• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

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 and the armpits, are truly good sources of information. To disallow this greeting is tantamount to blindfolding yourself when you open the door to a stranger. Since my guests may be less keen on the dog umwelt, though, I advise visitors to proffer a hand (undoubtedly fragrant), or kneel and let their head or trunk be sniffed instead.

Similarly, it is peculiarly human to chastise a dog for greeting a new dog in the neighborhood by smelling his rump. Our distaste for the notion of rump-smelling as a human social practice is irrelevant. For dogs, by all means, the closer the better. Dogs will communicate to each other if they are uninterested in being so intimately examined; interference may agitate one or both of them.

To understand the dog umwelt, then, we must think of objects, people, emotions—even times of day—as having distinctive odors. That we have so few words for smells restricts our imagination of the brambish, brunky diversity that exists. Perhaps, a dog can detect what a poet evokes: the "brilliant smell of water, The brave smell of a stone, The smell of dew and thunder …" (and definitely "… The old bones buried under …"). Probably, not all smells are good smells: as there is visual pollution, so is there olfactory pollution. Definitely, those who see smells must remember in smells, too: when we imagine dogs' dreaming and daydreaming, we should envisage dream images made of scents.

Since I've begun to appreciate Pump's smelly world I sometimes take her out just to sit and sniff. We have smell-walks, stopping at every landmark along our routes in which she shows an interest. She is looking; being outside is the most smelly, wonderful part of her day. I won't cut that short. I even look at photographs of her differently: where she once looked to be pensively staring in the distance, I now think what she's really doing is smelling some new exciting air from a far-flung source.

But I'm happiest of all to receive her greeting sniff of me, prompting her wag of recognition. I nuzzle into the scruff of her neck and sniff her right back.

Mute

Pump sits close to me and quietly pants, gazing at me: she wants something. On our walks she tells me when we've gone far enough and she is ready to go back: she hops up, pivots on her rear legs, then beelines back from where we came. I turn on the bathwater, turn to her with a smile,