Why Do Hounds Have Floppy Ears?

Sure, scent hounds' noses are powerful tools -- but their ears may be the secret to their success. Learn why in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff Works, Hey, brain
Stuff loring vogel bomb here. When two convicts pulled a
shawshank redemption in and tunneled out of the Clinton County
Correctional Facility and upstate New York, a two year old
bloodhound named Jinny was hot on their trail. Working with
James Pedolino from the Rensselaer County, New York Search and

(00:24):
Rescue Team, Jinny and a number of other canines used
their noses to scour the vast Adirondack region hoping to
pick up the escape e scent. Pedolino said of bloodhounds
in an interview with an Albany, New York television station,
they never make a sound on the trail. All this
loose skin helps hold the scent. Bloodhounds with their floppy

(00:45):
skin and gangly ears are the quintessential tracking dogs, and
there's good reason. While all types of dogs, including German
Shepherds and Labrador retrievers can sniff out convicts, cadavers, and
victims of disasters, the dogs with floppy ears seemed to
be the best at what they do. For one thing,
regardless of breed, dogs have amazing noses with more than

(01:06):
two hundred and twenty million olfactory receptors. Experts say a
dog's sense of smell is thousands of times more sensitive
than a humans. In two thousand nine, researchers at Pennsylvania
State University created a computer model of canines nose to
better understand how dogs smell. They reported in the Journal
of the Royal Society Interface that each nostril pulls in

(01:27):
air about five times every second. The dog, it seems,
knows which nostril is pulling in the scent, allowing them
to turn right or left when tracking. Moreover, receptors continue
to hold onto scent molecules even after the dog exhales.
But that being said, dogs with floppy ears, such as bloodhounds, coonhounds,
and bassett hounds, are exceedingly good trackers. That's because their

(01:51):
long ears act as catchers miths, scooping up invisible scent
particles on the trail and sweeping them towards the nose.
The scent particles also get trapped in the folds of
wrinkly skin on their faces, allowing the dog to carry
reference samples as they hunt. Long ears also tamped down
a dog's ability to hear far off sounds, forcing the
dogs to rely more on their sense of smell. Today's

(02:19):
episode was written by John Paritano and produced by Tyler Clang.
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visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com