Science Into Practice: The Panting Dog Myth

"The dog is panting. They can't smell right now."

You're watching your dog, thinking about their welfare, and trying to read the situation in front of you. Your intuition is understandable, but the conclusion misses the mark.

Why does that matter? If we get the problem wrong, we get the solution wrong, too.

Panting is how dogs cool themselves down. When a dog pants, air moves primarily through the mouth, where evaporative cooling occurs on the tongue and upper airway. That doesn’t mean the nose is out of action.

Deep in a dog’s nose sits the olfactory epithelium, a patch of tissue tucked away in the upper nasal cavity. Studies show this area is set apart from the main airflow used for breathing. When dogs sniff, odor molecules get pulled into a special zone where they linger against the scent receptors longer than if they just blew straight through.

Panting doesn’t turn that system off.

A panting dog can still sniff. Sniffing and panting are separate actions—they don’t get in each other’s way.

Craven, B.A. et al. (2010). The fluid dynamics of canine olfaction: unique nasal airflow patterns as an explanation of macrosmia. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 7:933–943.

But here’s the key: curiosity matters more than simply assuming panting means a dog can’t smell.

Exercise does affect scent detection, just not in the way you might expect.

A recent study from Texas Tech’s Canine Olfaction Lab tested dogs’ scent detection while exercising on a treadmill. At a slow pace (4 km/h), dogs could continue detecting scents for over half an hour. But when the pace picked up (8 km/h), their performance started slipping after about 20 minutes, and by the end, some dogs could barely find the target scent at all.

So, something is going on, but what, exactly?

Researchers tracked body temperature and heart rate during detection testing. At first, core temperature seemed to predict scent performance. But when they switched the dogs’ pace mid-session, breaking the link between temperature and exercise intensity, temperature stopped mattering. Heart rate didn’t predict detection at all.

What actually mattered? How hard and how long the dogs were working, not their temperature or heart rate.

Rothkoff, L., Schultz, J., Aviles-Rosa, E.O., Maughan, M.N., Best, E., & Hall, N.J. (2026). A preliminary study on the impacts of exercise intensity and duration on gastrointestinal temperature and odor detection performance of dogs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 299, 106970.

That’s why it matters to know what you’re measuring.

If panting were the problem, you’d keep an eye on panting. But since it isn’t, watching for it won’t help. If you’re stopping a search because your dog is panting, you might be reacting to the wrong thing.

What the data actually tells us is more practical: pace and duration are the things you can control.

A slow, steady dog could keep detecting scents for the entire session. Dogs working at a faster pace lost their scenting ability much sooner. And when those dogs slowed down, their performance stopped getting worse, but didn’t bounce back. The effects of working too hard, too soon, lingered.

One interesting detail: one dog liked to jump off the treadmill for short breaks. That dog’s performance didn’t drop as much as the others. The researchers think this mimics what dogs do naturally, stopping and starting, slowing down over rough ground, or pausing to work a scent. That kind of self-regulation might be more important than we realize.

Your dog might already know how to pace themselves. The real question is whether your approach to searching helps them do that—or gets in the way.

Here are a few practical takeaways.

Don’t use panting as your sign for whether the nose is working. Instead, pay attention to how hard your dog is working and for how long.

Temperature and heart rate still matter for your dog’s safety, especially to prevent heat injury—but those are separate issues with their own responses.

If your search is going to be tough, tackle the hardest parts first. Dogs that started hard and then slowed down maintained steadier performance. Those who started easy and then sped up lost ground the fastest.

This is just early research, with a small sample and in a lab setting, so we shouldn’t overgeneralize.

The nose doesn’t have an off switch, but it does have limits, and now we have a better idea of what sets those limits.

Be curious.

Robin