Intelligent
Sniffing
“It’s
no coincidence that I’m drawn to Finn’s eyes. Dogs have a facial muscle that
can raise their inner eyebrows, giving them a soulful, plaintive expression.
This muscle doesn’t exist in wolves. It’s the result of centuries of
domestication, in which dog faces were inadvertently reshaped to look a bit
more like ours. Those faces are now easier to read, and better at triggering a
nurturing response.”
Ed
Yong (An Immense World, p.18; Random House, New York, 2022)
If you’ve
ever had a dog for a pet, you know that their noses rule. Liza, my little mixed
breed rescue, walks with her nose to the ground. Taking her for a walk is not
easy because she will, if allowed, stand forever sniffing the same clump of
grass, ears trembling at the joy of it. According to Yong, while their sniffing
seems random, it isn’t. They follow trails and check out spots from different
distances, sometimes poking their noses into substances that we would prefer
they didn’t—like road-kill and other dog’s excrement. Gross!
When we
humans visit an art gallery, we approach paintings with the same kind of zeal—only
with our eyes. We look from a distance, then get closer to examine the
brushstrokes. I remember doing this at the Van Gogh interactive exhibit, amazed
at what he could do with one stroke. Dogs are in olfactory exploration all the
time. It’s how they identify everything in their world. If you examine a dog’s
nose, you’ll see that they have open nostril holes that have a side slit. When they
are sniffing, they inhale through the hole and exhale through the side slit,
careful not to blow away the interesting patch of odors, and so that they can continue
to sniff through several breaths. According to Yong, some dogs can create a
continuous uninterrupted airstream for as long as forty seconds, while sniffing
thirty or more times. (p.19)
Yong
tells about some of the things that dogs can do with their super-powerful sense
of smell: “tell identical twins apart by smell; detect a single fingerprint
that has been dabbed onto a microscope slide, then left on a rooftop and exposed
to the elements for a week; tell which direction a person has walked in after
smelling just five footsteps.” Several days ago, while Liza and I were on
our walk, she suddenly began pulling the leash and trying her best to run uphill.
I had no idea what had sparked her until we rounded the corner and saw my son’s
car parked in front of the house. She must have identified his scent from
almost a block away.
I write
all this to say that there are many kinds of intelligence. Scientists,
according to Yong, have tried to find the threshold beyond which dogs can no
longer detect certain chemicals without conclusive answers. Suffice it to say,
their noses are far better than ours, and just as smart as our brains in some
ways. “They’ve been trained to detect bombs, drugs, landmines, missing
people, bodies, smuggled cash, truffles, invasive weeds, agricultural disease,
low blood sugar, bedbugs, oil pipeline leaks, and tumors.” (Yong, p.19-20)
We
humans are just beginning to, as my mother would say, “get down off our
high-horse,” and accept that the rest of the living, breathing world is not our
inferior, and is, in many ways, our superior. Yong’s book goes a long way toward proving that. For that I am grateful.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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