Not only can dogs use their incredible sense of smell to save lives by detecting cancer and finding people buried in rubble, they can also be trained to sniff out peanuts as well as other allergens that are potentially deadly to people with extreme allergies.

Dogs are natural-born sniffers: their sense of smell is 1,000 times greater than a human’s. While humans have 5 million olfactory receptors in their noses, dogs have a whopping 220 million.

The breeds commonly used for peanut detection are Poodles and Portuguese Water Dogs (both breeds also make good pets for highly allergic people since they don’t shed much and have little dander), Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds, along with mixed breeds such as Labradoodles. (more…)