“Well I’ll be damned,” said Uncle M. “That’s a talking dog!” We were at the circus. I knew it was a man in a dog suit. But M loved the sight of it for my sake. What was amusing was the influence of the costume. The man inside the dalmatian suit only said things like “roof” and “bark”. I was five years old but I saw costumes could be deleterious.
So now I was dog-man—and the trick was different. I had to understand my canine companion. The first thing was to enter smell world. I needed a comprehension of smells because they mattered so much to her. I didn’t want to be one of those Puritan dog owners embarrassed by his dog’s nose.
Stanley Coren writes of the dog’s nuanced capacities when it comes to smell:
“Dogs work more actively than humans to gather scents. They don’t let them casually drift into the nose but rather gather them from the environment by using certain abilities and structures that humans don’t have. To begin with, dogs can move or wiggle their nostrils independently, which helps them determine the direction a scent is coming from. Dogs also have a special sniffing ability that is quite different from their normal breathing. When your dog pushes its nose in the direction of a scent, he is actively interrupting his normal breathing process. As he sniffs, the scent-containing air first passes over a bony shelflike structure in the nasal cavity that is designed to trap the odor-containing air and protect it from being washed out when the dog exhales. This allows the scent molecules to remain in the nose and accumulate. When the dog breathes normally, or pants, the air goes through the nasal passages below the shelf and continues on down to the lungs. Sniffing, however, briefly stores the air in the upper chambers of the nose so its contents can be interpreted.”
Armed with this information I stood on a street corner with Corky and pushed my nose in the direction of the park. Of course I couldn’t smell a thing. Corky’s head was up. She was scenting something far away, something dead, a rabbit in leaves or a lost shoe. I pinched my left nostril to see if a mono-effect would make a difference. Maybe I’d smell something atavistic with half my nose. Nothing. People walked by. I was playing with my nose. I looked like the king of irrelevancies. Sniff sniff. Was that the thawing snow I was smelling? Yes. I could smell the sweet and evanescent thaw.
But Corky had a hundred scent molecules in storage per inhalation compared to my five. She could smell soft and homely odors—literally smell the crows’ wings from the wire above. I suspected she could smell random movements. She could smell whether the crow was going to stay or go.
Planet of the Blind 