Do Dogs have taste buds like people have? (food, walk, eating)

[JD59]

Hi, Just wondering if Dogs can taste foods like people do? Dogs will eat about anything that people will never eat like dead animals laying around for weeks.


Thanks, John

[PitBullMommie1206]

Dogs do have taste buds, but I think they only have half as many as humans do. I'm not sure if that's exactly right, but just recently I saw something on tv about this and I know that they don't have nearly as many taste buds as we do, that's why they can eat stuff that we would never dream of eating! lol! If I remember right, they have half as many taste buds as humans do.

[Travel'r]

But their sense of smell makes up for it :>) They generally won't eat anything unless they smell (and like it) first.

[mikenbacismama]

Funny story, we always wondered if our last dog (Baci, a chocolate Lab, passed away in June) was really a dog since she seemed to think she was a human.

WELL....we found out she actually was a dog when our friend came to visit us in Vegas after picking up a new truck in Utah. The truck had fresh roadkill on it, and our dog promptly munched out on it like it was a snack! It was the grossest thing I'd ever seen her do! But she was in her glory!

[World Citizen]

Here ya go, John1960...

Taste: A dog's senses of taste and smell are closely linked and it is possible that dogs gain more imformation about food from its smell than from its taste. Most of a dog's taste buds are clustered around the tip of the tongue. Dogs can detect bitter, sweet, salty, and sour tastes, but their sense of taste is relatively poor and they have only one-sixth the number of taste buds that humans have (Whitehead 1999).

Taken from General Physiology of Dogs

[ESFP]

I've always wondered why dog food leaned toward chicken and beef flavor, when my dog obviously prefers cat-box and carrion.

[scorp200]

Someone threw up in my apartment complex over the weekend (sigh) and my dog would have pulled me off my feet to get to it. She did not, thanks to the easy walk harness (hey, that should be in an ad)

[Fontucky]

My dog likes to recycle her own barf, but only after it has festered under the sun for 24 hours. Disgusting.

[World Citizen]

gee this is a gross discussion

[jimboburnsy]

To the OP:

Something interesting about humans is that we can acquire a taste for anything. Do you like coffee? Tea? Tobacco? Blue cheese? Beer? Scotch? All of these would be absolutely hideous to a child. Unless you learn to eat it, many delicacies just don't taste very good. My point being that what is distasteful is all relative, even between human cultures. Many Asian cultures find cheese to be completely repugnant, I think menudo is the worst culinary idea anyone ever had, and some people actually eat hagus.

Dogs can and do taste, they just aren't very sophisticated when it comes to flavors. They are completely pragmatic about food and anything a dog eats, you can eat in a pinch (even raiding the catbox for good gut flora). Hopefully none of us will ever find ourselves in that bad of a pinch.