Emily Gillette

Dogs perform many roles for people, such as hunting, herding, pulling loads, protection, assisting police and military, companionship, and assisting individuals with disabilities or groups of people in educational and healthcare settings.

Web team dogs

The Academic Health Center web team includes several canine companions. Though they do not come into the office, they are an important part of our work. Photos of Bella, Opal, Perry, Shelby and Stewie often show up in our mock-ups and training materials. 

Learn more about the web team's dogs

Dog biology

This is a brief overview of dog biology. To learn more about dogs, visit the Wikipedia dog page. 

Anatomy

Domestic dogs have been selectively bred for millennia for various behaviors, sensory capabilities, and physical attributes. 

Download an overview of dog anatomy

Senses

The dog's senses include vision, hearing, sense of smell, sense of taste, touch and sensitivity to the earth's magnetic field.

Vision

Behavioral studies have shown that the dog's visual world consists of yellows, blues and grays, but they have difficulty differentiating red and green making their color vision equivalent to red–green color blindness in humans (deuteranopia). 

Hearing

The frequency range of dog hearing is between 16-40 Hz (compared to 20–70 Hz for humans) and up to 45–60 kHz (compared to 13–20 kHz for humans), which means that dogs can detect sounds far beyond the upper limit of the human auditory spectrum.

Smell

While the human brain is dominated by a large visual cortex, the dog brain is dominated by a large olfactory cortex. Dogs have roughly forty times more smell-sensitive receptors than humans, ranging from about 125 million to nearly 300 million in some dog breeds, such as bloodhounds.

Taste

Dogs have around 1,700 taste buds compared to humans with around 9,000. 

Touch

The main difference between human and dog touch is the presence of specialized whiskers known as vibrissae. Vibrissae are present above the dog’s eyes, below their jaw, and on their muzzle.

Qualities of a dog

• Loyalty – a dog is naturally born with a sense of loyalty for its owner, and each dog displays this loyalty in its own unique way.
• Compassion – no matter how sad or upset you are, a dog always knows to give you love and comfort.
• Unconditional love – a dog loves with no strings attached.
• Selflessness – a dog's first focus is to provide you with its joy and spirit, it is not naturally vain or selfish, if you show it love and kindness, he is your ultimate selfless companion.
• Forgiveness – us humans have a hard time forgiving each other, we hold onto things forever, but not a dog. He will forgive you for anything you do to him (to a fault sometimes).
• Non-judgmental – a dog does not judge, it may have reservations because it sense something is wrong, but it does not judge us like humans judge each other. A dog can sense your true nature and spirit, thus it loves you for who you are inside and out.

Roles of dogs in society