How Dogs Sense Someone’s Death Before It Happens (Science Explains)

[00:00:00]In a house in North Palm Beach Florida, a dog named Crispin starts doing something new. Crispin is a Borzoi, one of those tall, impossibly elegant Russian sighthounds that look like they're posing even when they're sleeping. He is 6 years old, and in the last days of his owner's mother's life, every single time the aide finishes cleaning [music] her and feeding her, Crispin walks into the bedroom, up to the bed. He nuzzles her hair. He smells her breath. Then he lies down beside her. He has never done this before, and when Beverly, his owner, the daughter, watches him do this, she has one quiet theory about what he's reading. She is [music] right, and she is underselling it. Look, I know what the comment section on a video like this usually says. Sixth sense, intuition, the dog just knew. And honestly, I'm not going to tell you that's wrong. I'm going to tell you something better. Because when you find out what's actually happening inside a dog when they do this, when they walk into the room of someone who is dying and refuse to leave, the real answer is stranger than the mystical one, and I think it's more beautiful.

[00:01:07][music] So let me show you what Crispin was doing. When a human body starts to die, it stops running its chemistry correctly. The liver is supposed to filter waste out of your blood. When it fails, it doesn't. The kidneys are supposed to clear ammonia. When they fail, they don't. The pancreas is supposed to regulate sugar. When it fails, it doesn't. And because body is basically a very elegant chemistry set that depends on everything working at once, the second that chemistry breaks, it starts leaking compounds it doesn't normally leak through your skin, through your breath, [music] through your pores. These are called volatile organic compounds, VOCs. When the liver fails, the breath gives off a smell so distinctive the Romans had a name for it 2,000 years ago, fetor hepaticus, the breath of [music] the dead. Garlic and rotten eggs, two compounds called dimethyl sulfide and methyl mercaptan. When the kidneys fail, the breath smells faintly like ammonia, like bleach. When the pancreas goes, the breath turns sweet, like nail polish remover. Medical students are literally taught in their first year to sniff patients' breath for it. This is not folklore. This is on the wall of every emergency room on Earth, and dogs can read every single one of these much earlier than we can. Because a dog's nose is not a slightly better version of your [music] nose. It is a completely different instrument. You have about 5 million smell receptors. A dog has around 300 million. The tissue in their nose that actually does the detection, the olfactory epithelium, is 30 times larger than ours. The part of their brain that processes smell is 40 times bigger, proportionally. And they can sniff five to 10 times per second, actively pulling molecules across those receptors like a machine. Their detection threshold for certain compounds is around one part per trillion. [music] That number is too big to mean anything when I just say it. So let me put it another way. If you took a single drop of a scent, and you dropped it into 20 Olympic swimming pools, a dog could still smell it.

[00:03:23]>> [music] >> One drop, 20 pools. That is not a great nose. That's not a better [music] nose.

[00:03:29]That is a different category of machine.

[00:03:32]So when your dog freezes near someone who looks fine to you, [music] and fine to their doctor, and fine to their blood tests, your dog isn't imagining something. Your dog is reading something real. In 2006, researchers at the Pine Street Foundation in California wanted to know if this could actually be measured. So they took five ordinary dogs, three Labradors, two Portuguese water dogs, and they trained them on something very specific, the breath of cancer patients. The dogs got identical-looking breath samples, some from patients with lung cancer, some from patients with breast cancer, some from perfectly healthy people. The dogs could only use their noses. Here's what came back. 88% accuracy on breast cancer, 99% on lung cancer, across every stage of the disease. Stage one, stage four, didn't matter. [music] These weren't specially-bred detection dogs. They were family pets trained for a few weeks, which means, and this is what I want you to sit with, the dog sleeping at your feet right now, untrained, has roughly the same hardware. Let me tell you one more quick thing before we get to the part that actually answers the title. Last year in Missouri, [music] a woman named Kenzie was sitting in bed when her 2-year-old rescue dog Sunny climbed up behind her and pressed her whole body against Kenzie's neck, >> [music] >> whining, refusing to move. The next morning, Kenzie went to the ER with a headache. That afternoon, a CT scan found a brain aneurysm. Sunny had been pressed against the one spot on Kenzie's body where something was quietly going catastrophically wrong, about 24 hours before anyone human knew about it. Hold on to that number, 24 hours, because it matters for what I'm about to show you next. Because here is what nobody on the internet is telling you clearly enough.

[00:05:24]When we say a dog can sense death before it happens, we're actually talking about three completely different windows. The first window [music] is ours. This is the hospice window, acute organ failure.

[00:05:36]The liver crashes, the kidneys give up, the chemistry cascade starts, [music] the VOCs pour out, and the dog in the room smells it before the nurse checking the clipboard does. We're talking hours to a day. The second window is days.

[00:05:51]This is what Crispin was inside, a slow, gradual decline, like Beverly's mother, where the chemistry shifts gently over a week or two. Humans can't track it. The aide who cleans the room twice a day can't track it. But a dog living in the house is doing a running comparison every time that person exhales. They notice the drift before anyone else can.

[00:06:14]The third window is weeks, sometimes months. This is the one that feels impossible. Cancer cells release VOCs as they grow, long before tumors are visible on a scan. Aneurysms cause tiny metabolic shifts long before they rupture. We've documented dogs reacting to these signals weeks ahead, not minutes, not hours, weeks. That's what the 99% study actually proves, because it wasn't measuring dogs at deathbeds.

[00:06:44][music] It was measuring dogs identifying people who didn't know they were sick yet.

[00:06:50]Okay, I need to stop here, because I know who's watching this. If you clicked on this video, there is a real chance you're here because someone you love died or [music] is dying, and your dog didn't do any of this. Didn't stare, didn't nuzzle, didn't act differently [music] at all. And somewhere in the back of your head, a small, ugly voice has been asking whether your dog even cared. Let me be honest with you. The chemistry I just described only reaches loud levels when failure is acute and severe. A peaceful decline managed on medications over months produces a much quieter signal. Your dog may have had almost nothing to read. [music] Second thing, a lot of dogs do signal, and we miss it. Sleeping in a different room, eating less, hovering quietly in a corner without making a scene. We expect the Hollywood version, the dog howling at the exact second of death, [music] because that's what we've been sold.

[00:07:51]Most dogs are more subtle than that.

[00:07:53]Your dog not reacting like Crispin doesn't mean they didn't love your person. Sometimes the gift a dog gives you is staying ordinary when everything else in the house is falling apart, which brings us back to Beverly's house in Florida. A Borzoi named Crispin, a dying woman, a dog who kept walking into her bedroom to nuzzle her hair and smell her [music] breath. We now know exactly what he was doing. Crispin was reading chemistry, the liver slowing down, the kidneys shifting, the pancreas drifting.

[00:08:24]Her body was releasing compounds Beverly could not smell, and her aide could not smell, and her doctor could only guess at. [music] Crispin wasn't predicting her mother's death. He was already inside it, in a way no one else in that room could be. And here's the quiet theory Beverly offered, almost apologetically, when she talked about it later. She said, "I think they at least pick up on changes in the dying person's body chemistry." She was underselling it. Her dog wasn't picking up on changes. Her dog was swimming in them.

[00:08:55]What was invisible to Beverly was, to Crispin, the loudest thing in the room.

[00:08:59]Louder than the television, louder than the voices, louder than anything Crispin had ever smelled in six years of living in that house. He wasn't there because he had a sixth sense. He was there because of everyone in that house, he was the only one who could hear what was happening, and he wasn't going to leave her alone. So, here's what I want you to do right now. Look at the dog in your room, that small body, that twitching nose, >> [music] >> 300 million receptors running constantly, mapping a version of the world you will never have access to, reading your liver, reading your [music] breath, reading the people you love when they walk into the room. Your dog is not psychic. [music] Your dog is something more remarkable than that. Your dog is an instrument more sensitive than almost anything [music] modern medicine has ever built, and it is choosing to point itself all day, every day, at you.

[00:09:53]>> [music] >> The next time they do something strange around someone you love, take it seriously. If your dog has ever done this, stared too [music] long, nuzzled a spot that turned out to matter, refused to leave someone, tell me in the comments. I'm waiting for your comment.

[00:10:09]All right, that's a wrap-up for this video. See you in the next one.