THE NOSE KNOWS

The weather has cooled off.  What a very narrow range of temperature provides sufficient comfort for us to go about our daily activities. How peculiar it is that this little window of life sustaining coolness-to-warmth is generally available on our planet, at least when supplemented by technology.  Today was cool enough to go to the road by the ferry dock, but not to be without shade in other of our favorite places.

I am reading Alexandra Horowitz's Inside of a Dog.
She is a cognitive scientist examining how dogs experience the world.  Not only is it clear to the most casual observer that dogs have a more acute sense of smell than humans, but the degree of difference is staggering:

"Once a smell has been vacuumed in, it finds a receptive welcome from an extravagance of nasal tissue...The tissue of the inside of the nose is entirely blanketed with tiny receptor sites...Human noses have about six million of these sensory receptor sites; beagle noses over six hundred million."  I try to imagine what it would be like to be one hundred times more aware of odors.  Jonathan Swift was evidently much more sensitive to smells than most people, and this fueled his misanthropy.  How amazing it is that dogs like us in spite of how we smell.  Or maybe even because of it.

Horowitz makes the point that not only do dogs have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell, but that to them smelling is believing, the way seeing is believing for humans.  The primary way dogs accumulate experience and assign meanings is by smell.  I watch Amber as she makes all the necessary little decisions about which direction to take while we are walking along the road by the cherry orchard, and it is clearly her nose that is deciding what direction to take, while I make my choices by what I see.