IMHO, Using a dog as a feedback party for your phero mixture (natural or synthetic) is interesting in a few ways.
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They are free of human social pressures. No pandering, no subtext, no backhanded compliments or mixed signals. Dogs display very straightforward “emotions”.
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The dog’s elongated sniffer barrel is packed with 220 million olfactory receptors in their nose. Humans? 50 million.
Some interesting olfactory tidbits from the Smelliverse:
http://www.pheromonetalk.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1021&stc=1&d=1393908944
http://www.pheromonetalk.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1022&stc=1&d=1393908944
http://www.pheromonetalk.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1023&stc=1&d=1393908944
The Canine Sensory Experience
Dogs are colour-blind, but they don’t see in black and white. Rather, a dog sees yellow over most of its visual spectrum, with hints of teal and violet. Even though a dog sees colours that are familiar to us, it doesn’t see them at the same wavelengths that we do.
None of this really matters, because colour isn’t important to a dog. Humans rely on their colour vision to tell the chemical composition of matter - i.e. the ediblity of foods. Dogs rely on their vision to perceive movement and distance, dark and light. Everything else about the world it needs to know, its nose can tell it.
A dog’s immense sensitivity to scent - said to be a thousand times greater than ours - allows it to gather highly detailed information and detect the faintest of chemical traces. For a comparison fathomable to the human senses, this is like looking through a microscope instead of a naked eye, or listening to a live symphony instead of a gramophone record.
The olfactory chamber of a dog is so complex, its surface area is equal to the dog’s entire hide. When a dog sniffs, pushing air in and out of its nasal passage, it rouses the scent particles and washes them repeatedly over its olfactory glands, mulling over the scent.
The dog’s full olfactory system - the nasal cavity, olfactory gland, and olfactory lobe - is larger than its brain.
Source: On the internet, everyone knows I am a dog. - The Canine Sensory Experience ? Dogs are…
Some more goodies: Jacobson’s Organ
Inside the nasal cavity and opening into the upper part of the mouth is the final piece of the dog’s scent-related puzzle, the remarkable Jacobson’s Organ. Jacobson’s Organ is a “sense of smell” receptor that is actually not receptive to ordinary odors. Rather, the scenting nerve cells of the organ are quite different from those in normal olfactory tissue in that they respond to a range of substances that have large molecules, but often no detectable odor.
The sensory cells of Jacobson’s Organ (which anatomists claim are unlike any other nerve cells) communicate not with the olfactory bulbs and cortex, but with the accessory bulbs and the part of the brain that coordinates mating and other basic emotions. In fact, recent evidence suggests that the two separate but parallel systems of odor detection cooperate in surprising ways to produce novel sensibilities not achievable by either of them on their own.
The primary function of the Organ is to detect pheromones, which then provides both sexes with information as to the availability of the opposite sex for breeding. Additionally the Organ is apparently able to detect other, normally undetectable, odors – odors that may enhance the newborn’s ability to find its own dam, for example. Search and rescue dog handlers notice that many of their dogs lick the air, as if to give additional input into their “scents-ability.”
Animals enhance the sex-detection ability of the Organ with what is called the “flehmen” reaction or “flared face.” When exposed to the urine of an animal in heat, a male will typically throw back his head and raise or curl his upper lip – both of these help to open the entry slits into Jacobson’s Organ.
Horses, deer, and goats are the masters of this reaction, and many dogs can produce a rather pronounced flehmen when the time is right.
From: The Canine Sense of Smell, Randy Kidd DVM, PhD