Scientific study: dogs really can smell fear

Dogs live in a universe of odours — to them, smelling is a prime communication medium

A new study has tested whether dogs can identify the scent of human stress or fear — it reveals that dogs do use smell to read the emotions of their owners

Colin Farrell was bitten by a dog on a film set recently. Such attacks are rare nowadays but encounters with ‘cross’ dogs were common during my childhood. If confronted by a ‘vicious cur’, the advice was: stand your ground, use eye-contact to stare the critter out, and then back off very slowly. That was easier said than done, but if you panicked you were ‘a gonner’. The descendants of the wolf, we believed, would smell your fear.

But could they?