Read Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know Online

Authors: Alexandra Horowitz

Tags: #General, #Dogs, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Psychology, #Cognitive Psychology, #Dogs - Psychology, #Pets, #Zoology, #Breeds

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (12 page)

BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

11.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads

In the annals of animal urine marking, dogs are not the most impressive players. Hippopotami wave their tails as they spray urine, better to scatter it, sprinklerlike, in all directions. There are rhinoceroses who follow their high-powered urination onto bushes with destruction of the same bushes with horn and hoof—to ensure, presumably, that their urine is spread far and wide. Pity the owner whose dog is the first to discover the spreading-efficiency of high-powered, whirling-sprinkler urination.

Other animals also press their rear ends against the ground to release fecal and other anal odors. The mongoose does a handstand and rubs itself against a high perch; some dogs do what gymnastics they can, seemingly deliberately relieving themselves on large rocks and other outcroppings. Although secondary to urine marking, defecation also holds identifying odors—not in the excreta itself but in the chemicals dolloped on top. These come from the pea-sized anal sacs, situated right inside the anus and holding secretions from nearby glands: extremely foul, dead-fish-in-a-sweatsock kind of secretions with apparently individual-dead-fish-in-individual-sweatsock odors for each individual dog. These anal sacs also release involuntarily when a dog is afraid or alarmed. It may be no wonder that so many dogs fright at their veterinarian's office: as part of a routine examination, vets often express (squeeze to release the contents of) the anal sacs, which can get impacted and infected. The smell, covered for us by the familiar scent of veterinary antibiotic soaps, must be all over the vets: they reek of epic dog fear.

Finally, if these mephitic calling cards are insufficient, dogs have one other trick in their marking book: they scratch the ground after defecation or urination. Researchers think that this adds new odors to the mix—from the glands on the pads of the feet—but it may also serve as a complementary visual cue leading a dog to the source of the odor for closer examination. On a windy day, dogs may seem friskier, more likely to scratch the ground; they may in fact be leading others to a message that otherwise would waft away.

LEAVES AND GRASS

Science, out of decorum or disinterest, has not definitively explained Pump's mad wriggling in a funky spot of grass. The odor may be of a dog she's interested in, or of a dog she recognizes. Or it may be the remnants of a dead animal, rolled in not so much to conceal her own smell as enjoyed for its sumptuous bouquet.

We respond pithily and with soap: by giving our dogs frequent baths. My neighborhood has not only its fill of dog groomers, but is visited by a mobile grooming van that will come to your home to pick up, suds, fluff, and otherwise de-dog your dog for you. I'm sympathetic to owners who have a lower tolerance for detritus and dust around their homes than I do: a well-walked, thoroughly played-out dog is an efficient spreader of dirt. But we deprive our dogs of something by bathing them so much—to say nothing of our culture's overenthusiastic cleaning of our own homes, including our dogs' bedding. What smells clean to us is the smell of artificial chemical clean, something expressly non-biological. The mildest fragrance that cleansers come in is still an olfactory insult to a dog. And although we might like a visually clean space, a place rid entirely of organic smells would be an impoverished one for dogs. Better to keep the occasional well-worn T-shirt around and not scrub the floors for a while. The dog himself does not have any drive to be what we would call clean. It is no wonder that the dog follows his bath by hightailing it to roll vigorously on the rug or in the grass. We deprive dogs of an important part of their identity, temporarily, to bathe them in coconut-lavender shampoo.

Similarly, recent research found that when we give dogs antibiotics excessively, their body odor changes, temporarily wreaking havoc with the social information they normally emit. We can be alert to this while still using these medicines appropriately. So too with the laughable Elizabethan collar, an enormous cone collar typically used to prevent a dog from chewing at stitches closing a wound: it is useful to prevent self-mutilation, but consider all the ordinary interactive behavior it prevents—looking away from an aggressive dog; seeing someone's loping approach from the side; the ability to reach and sniff another dog's rump.

Pity the urban dog, subjected to the remnants of an old society-wide terror that odors themselves caused disease. Urban planning shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries toward elaborate "deodorization" of cities: paving streets and replacing dirt paths with concrete to trap odors. In Manhattan it even prompted a grid-based street system that, it was thought, would encourage odors to race out of the city to the rivers, instead of settling into pleasant nooks and alleys. This surely

reduces the dog's possible enjoyment of the smells inside the crevices of every fallen leaf and blade of grass paved over.

BRAMBISH AND BRUNKY

I used to be fooled by Pump's motionless posture when we sat outside together. One time, looking more closely at her, I saw that she was motionless but for one part: her nostrils. They were churning information through their caverns, ruminating on the sight before her nose. What was she seeing? The unknown dog who just turned the corner off the block? A barbecue down the hill, with perspiring volleyballers circling grilling meats? An approaching storm, with its fulminating bursts of air from distant climes? The hormones, the sweat, the meat—even the air currents preceding the arrival of a thunderstorm, upwardly moving drafts leaving invisible scent tracks in their wake—are all detectable, if not necessarily detected or understood, by the dog's nose. Whatever it was, she was far from the idle creature she'd seemed to be.

Knowing the importance of odor in a dog's world changed the way I thought about Pump's merry greeting of a visitor in my house by heading directly for his groin. The genitals, along with the mouth and the armpits, are truly good sources of information. To disallow this greeting is tantamount to blindfolding yourself when you open the door to a stranger. Since my guests may be less keen on the dog umwelt, though, I advise visitors to proffer a hand (undoubtedly fragrant), or kneel and let their head or trunk be sniffed instead.

Similarly, it is peculiarly human to chastise a dog for greeting a new dog in the neighborhood by smelling his rump. Our distaste for the notion of rump-smelling as a human social practice is irrelevant. For dogs, by all means, the closer the better. Dogs will communicate to each other if they are uninterested in being so intimately examined; interference may agitate one or both of them.

To understand the dog umwelt, then, we must think of objects, people, emotions—even times of day—as having distinctive odors. That we have so few words for smells restricts our imagination of the brambish, brunky diversity that exists. Perhaps, a dog can detect what a poet evokes: the "brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder …" (and definitely "… The old bones buried under …"). Probably, not all smells are good smells: as there is visual pollution, so is there olfactory pollution. Definitely, those who see smells must remember in smells, too: when we imagine dogs' dreaming and daydreaming, we should envisage dream images made of scents.

Since I've begun to appreciate Pump's smelly world I sometimes take her out just to sit and sniff. We have smell-walks, stopping at every landmark along our routes in which she shows an interest. She is
looking;
being outside is the most smelly, wonderful part of her day. I won't cut that short. I even look at photographs of her differently: where she once looked to be pensively staring in the distance, I now think what she's really doing is smelling some new exciting air from a far-flung source.

But I'm happiest of all to receive her greeting sniff of me, prompting her wag of recognition. I nuzzle into the scruff of her neck and sniff her right back.

Mute

Pump sits close to me and quietly pants, gazing at me: she wants something. On our walks she tells me when we've gone far enough and she is ready to go back: she hops up, pivots on her rear legs, then beelines back from where we came. I turn on the bathwater, turn to her with a smile, and her tail drops and wags low, her ears flattening on her head. All this talking and yet no talking at all.

There is a certain poignancy in describing animals as our "dumb friends"; in noting the "blank bewilderment" of a dog; in nodding at their "uncommunicating muteness." These are familiar ways of talking about dogs, who never respond in kind as we speak to them. No small amount of dogs' winsomeness is the empathy that we can attribute to them as they silently contemplate us. Still, these characterizations, while evocative, seem to me to be outright flawed in two ways. First, it is not the animals who desire to speak and cannot, I suspect; it is that we desire them to talk and cannot effect it. Second, most animals, and dogs in particular, are neither blank of expression nor in fact mute. Dogs, like wolves, communicate with their eyes, ears, tail, and very posture. Far from pleasantly silent, they squeal, growl, grunt, yelp, moan, whine, whimper, bark, yawn, and howl. And that's just in the first few weeks.

Dogs talk. They communicate; they declare; they express themselves. This comes as no surprise; what is surprising is how often they are communicating, and in how many ways. They talk to each other, they talk to you, and they talk to noises on the other side of closed doors or hidden in high grasses. This gregariousness is familiar to us: having a large roster of communications is consistent with being social, as humans are. Those canids such as foxes, who do not live in a social group, appear to have a much more limited range of things to say. Even the kinds of sounds foxes make are indicative of their more solitary nature: they make sounds that travel well over long distances. Dogs' staunch unmuteness is expressed through making sounds bellowed and whispered. Vocalizations, scent, stance, and facial expression each function to communicate to other dogs and, if we know how to listen, to us.

OUT LOUD

Two human beings stroll through a park chatting. They move with ease from commenting on the warmth of the air, to the nature of humans in positions of power, to expressions of mutual adoration, to reflections on past expressions of mutual adoration, to admonishment to observe the tree straight ahead. They do this primarily by making small, strange contortions of the shape of the cavities of their mouths, the placement of their tongues, by pushing air through the vocal tract and squeezing or widening their lips. Theirs is not the only communication going on. Over the course of a walk, the dogs by their sides may scold one another, confirm friendships, court each other, declare dominance, rebuff advances, claim ownership of a stick, or assert allegiance to their person. Dogs, like so many non-human animals, have evolved innumerable, non-language-driven methods to communicate with one another. Human facility at communication is unquestionable. We converse with an elaborate, symbol-driven language, quite unlike anything seen in other animals. But we sometimes forget that even non-language-using creatures might be talking up a storm.

What animals have are whole systems of behavior that get information from a sender (speaker) to a recipient (listener). That is all that is needed to call something a communication. It needn't be important, relevant, or even interesting information, but between animals it often is. Communication is only sometimes within our range of hearing, or even vocal: it is often made through body language—using limbs, head, eyes, tails, or the entire body—or even through such surprising forms as changing color, urinating and defecating, or making oneself larger or smaller.

We can spot a communication by noticing if, after one animal makes a noise or does an action, another responds to it by changing its behavior. Information has been imparted. What we'll miss, since we don't know the language of, say, spiders or sloths (though there are currently researchers trying to learn these communication systems), is those utterances that fall on deaf ears. Still, animals are constant gabbers. The discoveries of natural science over the last one hundred years have shown us the variety of guises in which this gabbing can appear. Birds twitter, peep, and sing songs—so do humpback whales. Bats emit high-frequency clicks; elephants, low-frequency rumbles. The wiggling dance of a honeybee communicates the direction, quality, and distance to food; a monkey's yawn conveys a threat. A firefly's flashes indicate his species; a poison-dart frog's coloration identifies his toxicity.

The kind we notice first is the one that most closely matches our own language: communication out loud.

DOG-EARED

BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

11.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads