The dog runs around my car as I pull into the drive, so I slam on the brakes and skid across the gravel. My husband jogs up, lead in hand. They were about to go for what we wryly call a Daddywalk, meaning a brisk, military-style, one-two-one-two (or would it be two-four?) exercise walk.
I open the car door, and after a few pets, Willie reaches into the back seat and drags out the leash I carry with me. Holding it in his mouth, he looks at me beseechingly.
“No, I’m not taking you this time,” I say firmly. He drops the lead, woebegone. Walks with me are leisurely, and I let him sniff wherever he likes. In the past, this was simply passive generosity: I do not incline toward briskness, and it is, after all, his walk. But lately I have seen a series of articles and studies explaining how important it is for dogs to sniff.
They do not possess extraordinary powers of olfaction simply to wow us. Sniffing is how they learn the world, accessing both current and historical information. I guess we do that, too; a leftover whiff of another woman’s perfume on a man’s shirt is definitely a data point. But a dog could tell you who the woman was and what she ate for breakfast.
“How do you expect Willie to detect cancer for us, if he cannot even analyze a boxwood hedge?” I ask my husband. “How will he track me if I am kidnapped?” I am only half kidding. Our previous dog used to delicately sniff my nostrils whenever I had a sinus infection. Dogs smell fear and anxiety (adrenaline has a distinct noseprint) as well as disease and low blood sugar. They have up to three hundred million sensory receptor sites in their noses (we have a measly six million), and the part of their brain that analyzes odor is forty times larger than ours. In addition to all those receptors for scent molecules, dogs can cross-react and recognize even more smells. They can even acquire different odor samples in each nostril, simultaneously—which acts as a sort of triangulation, helping them monitor intensity and detect location.
For a smart dog, a good sniffing session is as stimulating as a locked-room murder mystery. Sniffing increases the respiration rate (cardio!), stimulates metabolic processes, and lowers the stress hormone cortisol. Why would we discourage this?
I get that Willie also needs brisk walks. But thinking about our eye-rolls when he stops to sniff (because I get impatient too, especially when he is engrossed with one particular blade of grass for what feels like forever), it occurs to me that humans lose patience with any way of learning the world that is not our own.
How I have mocked friends addicted to soap operas or reality TV. Yet they developed at least a million receptors for the emotions and drives that tear humans apart. Passionate fans of sports baffle and sometimes appall me—all that energy wasted on vicarious, ephemeral achievements? Yet the fans have a million receptors for teamwork, strategy, discipline, the limits and feats of the human body, and the psychology of winning and losing. Collectors also make me wince—how are all those Pez dispensers or Elvis dolls or Mickey mice saving the world? So much money and time poured into the hunt, so much insignificant stuff amassed. Yet they learn about social history, business, merchandising, supply and demand, design, production, materials, advertising, the life cycle of fads, pop culture in general, the quirks of human nature….
My husband learns the world through its past, reading heavy tomes of nonfiction dusty with facts. I learn truth through fiction, which I suspect he secretly finds frivolous. But novels compress and animate the deepest insights. Often, the two of us share what we have discovered. But we learned long ago not to insist that the other person read the book.
Yet another arena of prejudice, then, this bias against other ways of learning. Genius can look like disability, or a maddening vice, to someone watching. We are all stuck in our preferred mode, dictated by our temperament, experience, and conditioning. Because learning the world is so damned important and necessary, we have a hard time making room for ways we do not immediately grasp as valid.
Religion tumbles into the same trap. Knowing why we are here and how we are to live and what will happen, or not, after death is so damned important that it is hard to genuinely, wholeheartedly honor any beliefs other than one’s own. Yet all those paths wind through the same cosmos, and each offers different views.
If I stopped secretly, often unconsciously, discounting other approaches, beliefs, and seemingly silly obsessions, I would be able to build a more complete picture of reality. I cannot take a walk and learn all that my dog learns about our neighbors, our common ground, our landscape and its menaces. He cannot read one of my novels and learn about the puzzling species he depends upon. Nobody is ever going to draft me for search and rescue or assign him a story. Willie and I learn different things, with our different methods, about the same world.
We need other ways of learning the world. And we each need permission, and time, to sniff out the truth as best we can.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
