08/29/2026
If My Dog Is Panting, They Aren’t Working... Right?
Today I overheard a conversation at the conference:
“If your dog is panting, they aren’t working. They lose 80% of their scenting ability when they pant.” 🫣🤦♀️🤔
Ugh.
I hear some variation of this way too often.
And from very experienced, high-level professionals. 🙄
Panting can absolutely affect olfactory performance... BUT... panting means the dog isn't working? No!
They lose 80% of their scenting ability? I can't find science that supports that 🤔 If you can, please share.
So let me back up and lay some groundwork here. I can train all kinds of things, but none of that helps if I don't understand what the dog can and can't physically do under the conditions I am asking them to work in.
When their performance changes, I need to look at multiple things, and one thing I need is enough physiological understanding of what I am looking at.
What I train, what I expect, and how I read the dog in front of me can change many things, but not the actual biology.
And if you train or handle a scent dog, you need enough understanding about what is actually happening to make informed decisions.
So what is actually happening when a dog pants? What do we actually need to know?
Panting and active sniffing are not the same respiratory behavior.
Panting is part of normal thermoregulation. A dog exercises or works in a warm environment, panting increases, and the respiratory pattern changes.
But the nose does not simply turn off. Air can still move through the nose while a dog pants. Dogs can also change respiratory patterns while they work.
Pant. Pant. Sniff. Pant. Sniff.
An open mouth by itself doesn't tell me how much odor the dog is sampling, how often they are actively sniffing, or what they can detect.
And active sniffing does matter. Sniffing moves odor through the nasal cavity differently from ordinary breathing and is particularly effective at getting odor into the olfactory region.
So panting may change how the dog samples odor without making olfaction disappear.
That is already a long way from:
mouth open = nose off
And then we have another problem. What exactly is “scenting ability”?
Detection sensitivity? Recognition or discrimination? Search efficiency? Sourcing? Accuracy? The ability to detect extremely low concentrations? Those aren't interchangeable.
So an 80% loss, okay... of what, exactly? So here's where I'm going to get a little nerdy.
Because there is real research behind the broader idea that exercise, heat, and physiological load can affect olfactory performance. Research that tells us so much more than these aforementioned statements just circling around our world.
Now I can see how complicated research eventually gets compressed into something much tidier than the research itself. It's a lot. So... let's look at a few of these studies.
1981: What happens to airflow when a dog pants?
Goldberg, Langman, and Taylor measured airflow through the nose and mouth of three dogs during heat and exercise.
They found three panting patterns. Dogs could inhale and exhale through the nose, inhale through the nose and exhale through both the nose and mouth, or use both the nose and mouth during inhalation and exhalation.
And they moved between those patterns as heat and exercise demands changed.
In short: Panting changes respiratory airflow. It does not automatically eliminate nasal airflow.
Okay.
But what happens when a dog is actually out there working?
1996: A dog running and searching
Steen and colleagues measured nasal airflow in bird dogs during hunting.
While searching for game, running with the head high into the wind, they recorded continuous inward airflow through the nose for as long as 40 seconds across at least 30 respiratory cycles.
The dog is running.
Working.
Breathing.
And environmental air is still moving inward through the nose, even across respiratory cycles.
That does not mean active sniffing and heavy respiration are the same thing.... because they aren't. But the nose is clearly not simply switching off.
So now we have another question. If air is still getting into the nose, does strenuous exercise actually change detection performance?
Yep.
2003: Strenuous exercise really did affect detection
Gazit and Terkel tested six trained explosive detection dogs before and after strenuous treadmill exercise.
Twenty minutes at 9 km/h on a 12% incline. Not something I want to do then be asked to do a test but dogs are a different animal.. literally 🤣
In outdoor searches, search time increased and detection decreased significantly. Before exercise, the dogs detected 91.46% of the explosives.
After exercise? 80.94%.
I cannot tell you this is where the frequently repeated “dogs lose 80% of their scenting ability” statement came from. But I certainly notice it we ended up at 80% 🤔
It is not saying dogs lose 80% of their ability to detect odor.... They were still detecting approximately 81% of the targets after strenuous exercise instead of almost 92%.
And indoors? Every dog found the explosive before exercise. Every dog found it after exercise... and.. It took them longer after exercise. So yes. Exercise affected performance.
But was that decrease fixed? No.
The same study followed the dogs across repeated sessions working after strenuous exercise.
During sessions 1–6, post-exercise detection averaged 67.13%.
During sessions 7–12? 93.33%.
Sniffing frequency increased during the later sessions. So did panting frequency.
And the researchers did not find an improvement in the dogs' measured physical fitness that explained the change. They interpreted the improved detection as the dogs adjusting to working under those physiological conditions.
The physical demand was still there. The dogs got better at doing the job in it.
In short: Strenuous exercise affected detection and search time. The dogs did not lose 80% of their ability to smell, and their performance under those conditions improved substantially with experience.
Which immediately makes me wonder about another variable. What about physical conditioning?
Also 2003: Conditioning changed the picture
Altom and colleagues studied 18 male English Pointers. Half were physically conditioned three days a week. Half were not.
All of the dogs were then put through a substantial physical stress test: 60 minutes on a treadmill at 8.05 km/h on a 10% slope.
The non-conditioned dogs showed a 63.6% decrease in measured olfactory acuity following the exercise test.
The conditioned dogs did not show a significant pre/post-exercise decrease. That does not tell us panting caused the difference. It tells us that physical conditioning changed how olfactory performance held up under intense exercise. And now a fixed percentage makes even less sense.
In short: Exercise can affect olfactory performance. Conditioning can change how much.
But why should respiratory pattern affect odor detection in the first place?
2010 and 2017: What does active sniffing buy the dog?
Craven and colleagues modeled airflow through the canine nasal cavity and showed a specialized airflow pattern during sniffing that moves odor toward the olfactory recess while leaving air there relatively undisturbed during expiration.
Later, Rygg, Van Valkenburgh, and Craven compared active sniffing with quiet breathing in an anatomically accurate coyote nasal model.
Active sniffing delivered about 2.5 times more air to the olfactory recess. For highly and moderately soluble odorants, uptake in the sensory region was roughly 2.5 to 3 times greater per unit time than during quiet breathing.
Not every odorant behaved exactly the same way. Because apparently even odor molecules refuse to make this simple for us. 🤣
But now we know why a change in respiratory behavior could matter. Active sniffing is a very effective way to sample odor. Change the sniffing and you may change the sampling.
That still isn't the same thing as:
the dog can't smell
In short: Active sniffing can make odor sampling much more efficient. Less efficient sampling is not no olfaction.
So does exercise always change detection in the same way?
Apparently not.
2014: Another exercise study. Another slightly different answer.
Angle and colleagues tested 17 certified explosive detection dogs before and after 30 minutes of treadmill exercise.
Overall, dogs were 1.49 times more likely to find the target before exercise than after exercise.
So again, exercise affected performance.
But in this experiment the researchers did not find a significant pre/post-exercise change specifically in the dogs' ability to detect target odor at threshold amounts.
Different dogs. Different exercise. Different testing method. Different odor problem. Different outcome. Biology refusing to cooperate with a catchy percentage yet again.
In short: Exercise affected overall detection probability, but exactly what changed depended on what was being measured. And then we get to a slightly different question.
What happens when we change the amount of odor available while the dog is exercising?
2024: Now change the concentration
Aviles-Rosa and colleagues built a system that allowed dogs to perform an odor-detection task while exercising on a treadmill.
Only three dogs. Keep that firmly in mind.
But those three dogs completed more than 2,800 trials, allowing the researchers to change exercise intensity, exercise duration, and odor concentration. At the higher odor concentrations, the dogs continued to do very well.
At the highest concentration tested, detection was about 100% during low-intensity exercise and about 91% during moderate-intensity exercise.
Then they lowered the concentration. At the lowest concentration, average detection was about 87% during low-intensity exercise and dropped below 45% during moderate-intensity exercise.
Then... they looked at duration effects.
During the first ten minutes of moderate exercise, the dogs were still detecting that lowest concentration at close to 100%.
After 20 minutes? 0%.
Higher odor concentrations remained considerably more detectable.
Now I am asking a very different question than: Can the dog smell when panting?
I want to know what happens when there isn't much odor available. How does physical demand change the dog's ability to detect it? And how does that change as they work? BUT there is a big caution here.
The researchers did not measure panting, respiration, or core body temperature. So we can say that exercise intensity and duration affected detection near threshold under these conditions.
We cannot say: panting caused the decline We don't know that.
In short: The harder and longer these dogs exercised, the more vulnerable detection became near threshold. Higher concentrations held up much better. We still don't know exactly which physiological changes caused the difference.
What does all this mean?
A panting dog can still smell. Panting changes respiratory behavior, and active sniffing is particularly effective at sampling odor.
Exercise can affect detection performance. Physical conditioning can change the outcome. Experience working under physical load can change the outcome. How long the dog works can change the outcome. How much odor is available can change the outcome.
And we still don't know exactly how much of the change associated with exercise comes specifically from panting.
Now take all of that back into an actual search. If my dog is panting, I watch the dog. Are they still actively sniffing? Are they acquiring odor? Does anything change as the search goes on or the physical demand increases? What happens when less odor is available?
Then I start looking across searches. Maybe I see a change. Maybe I don't.
The 2024 study makes me especially curious about what happens in the lower-concentration parts of a real odor picture.
Maybe small amounts of odor become harder to recognize under physical load. Maybe there are implications for intermittent odor or other places where very little odor is available.
Maybe not.
That study did not test plume edges, hide placement, or sourcing. I'm not going to pretend it did. But now I have a bunch of information to make thoughtful choices with, not a rule that does not have scientific support.
I need to understand enough about what the dog can and can't do to make better decisions about what I am seeing and what I am training.
So when the dog is panting, I still have questions. What is happening with odor? Does anything change as the search continues? When does it actually affect the job I am asking the dog to do?
That gets me a whole lot farther than: “If your dog is panting, they aren't working.”
Want to read the studies I mentioned for yourself? It's always good to make sure I didn't make something up or miss something 😉 Check them out.
Goldberg, Langman & Taylor (1981). Panting in dogs: Paths of air flow in response to heat and exercise.
Steen, Mohus, Kvesetberg & Walløe (1996). Olfaction in bird dogs during hunting.
Gazit & Terkel (2003). Explosives detection by sniffer dogs following strenuous physical activity.
Altom, Davenport, Myers & Cummins (2003). Effect of dietary fat source and exercise on odorant-detecting ability of canine athletes.
Craven, Paterson & Settles (2010). The fluid dynamics of canine olfaction: unique nasal airflow patterns as an explanation of macrosmia.
Angle et al. (2014). The effects of exercise and diet on olfactory capability in detection dogs.
Rygg, Van Valkenburgh & Craven (2017). The Influence of Sniffing on Airflow and Odorant Deposition in the Canine Nasal Cavity.
Aviles-Rosa et al. (2024). A canine model to evaluate the effect of exercise intensity and duration on olfactory detection limits: the running nose.
