They can detect cancer
People have been questioning this since 1989, when a woman went to the doctor worried about a mole. She said that her dog is constantly sniffing it and has also tried to bite it off. After all of the necessary tests, it was determined to be a malignant melanoma.
Since this incident, numerous people have claimed that their dogs can smell cancer because they detected it after their dogs began to constantly smell or squeeze areas of their bodies.
But how can this be possible? The main theory is that tumors can produce some compounds that are volatile, and the dog can smell them through your breath, sweat, or urine. This is particularly true in the early stages of the disease, when cells begin to divide.
At this moment, there are a couple of studies out there that confirm the fact that trained dogs can indeed detect cancer. For example, they can identify bladder cancer patients by smelling their urine, which is actually three times more accurate than it would be if they only relied on chance alone. Dogs can also detect lung cancer from breath with a pretty high degree of accuracy, and more than that, they can sense colorectal and ovarian cancers.
