DACHSHUND NOSES: WORKING 24 HOURS A DAY

Have you noticed how quickly a dachshund can snap up a bit of food dropped on the floor? We jokingly used to call our doxie Duke the vacuum cleaner! He kept all crumbs off the dining room floor, that's for sure.

Dogs are driven by their extremely sensitive noses. I've written before about HOW sensitive those noses ACTUALLY are: whereas we humans smell spaghetti sauce when it's cooking, dogs can differentiate the various ingredients in the sauce: garlic, onions, tomatoes, Italian seasoning, green peppers, ground beef or Italian sausage, and whatever else. Wow.

Therefore, it's futile to try to hide food from the little beggars. If they don't HEAR you open the cheese wrapper (but trust me, they will, even if dead asleep), they'll SMELL the food!

Dachshunds . . . you gotta love 'em, but maybe not their noses? LOL

DACHSHUNDS: CHOW HOUNDS EXTRAORDINAIRE

We all make jokes about how much doxies love to eat, but since their noses are about 100,000 times more powerful than ours, it's no wonder that food smells so good to them! When they smell spaghetti sauce, they smell each ingredient separately--so they know if we've forgotten the basil, the garlic--what have you.

Here are some prime examples of what I think dachshunds are thinking when they see or smell food:

"Look! He's getting ready to take another bite!"

"If I'm quick, I can polish off those donuts before anyone even notices!"

No caption needed

Dachshunds . . . you gotta love 'em--AND their noses!

HOW TO EAT AROUND A DACHSHUND

There's much truth to that statement; in fact, I'd like to add to it: I've learned to eat just about everything more quietly since we got Duke, but it usually doesn't work.

He can be dead asleep under his blanket on the couch, but if I tiptoe into the kitchen and get out a slice of cheese, he's there underfoot before I know it. He has a lot of favorite foods, actually, so with the exception of those foods we can't give him (like grapes, tomatoes, onions, and so on), he's game for just about anything else. Oh, he doesn't like lettuce, but he likes yogurt (except for the banana flavor.). He doesn't really like bananas very much, either.

Dachshunds, a.k.a. chow hounds extraordinaire, have such good noses that I can only imagine how much better food smells to them than it does to us humans. I made spaghetti sauce in the crock pot this week, and after an hour or so, it really started smelling wonderful. To a dog, each ingredient is smelled separately, so my chow hound knew exactly what was in my sauce, even if he didn't know the name of each item: ground beef, onions, Italian seasoning, garlic, diced tomatoes, undiluted tomato soup (takes away some of the sour taste) and Classico garlic and basil sauce as the base. Oh, it was great after slow cooking for five hours. Along with our tossed salad and garlic bread, it was a delicious meal. 

Duke loves to eat the pasta by itself--we used angel hair--and he acts like it is delicious!  As you know, pasta alone has very little taste, but I suppose he likes the unusual shape of it. We give him a small bowl with some angel hair, and he's so happy.

Dachshunds . . . you gotta love 'em!

"You gonna eat that?"