once in a while is a dog. A reverse sneeze twelve times a day is a nose that needs looking at.
Why flat-faced dogs get all of this
The anatomy is straightforward, and it’s worth understanding rather than just accepting.
Selective breeding compressed the skull of pugs, Frenchies, Boston terriers, and bulldogs, but it did not proportionally shrink the soft tissue inside. So the same amount of palate, tongue, and nasal tissue is now packed into a much shorter box. The result is a stack of problems: narrowed nostrils, an over-long soft palate hanging into the airway, and a narrowed windpipe. Together these are called brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome, or BOAS.
The straw analogy is the useful one. Breathing through a wide tube takes almost no effort. Breathing through a narrow one takes real work, on every single breath, all day. That’s what a flat-faced dog is doing.
“The noise is the symptom people find endearing, and that’s exactly what makes it dangerous,” says Dr. Mara Chen. “Owners tell me their dog has always snored like that, so they never mentioned it. Meanwhile the dog has been working hard for every breath for six years. The sound isn’t the dog’s personality. It’s the dog’s airway telling you it’s under strain.”
BOAS is treatable. Widening the nostrils and shortening an elongated palate are routine surgeries, and dogs who have them often behave like different animals afterward: more energy, better sleep, less heat intolerance. Weight matters enormously too, because fat deposits in the neck and chest narrow an already narrow airway. For a flat-faced dog, keeping them lean is not cosmetic. It’s respiratory medicine.
The question that matters more than the sound
Forget the taxonomy for a second, because here’s the actual test, and it’s one question:
Is this new?
A dog who has snurfled since puppyhood and still snurfles is a dog with a habit. A dog who never made this noise and now makes it every day has changed, and change is the whole signal.
Sudden-onset snorting, snuffling, or reverse sneezing in a dog who didn’t do it before can mean allergies, a nasal foreign body (grass seed, foxtail, a piece of a toy), dental disease that has eroded into the nasal passage, a growth, or a collapsing trachea. None of those get better on their own.
The same applies to intensity. A dog whose long-standing snoring has gotten noticeably louder, or who now snores when they never used to, has usually gained weight or developed something new. Both are worth a visit.
Take the video
This is the single most practical thing in this article, and almost nobody does it.
Whatever noise your dog is making, film it. Twenty seconds on your phone. Do it while it’s happening, not later.
Airway noises are notoriously difficult to describe and notoriously absent in the exam room, where a nervous dog pants and masks everything. A veterinarian who can hear the actual sound, at the actual frequency, in the dog’s normal environment, can often narrow the diagnosis before touching the dog. A veterinarian working from “he kind of honks, sort of” cannot.
Film it. Bring it. It changes the appointment.
The signs that mean go now
Set the noise aside. These are the ones that don’t wait:
- Gums or tongue turning blue, grey, or brick red
- Collapse, or an inability to stand
- Open-mouth breathing at rest in a dog who isn’t hot or exercised
- Breathing with visible effort in the belly or ribs, at rest
- Extreme noise plus panic, especially in heat
- Any airway noise in a flat-faced dog on a hot day, which is a heatstroke emergency in progress until proven otherwise
Flat-faced dogs overheat catastrophically fast, because panting is how a dog cools and their panting is inefficient by design. A snorting Frenchie on an 85-degree afternoon is not being funny.
What newer research adds
The useful development for owners is the arrival of standardized BOAS grading. Rather than a vet listening and giving you a vibe, several veterinary schools now use a graded assessment, often involving a short exercise test, that sorts flat-faced dogs into functional grades from unaffected to severely affected.
That matters because it turns “he’s a bit snorty” into a number you can act on and re-measure. It also gives breeders something objective to select against, which is the only way this improves at the population level rather than one surgery at a time.
If you have a brachycephalic dog, ask your vet whether they use a graded airway assessment. Knowing your dog is a functional grade II rather than a grade 0 is a far more useful thing to carry around than a hunch.
FAQ
Is snurfling a real veterinary term? No. It’s an affectionate made-up word for normal, noisy, scent-driven sniffing. The clinical terms that matter are stertor, stridor, and reverse sneezing.
My pug has always snorted. Should I still get it checked? Yes, at least once. “Always” is not the same as “fine,” and a graded airway assessment will tell you whether your dog is working harder than they should be.
What’s the difference between a reverse sneeze and choking? A reverse sneeze is a rapid, honking inhale, the dog is braced but alert, and it stops on its own within seconds. Choking involves distress, pawing at the face, and no air moving. Choking is an emergency.
Can weight loss actually fix a noisy airway? It can meaningfully improve one. Fat around the neck and chest narrows the airway further, and getting an overweight brachycephalic dog to a lean body condition often reduces both noise and effort. It won’t fix a structurally elongated palate, but it makes everything else better.
References
- “Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome (BOAS).” American College of Veterinary Surgeons. https://www.acvs.org/small-animal/brachycephalic-syndrome/
- Liu, N.-C., et al. “Conformational risk factors of brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome (BOAS) in pugs, French bulldogs, and bulldogs.” PLOS ONE, 2017. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0181928
- Packer, R.M.A., et al. “Impact of Facial Conformation on Canine Health: Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome.” PLOS ONE, 2015. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137496
- “Reverse Sneezing in Dogs.” VCA Animal Hospitals. https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/reverse-sneezing-in-dogs
