dogs and smell

Better Than Therapy

Pam Hogle The Thinking Dog Blog , ,

Golden retriever puppy arcs her body to grab her tailYou’ve probably heard that dogs can smell fear — that is, they know if you are afraid of them by your scent. It’s increasingly accepted that dogs can sniff out all kinds of physiological changes, ranging from detecting tumors to identifying when a diabetic person’s blood sugar is dropping to cuing in on impending seizures.

So it’s not exactly surprising that your dog can tell if you are stressed — just from your scent. The Washington Post recently described a study that found that dogs are extremely accurate in detecting stress from the scent of a person’s sweat or breath.

Just knowing that their person isn’t enough for most dogs, though. The reason they’re better than therapy is that they nearly always want to do something about it: Offer comfort, make you laugh, do something naughty to distract you… (hi, Orly!).

Speaking of making people laugh, dogs do seem to recognize laughter as positive and try to get their humans to laugh. Orly likes to make me laugh by chasing her tail. She doesn’t just run in circles, though; she grabs her tail, tugs on it until she tips over, then does a little somersault, going ears over tail like a furry doughnut. It’s hard to capture this, first of all because I am laughing too hard, but also because when she sees me get out the phone/camera, she stops doing it. Here’s my best attempt so far:

Stinky Dogs

Pam Hogle The Thinking Dog Blog , , ,
Golden Cali and Lab Koala sniff deeply at the grass and leaves
Cali and Koala explore the neighborhood with their sensitive noses

When I last took Cali to the groomer, I noticed a row of bottles of dog perfume near the checkout. Clients could choose a scent and spray their dogs when they picked up their clean and trimmed pups.

Eeewww, I thought, that’s a terrible idea.

Then I saw an article about “the best” dog perfumes. Promoting them to cover “wet dog” smell.

We need to be clear on why this is a terrible idea.

Dogs’ sense of smell is hundreds to thousands of times more powerful and sensitive than humans’. If you spray something on your dog in a significant enough quantity that you can smell it from any distance at all, even snuggling distance, your poor dog is being overwhelmed by the scent.

That’s bad enough if it’s a scent that dogs like, such as, say, dead fish or fresh deer droppings. But a fake chemical scent intended to smell like, who knows, a floral bouquet or clean linen (whatever that smells like) or mangoes … just no.

The dog’s primary and preferred method of exploring the world is scent. This is how dogs recognize friends, potential friends, and for dogs other than Cali and Orly (for whom there are only those two categories) potential foes; it’s how they decide where to lead me on our smell walks and which disgusting (oops, I meant delightful) dead things to roll in at the dog beach.

I’ve always thought that the reason nearly all dogs race outside to roll in the grass (if you’re lucky) immediately after a bath is that they are trying to get rid of the scent of the shampoo. I look for unscented dog shampoos — and rinse really, really well. I think dog shampoos should smell like freshly cut grass or sea breezes… or nothing. Cali would choose other scents, I am sure.

Adding a sweet, fruity, floral, or other scent — “sugarcane island” and “cookie crush” are real options — on top of that is torture for the dog. It overwhelms her sensitive nose and interferes with her most basic means of experiencing the world. Like the annoying tag jingle, she can’t escape it. And it’s completely unnecessary: Your clean dog smells great just as she is — once her fur is dry, that is!

Favorite Stops on Our Smell Walks

Pam Hogle Stories, The Thinking Dog Blog , , , ,
Golden Cali and Lab Koala agree to sniff deeply at a grassy spot
Pooling the “sniff” budget pays off

“Smell walks” with Cali and Koala are undergoing an update. It’s going better than I expected, actually.

Smell walks follow a suggestion from Alexandra Horowitz’s book Being a Dog. Basically, they are walks where the human actually lets the dog stop to sniff things. Since in the dog’s world, that is the one and only purpose of a walk, they tend to be mystified and frustrated by the large number of humans who seem to think walks are about walking.

Koala takes the concept beyond the extreme, though, sniffing Every. Single. Tree. And rock, blade of grass, and other, ickier stuff. After realizing that my usual 20-minute morning walk with Cali takes well over 45 minutes when Koala joins us, I knew that changes were needed.

I decided that each dog could choose 3 spots for long, deep sniffing sessions. The rest of the time, we’d walk. There’s one other rule: The deep sniffs do not include other dogs’ droppings.

I explained these rules to them carefully, and off we went. I counted each stop and told them how many they each had remaining in the bank. Even so, on the first modified walk, they seemed surprised and, yes, annoyed when I hustled them along after their 6 deep sniffs.

But they caught on pretty quickly. Soon, they started choosing their spots together, rather than taking turns. I could see one turn to the other, the other give a look — and both dive in. I think this approach provides them both with a greater return from their sniff budget.

They have started to return to the same spots, walk after walk. I’m guessing that those are spots favored by our neighborhood deer friends as well as the numerous other dogs who stroll the sidewalks.

Koala is quickly mastering the “walk-by sniff” — she samples an area with a quick sniff-survey of the air as we approach. Before we’re even there, she’s rejected it as a stop, quickly collecting all the information she needs without even slowing down.

Koala is efficient in another way: She often combines a deep-sniff session with other business needs. I appreciate that she frequently does that near one of the two trash cans on our usual route.

We’ve almost settled into a new routine. I can predict 3 or 4 of their stops already. Maybe they are weighing the others and will make their choices soon. Or perhaps they will always reserve 2 spots for impulse stops. Even dogs need some variety in their routines, after all.

Getting to Know You …

Pam Hogle The Thinking Dog Blog , , , ,

Cali’s tail never stops wagging as she follows her nose.

A recent column in the Whole Dog Journal had these two sentences, part of a longer description of a coonhound learning to trust humans (the column is well worth a read; in fact, nearly everything in WDJ is worth reading):

The only clue we had that she actually did like attention was that if you sat in her presence, she would come and stand very close to you; she liked to put her face very near your face – a quite uncomfortable sensation with a dog who has no expression, and isn’t wagging her tail or trying to lick you. She would just approach, stand very close, and hold very still – odd.

This caught my attention because Cali does the same thing. Well, Cali has a very expressive face and is nearly always wagging her tail, sometimes even in her sleep. But the ‘putting her nose right next to people’s mouths’ part is the same.

I think that dogs do this to learn about people. They pick up a lot of information from smells, far more than whether we’re overdue for a dose of mouthwash. They learn about other dogs that way, both in person and by sniffing the ground.

Cali often does this breathing exercise while also giving the person a hug (she gives great hugs), possibly begging for a treat (or sniffing the person’s plate), or nuzzling the person. But often, she just inhales … soaking in the essence of her friend. And almost everyone is her friend — or would be if she could only meet them!

I’m not sure whether Cali is doing this more, as well as sniffing the ground more carefully and thoroughly since we started doing scent work classes or I am just noticing it more. But she does seem to be very attuned to her nose lately. When we played ball in the snow this morning, though, I noticed that she doesn’t seem to be able to detect the scent as easily. She ran right past her ball several times, sniffing the air, and did not seem to know it was there. She’s generally very good at finding it with her nose.

Of course, it could just be that she loves running around in the snow …

 

 

Cali and the Magic Box

Pam Hogle Stories, The Thinking Dog Blog , , ,

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Cali’s head whips around. Her body follows her nose. She’s on the scent.

She started doing this at her second or third “nosework” class — as she ambled around, haphazardly looking for the target. Suddenly, she’d catch the scent and be off, following that now-beloved birch scent to the magic box. All she had to do was touch this box and her devoted servant (me) would start showering her with praise and treats. Really good treats. Yum.

Cali “got it” very quickly. When practicing, I have to put her in the bedroom and close the door so I can hide the magic box. She trots out eagerly, nose in the air. Within seconds, that nose whips around and she’s dancing beside the box.

The road to nosework expertise is not without bumps. At one point, Cali started bashing the box with a large, soft paw. When we switched to cardboard boxes, she thought they might make a nice snack.

Despite the minor hiccups, Cali continues to progress in her scent-detection abilities. She’s putting them to work daily. Though Jana enjoyed the concept of smell walks throughout her life, Cali had never been interested in sniffing her way through town. Now she thoroughly investigates the many (many, many, many …) places along our daily walks that other dogs have marked. I never knew it could take so long to walk around a parking lot!

She’s suddenly developed a deep interest in squirrels, too. Montana squirrels are a lot more interesting than California squirrels, apparently. Especially the one that hangs out near the veterans’ apartment building next to our apartment complex. Oh, and the one that raids our bird feeder any chance it gets, whom Cali seems to enjoy watching.

Back in “nosework” class, we’ve moved from hiding the scent in boxes to moving it around. Cali quickly grasps each new step — at least, in class. Watching her try to understand the new “rules” at home is interesting. She is a living illustration that content and context both affect learning. In plain English — don’t change everything at once. She did find the scent hidden in a plastic container this morning, as well as under the sofa and on a shelf. She’s is following her nose for sure; she can’t see where I have hidden the tin with the scent stick. She’s not very methodical in her search, but she is thorough. And she gets very excited when she finds it.

What’s great about the scent game is that we can play it all winter, indoors, with little changes, and – so far — Cali’s enthusiasm hasn’t faded a bit.

 

Being a Dog

Pam Hogle Barkshelf, The Thinking Dog Blog , , , , , ,

Alexandra Horowitz’s new book, Being a Dog, is as much about being — and sniffing as — a human as it is about dogs and their world of smells. Horowitz does a great job breaking down the science of how dogs smell and how humans do (or, rather, fail to). I finally understand how different the dog’ s sense of the world is, in a way that superficial comparisons of the number of smell receptor cells dogs and humans have never could convey.

Dogs process and understand smell in a completely different way from humans. Smell is an entire language. Sniffing stuff on a walk is like reading an entire encyclopedia. Horowitz says that dogs don’t judge smells the way we do either. Smells are information; neither good nor bad. That explains a lot!

A couple of weeks ago, I described “smell walks” but I wasn’t sure exactly how these were supposed to work. Jana will be devastated to learn that not all walks need to be smell walks, but she will be delighted with the news that she deserves frequent smell walks. She sort of gets them already: The rules are that the dog gets to decide what direction to head, when to change direction, when to stop, and when to continue moving. If you and the dog never make it down the front steps, so be it. Luckily, we don’t have front steps.

I’d guess that it’s best to smell-walk one dog at a time, though Cali seems pretty happy with letting Jana choose smell sites. One must not head out on a smell walk when one is pressed for time. Especially if one is walking Jana; her smell walks could easily last from breakfast until dinner, especially if one remembered to bring refreshments for along the way.

There’s a lot more to the book than smell walks, though. There’s a lot of science, much of it having nothing to do with dogs but lots to do with smells. There are some great chapters on working dogs that barely scratch the surface of what career options are out there for dogs with working noses. There’s also a description of Horowitz’s experience taking her dog to a nosework class. He, like Jana, was a natural. But her descriptions of some of the other class members, nose-impaired and inhibited, were very sad.

Nosework classes are a dog’s idea of heaven on earth. The dog is in charge. The human cannot tell her “no” or hold her back. She gets to climb on things and under things and stick her nose anywhere she wants to. She can bark as much as she wants. And the reward for finding something smelly is a ton of treats. Not hard to figure out why Jana loved it. Cali would, too. She deserves a smell class of her own, come to think of it.

The book is definitely worth a read. Horowitz’s last book, Inside of a Dog, was billed as offering insight into how dogs experience the world. But I think that Being a Dog does a much better job of that. Scent is what defines the dog’s world; as much as most humans rely on what they see to understand the world, dogs turn to scent. Gaining a better understanding of what that means is the best way to try to understand dogs. When you’re done, sign your dog up for a nosework class. Maybe Cali and I will see you there!