For a dog, the nose knows

I was recently talking to a friend who told me that dogs are more psychic than cats.

I asked her why. She told me it’s because dogs can sniff out a ghost because of their keen sense of smell, something that cats don’t have.

Just recently I was watching an episode of The Haunted, which chronicles true, chilling and terrifying stories of animals and their owners who are experiencing the unexplainable. In each episode, a paranormal team investigates grim cases using infrared cameras and sensitive recording devices.

In the episode I was watching, the owner of the haunted house explained that her dog was behaving strangely and was furiously sniffing the air. The human in the episode explained that the dog seemed to be following a scent at the start. Later on, the dog started to act fierce and began angrily barking at something the human could not see.

Which brings me to the book Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz, who writes about her experience with her dog, a mutt called Pumpernickel, or Pump.

In the book, Horowitz delves into how a dog’s nose always seems to know, based on her scientific research. Although I must admit the book is a little too technical for me, it is interesting how the author points to the fact that dogs have their own “umwelt,” or self-world.

Here’s Horowitz’s take on how a dog might view a rose as different from the way a human would. We humans might look at a rose as a beautiful flower that smells wonderful and comes in many attractive colors that speak of love.

For a dog? A rose might not be the same at all. Horowitz suggests a dog might only be interested in the rose if, perhaps, another dog has peed on its stem. The flower’s appearance doesn’t interest the dog, she asserts, but its smell — though not as sweet — may perk up his nostrils.

My two-year-old Bichon Vodka is a sniffer. Or perhaps I have just become more aware of her tendency to sniff the air more than my other four doggy companions since reading this book.

Vodka sneezes and walks away when I open the bottle of my favorite cologne: a sign that the scent is a bit too strong for her and that she would prefer to stay away from it.

But just the other day Yuri, my male Schnoodle, made his way into the room and, as is his style, left a tiny mark of his pee in the room, even a little on my bottle of cologne.

I was angry, but I also noticed the bottle was something that Vodka had become interested in. Perhaps it was the scent of Yuri’s pee that had caught Vodka’s attention.

Experiment one: positive.

Go ahead, sniff

Horowitz describes dogs as “creatures of the nose.” She writes that people have to exhale before they can inhale new air. Dogs breathe in, and then their nostrils quiver as they pull the air deeper inside the nose as well as out through side slits. In this way, dogs not only hold more scent than humans can, they also continuously refresh what they smell.

There have been many reports in the recent past about dogs being able to smell if a person is sick or even sad. As for sickness, I think it is possible, but I am not too sure about sniffing out sadness.

Yet scientists and people who study dog behavior agree that humans let out a certain scent when they are happy, sick or even sad that only the keen nose of a dog can pick up.

Smell the time

What I found new in Horowitz’s book is her theory that a dog’s sense of time differs from ours. For dogs, “smell tells time,” she writes. “Perspective, scale and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction — but olfaction is fleeting... Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed.” 

Unlike we humans who look at time in terms of past, present or future, Horowitz asserts that a dog’s “olfactory window” of present smells also brings with it smells from the past, and maybe even the near future.

I guess this might explain why dogs tend to behave in an excited manner when they can sense their human is on his or her way home, a few minutes before they actually arrive. Horowitz writes that dogs can sense, through their olfactory functions, “not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.”

And that eerie sixth sense would be the dog’s umwelt.

Inside of a Dog also looks into the similarities and differences between dogs and wolves.

“Dogs do not form true packs,” she writes. “They scavenge or hunt small prey individually or in parallel,” rather than cooperatively, as wolves do. Countering the currently fashionable alpha dog “pack theories” of dog training, Horowitz notes that “in the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are families, not groups of peers vying for the top spot.” 

The idea that a dog owner must become the dominant member by using jerks or harsh words or other kinds of punishment, she writes, “is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other. Dogs, too, are keen observers — of our reactions.”

But if there is one thing that makes dogs different from wolves, it is eye contact. “Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.”

I guess, then, in a sense Horowitz confirms what any dog-loving human already knows when he or she looks into the puppy-dog eyes of their beloved pet — that their fave dog is staring, soulfully, into our umwelts and trying to grasp what we are really all about.

It becomes all the more necessary, then, that we do all we can to welcome them into our world as much as they welcome us into theirs.

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Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know by Alexandra Horowitz is available at National Book Store.