Why Dogs Like to Stick Their Heads Out of the Car Window

One of the ways dogs judge the outside world is through scent recognition. Dogs can distinguish over two million different smells. For dogs, the outside world is filled with various scents. When you take your dog in a car, the dog is constantly in rapidly changing environments. Besides what their eyes see and their ears hear, to gather more environmental information, dogs need to use their sense of smell to judge and analyze the surroundings, so they often stick their heads out of the window.

Moreover, since dogs are quite intelligent, they also have curiosity similar to humans, and driven by this, they will actively "poke their heads out to look around."

However, generally when owners take their dogs out for car rides, it is best not to let dogs stick their heads out of the window, for the same reasons owners do not stick their own heads out of windows.