Book Club: “Being A Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell” by Alexandra Horowitz

The author of Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell is in charge of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College.

First, can we just stop to appreciate that there is an entire laboratory devoted to dogs’ acquisition of “knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses” (otherwise known as ‘cognition’)? I’m getting a mental image of rows of dogs writing essays on “The Early History of Tail Docking” or “Cats: Friend or Foe?” Do they hire tutors to prepare them for the DATs (Dog Aptitude Test)?

Ms Horowitz also wrote Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. Why she thought that how dogs experience the world through smell should be a book all on its own, is somewhat of a mystery.

While the book is well written (humorous even) I didn’t find it compelling. But then it’s a difficult subject; narrow and hard to explain.

Trying to describe how someone else experiences the sense of smell is almost impossible. Even a specific aroma is notoriously difficult to describe, although very evocative. Proust famously used the smell of freshly baked madeleines as a jumping off point for writing seven books totally over 3,000 pages, featuring more than 2,000 characters.

All to tell us that life is meaningless.

How did he reach that conclusion when he started with warm, delicious cookies?

Cookies themselves make my life worth living.

The book does contain some fascinating facts about dogs and their sense of smell.

Dogs’ sense of smell is accepted as evidence by courts in some countries. The procedures for the dogs’ testimony vary from country to country. In The Netherlands, Germany and Poland for example, dogs don’t sniff the accused in a lineup. Instead, the accused is made to handle a metal bar. Other (non-accused) people do the same. The bars are placed in random order before the sniffer dog, who has already visited the crime scene to pick up scents there. The sniffer dog picks out the bar which has the same scents as those he sniffed at the scene. If he picks the same bar the accused put his scent on, then it’s welcome to The Big House for the accused. It’s like a line up for the nose, rather than the eyes.

Ms Horowitz also describes at length an experiment designed to see if dogs have self-recognition. The ‘mirror test’ is performed by marking an animal’s face with a sticker or an ‘x’ over an eye for example. If the animal sees something different about their face in the mirror and then touches the corresponding mark on their own face, it shows that they realize it is them in the mirror.

Primates, elephants and dolphins recognize themselves in a mirror. Dogs don’t.

Max here is convinced he’s seeing another dog. Put a sticker on his face, mark an ‘x’ under his eye, write his name in neon. Won’t matter.

She doesn’t explain just how dolphins touch their own faces.

Also, dolphins are self groomers? How exactly does that work in an environment that is always wet? This whole dolphin mirror test thing perplexes me.

Our author theorises that dogs fail the mirror test because dogs are not self-groomers, and therefore aren’t concerned with maintaining their appearance. Dogs are not self-groomers? Then why are they always licking their crotches?

Don’t answer that.

Instead, she has proven that dogs recognize themselves and others by smell. Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “Duh. Any dog owner knows this.” But the test she devised to prove it is interesting. She collected urine from dogs and gave them to a variety of dogs to smell. Each dog peed on other dogs’ containers, but never on their own.

She then added a different smell to the sample to create a “revised scent image” of the dog’s own urine.

She used diseased tissue from a dead dog to create the revised sample.

My oh my, the things they get up to in the friendly neighbourhood Dog Cognition Lab. I won’t be applying for a job there any time soon.

Each of the dogs reacted to the altered scent samples more strongly than to the au naturel pee samples of other dogs. They scratched and licked at the container. This time they peed on their own ‘revised’ urine sample. They turned back to their owners “with looks of despair or excitement”.

Six pages to describe this. The dogs weren’t the only ones who found this freak show exciting.

Mostly though, I found that the book spent too much time on such mundane observations as that each time a dog walks around the same block, the things she smells have changed, so it’s a new world every time, or lengthy technical descriptions of the physical properties of the dog’s nose.

My verdict? It’s worth a skim through, but it’s not one you will need to re-read.