“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them ...
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. . .” - Mary Oliver
Can we ever fully know what a dog is thinking? Some say that they can. "I know dogs," the woman emphatically states as she clutches her wide-eyed, panting Chiweenie closer to her chest. "If you let Coco sniff your hand, she'll know whether or not to trust you." I do not offer the obligatory hand for investigation; knowing that if I were Coco, I might just nip that opposable thumb headed my way. But the doting, protective guardian is by and large, on to something.
Dogs do take in tremendous amounts of information through their nose. A dog’s sense of smell is said to be a thousand times more sensitive than that of humans. In fact, a dog has more than 220 million olfactory receptors in its nose, while humans have only 5 million. In an excerpt from her book, Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz readily points out that we humans are, well, pretty inept when it comes to using our schnoz....
"We humans tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about smelling. Smells are minor blips in our sensory day compared to the reams of visual information that we take in and obsess over in every moment. The room I'm in right now is a phantasmagoric mix of colors and surfaces and densities, of small movements and shadows and lights. Oh, and if I really call my attention to it I can smell the coffee on the table next to me, and maybe the fresh scent of the book cracked open--but only if I dig my nose into its pages." (Excerpt from Chapter 3: Sniff)
Read more here about your dog's olfactory senses and what it could possibly be like if you were inside a dog. Alexandra Horowitz teaches psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego, and has studied the cognition of humans, rhinoceros, bonobos, and dogs. For seventeen years, she has shared her home with an unwitting research subject, Pumpernickel, a wonderful mixed breed.
Nose work classes? The Find It game? Tracking? Lure coursing? Hide and Seek? How does your dog connect to her/his world? What do you do to encourage that connection?
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. . .” - Mary Oliver
Can we ever fully know what a dog is thinking? Some say that they can. "I know dogs," the woman emphatically states as she clutches her wide-eyed, panting Chiweenie closer to her chest. "If you let Coco sniff your hand, she'll know whether or not to trust you." I do not offer the obligatory hand for investigation; knowing that if I were Coco, I might just nip that opposable thumb headed my way. But the doting, protective guardian is by and large, on to something.
Dogs do take in tremendous amounts of information through their nose. A dog’s sense of smell is said to be a thousand times more sensitive than that of humans. In fact, a dog has more than 220 million olfactory receptors in its nose, while humans have only 5 million. In an excerpt from her book, Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz readily points out that we humans are, well, pretty inept when it comes to using our schnoz....
"We humans tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about smelling. Smells are minor blips in our sensory day compared to the reams of visual information that we take in and obsess over in every moment. The room I'm in right now is a phantasmagoric mix of colors and surfaces and densities, of small movements and shadows and lights. Oh, and if I really call my attention to it I can smell the coffee on the table next to me, and maybe the fresh scent of the book cracked open--but only if I dig my nose into its pages." (Excerpt from Chapter 3: Sniff)
Read more here about your dog's olfactory senses and what it could possibly be like if you were inside a dog. Alexandra Horowitz teaches psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego, and has studied the cognition of humans, rhinoceros, bonobos, and dogs. For seventeen years, she has shared her home with an unwitting research subject, Pumpernickel, a wonderful mixed breed.
Nose work classes? The Find It game? Tracking? Lure coursing? Hide and Seek? How does your dog connect to her/his world? What do you do to encourage that connection?
Cover photo by Erin Vey
RSS Feed
