Man’s Best Friend
On the way to the lanes the other day, a car passed me on the left. Through the half-open rear passenger window was the head of a very happy dog. Eyes squinting and ears flapping in the wind, he seemed ecstatic and I believe I know why.
A dog’s sense of smell is so dominant, we have yet to fathom how it works as well as it does. We haven’t been able to create machines that find people lost in the wilderness or under destroyed buildings, discover hidden contraband or even detect cancer cells in people the way a dog can sniff them out. We should be grateful that we have gotten along so well with the species this long.
A Load o’ Labs (Santa Fe, 22 March 2013)
With a brain only one-tenth the size of ours, a dog’s olfactory center is forty times larger. Depending on the breed, a dog has 25 to 60 times the number of scent receptors inside that cold, wet nose. That would make them up to 10,000,000 times more sensitive to smell than we are.
That dog in the car was being blasted by the scents of every animal, person and thing that had been in the area for who-knows how long…smacking him in the nose as he flew by. “Cat! – Dog! – FEMALE dog!! – Garbage can! – Someone dropped a burger! – A dead thing! – Turd!
Analogies would be mind-boggling. As I have noted in earlier posts, I’m a visual guy. My sense of smell is fair and my hearing sucks. If I could see as well as a dog smells, an object you mere mortals could see 600 yards away I could see just as well from 3000 miles. I wouldn’t just see a tree on the side of the road, I would ‘see’ every crease of bark, every nest and creature living in the tree and every bug on every leaf. I would see the fine mist of a trail left behind by a cat that passed by long ago. It would be like that x-ray vision I wish I had growing up…only better.
I do not have a large catalog of dog pictures but I have some candid shots of pets I have known. Since that sighting in the car, I’ll include a few here. The blog is about images after all.
Grandma Elsie and Malachi (Christmas 1972)
Grandma lived upstairs and did quite well the last 80 years of her life after meningitis left her with one eye and no hearing. Three years after Toulouse was gone, I brought Malachi home because I thought it was time to have a dog in the house again.
Malachi had just a little of that dopiness you find in some Irish Setters. The last family dog (Mom kept cats for the rest of her days) prompts one memory. One day in the living room, someone told Malachi to ‘sit’…and he plopped his rear end down on the couch, with his paws on the floor just like the rest of us.
“Who wants to go out?” (27 November 2010)
Jack and Jo have a wonderful country home in Chapel Hill. Large lots in the woods in between small horse farms. They have dogs, as do many of the neighbors. The neighbor dogs visit each other and this was one of those days when the menagerie was all present. When someone decides he wants to go out, everyone wants to go out.
O.5 seconds later (27 November 2010)
As I learned after telling the stories about Toulouse, we do love our pets. I suspect many in my ‘exclusive’ readership would prefer animal stories over rants and tombstone tales. I’ll see what I can do.
posted by Ted Ringger @ 8:12 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Thanks for your shout-out for what is clearly Dog Heaven here in the country outside Chapel Hill. Your blog prompted me to pick back up a book we got several years ago when we were trying to understand why Sweet Pea, the Treeing Walker Coonhound we had rescued, would simply not respond to our commands like our previous dogs. I highly recommend Alexandra Horowitz’s “Inside A Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, And Know”.
You speculated about what it would be like for humans to see as well as a dog smells. Alternatively it helps to understand the how well a dog smells if you compare it to how a human sees. Just like we see an object moving in one direction or the other dogs notice the change in smell over time and that’s how they know which direction to follow the scent.
Our strongest senses are sight and hearing – for dogs it’s smell and taste. Human noses have 6 million olfactory sites – beagles have over 300 million. Some of us might be able to smell a teaspoon of sugar in our coffee mug – a dog can detect that teaspoon of sugar in a volume of water equal to 2 Olympic-sized pools.
On the other hand, dogs really don’t see too well. Dogs’ eyes are not, as many think, color-blind but their eyes are just not as well-equipped as are ours. Humans have 3 kinds of cones (ie photoreceptors) that respond to red, blue, or green wavelengths. Dogs have only 2: one that’s sensitive to blue and the other to greenish-yellow. They have a tough time when you tell them to forget about the red ball, it’s the orange one you want.
Interestingly, dogs’ eyes also have a different “flicker rate” than do humans. We see around 60 images per second – anything less looks like an old silent movie to us – and that’s why analog TV was set at that refresh rate. Dogs see at 70 or 80 and never were very interested in TV. But now HDTV operates at 120 Hz and it can be a whole new world for your pets.
And they're loyal and loving and (mostly) obedient...but I'm not giving them control of the HDTV remote. Thanks for the additional info on these great creatures.
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