While taking a walk through town last Friday, I came upon a dog leading its owner from one fragrant location to the next.
That is to say, the locations were fragrant, if you were a dog. The owner didn’t exhibit the same excitement over the presumed odors that the dog was finding so fascinating.
I read somewhere that a dog has something like 300 million olfactory receptors in their nose, compared to about six million in my nose (and your nose). The part of a dog’s brain devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than ours. Putting those biological advantages together, and we have a pet whose sense of smell is, like, 10,000 times better than ours.
Just imagine. You wake up in the morning and you can smell the coffee brewing in your ex-wife’s house, 10 miles away. (That doesn’t necessarily strike me as a pleasant experience, so I’m glad it’s just a figment of my imagination.)
Anyway, I was watching this dog leading its owner last Friday, and I found myself wondering — what exactly does a dog experience, when sniffing? I mean, to judge by the tension on the leash, there’s something extremely compelling about sniffing a fire hydrant.
I once owned a dog — Rufus — but he decided to live with Darlene during the divorce. Our cat, Roscoe, decided to live with me, which is just fine, although I do miss the early morning walks with Rufus.
Roscoe the cat is not much for early morning walks. He prefers to kill small animals and birds early in the morning.
During my walks with our dog Rufus — back when I was still married — I admit I didn’t pay much attention to what Rufus was sniffing, or where he was sniffing, or for how long he was sniffing. But I clearly understood that, while I thought of our walks as a opportunity for exercise, Rufus had utterly different priorities. He couldn’t care less about ‘exercise’ unless it involved exercising his nostrils.
But this past Friday, watching the dog pull its owner from one fragrant location to the next, it suddenly struck me that, during all those years of walking Rufus, I had never really appreciated the intensity with which he was exploring the same sidewalks that we had been strolling for the past several years. In particular, his passionate interest in the same fire hydrants and trees and little clumps of weeds that — to my unaided eye and nose — seemed to have undergone no change whatsoever during the past 24 hours.
These same innocuous sidewalk fixtures obviously held — for Rufus — ever-changing secrets and clues to which I, as a dumb, sensory-deprived human, was oblivious.
I hate to experience a revelation and do nothing about it. So, on Friday, after the dog and his owner had safely disappeared around a corner, and no one else was around, I got down on my hands and knees and sniffed the fire hydrant.
To tell the truth, it smelled exactly what I expected a fire hydrant to smell like. A faint smell of rust, with notes of wet earth, and maybe some slight vinegar overtones.
Not the least bit exciting.
Obviously, I was missing something, with my limited stock of six million olfactory receptors.
Either that, or the dogs are pulling one over on us.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.