Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz Page B

otherwise would waft away.

LEAVES AND GRASS

    Science, out of decorum or disinterest, has not definitively explained Pump's mad wriggling in a funky spot of grass. The odor may be of a dog she's interested in, or of a dog she recognizes. Or it may be the remnants of a dead animal, rolled in not so much to conceal her own smell as enjoyed for its sumptuous bouquet.
    We respond pithily and with soap: by giving our dogs frequent baths. My neighborhood has not only its fill of dog groomers, but is visited by a mobile grooming van that will come to your home to pick up, suds, fluff, and otherwise de-dog your dog for you. I'm sympathetic to owners who have a lower tolerance for detritus and dust around their homes than I do: a well-walked, thoroughly played-out dog is an efficient spreader of dirt. But we deprive our dogs of something by bathing them so much—to say nothing of our culture's overenthusiastic cleaning of our own homes, including our dogs' bedding. What smells clean to us is the smell of artificial chemical clean, something expressly non-biological. The mildest fragrance that cleansers come in is still an olfactory insult to a dog. And although we might like a visually clean space, a place rid entirely of organic smells would be an impoverished one for dogs. Better to keep the occasional well-worn T-shirt around and not scrub the floors for a while. The dog himself does not have any drive to be what we would call clean. It is no wonder that the dog follows his bath by hightailing it to roll vigorously on the rug or in the grass. We deprive dogs of an important part of their identity, temporarily, to bathe them in coconut-lavender shampoo.
    Similarly, recent research found that when we give dogs antibiotics excessively, their body odor changes, temporarily wreaking havoc with the social information they normally emit. We can be alert to this while still using these medicines appropriately. So too with the laughable Elizabethan collar, an enormous cone collar typically used to prevent a dog from chewing at stitches closing a wound: it is useful to prevent self-mutilation, but consider all the ordinary interactive behavior it prevents—looking away from an aggressive dog; seeing someone's loping approach from the side; the ability to reach and sniff another dog's rump.
    Pity the urban dog, subjected to the remnants of an old society-wide terror that odors themselves caused disease. Urban planning shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries toward elaborate "deodorization" of cities: paving streets and replacing dirt paths with concrete to trap odors. In Manhattan it even prompted a grid-based street system that, it was thought, would encourage odors to race out of the city to the rivers, instead of settling into pleasant nooks and alleys. This surely

    reduces the dog's possible enjoyment of the smells inside the crevices of every fallen leaf and blade of grass paved over.

BRAMBISH AND BRUNKY

    I used to be fooled by Pump's motionless posture when we sat outside together. One time, looking more closely at her, I saw that she was motionless but for one part: her nostrils. They were churning information through their caverns, ruminating on the sight before her nose. What was she seeing? The unknown dog who just turned the corner off the block? A barbecue down the hill, with perspiring volleyballers circling grilling meats? An approaching storm, with its fulminating bursts of air from distant climes? The hormones, the sweat, the meat—even the air currents preceding the arrival of a thunderstorm, upwardly moving drafts leaving invisible scent tracks in their wake—are all detectable, if not necessarily detected or understood, by the dog's nose. Whatever it was, she was far from the idle creature she'd seemed to be.
    Knowing the importance of odor in a dog's world changed the way I thought about Pump's merry greeting of a visitor in my house by heading directly for his groin. The genitals, along with the mouth