Why is your food saltier than your dog’s? Like you, your dog needs salt. But he doesn’t need as much as you do. Dogs also don’t have as many taste buds as you do. You could have 9,000 or more. Dogs have only about 1,700.

What tastes good to you might not taste good to your dog, and vice versa. You’re different in another sense too: your sense of smell!

Dogs’ noses hold tiny organs called turbinates. Your nose has them as well. From a normal distance, these organs look like scrolls or seashells. If you look at them through a microscope, they resemble thick sponges. Those sponges hold the body’s sniffer-cells. They connect to nerves that send smelly messages to the brain.

Your turbinates measure about the size of a postage stamp. A dog’s—if you unfolded them—could be as big as a sheet of typing paper! Think of all the scent-messages flying into your dog’s brain at once! Unlike you, your dog doesn’t use mainly its eyes to make sense of the world. It uses its nose.

Scientists think a dog’s sense of smell is better than a human’s by 10,000 or even 100,000 times. If a dog had as much seeing power as it has smelling power, it could see at least 3,000 miles into the distance!

If you think about how dogs act, that makes sense. When two dogs meet on the street, they give each other a good sniff. Dogs even leave messages for each other on mailboxes and bushes . . . but not in words that can be read.

What is your dog asking the other dog with his liquid note?

Maybe, “Will you meet me for dinner at Dogue?”