Inside Of A Dog Part 4

THE VOMERONASAL NOSE.

What specificity of image the name "vomeronasal" conjures up! Evoking the displeasure of getting a good sniff of fresh vomit, the "vomer" is actually a description of the part of the small bone in the nose where the sensory cells sit. Still, the name seems somehow fitting for an animal that is notorious for coprophagia (feces eating) and that may lick another dog's urine off the ground. Neither act is vomitous for dogs; it's just a way of getting even more information about other dogs or animals in the area. The vomeronasal organ, first discovered in reptiles, is a specialized sac above the mouth or in the nose covered with more receptor sites for molecules. Reptiles use it to find their way, to find food, and to find mates. The lizard who darts out its tongue to touch an unknown object is not tasting or sniffing; it is drawing chemical information toward its vomeronasal organ.

These chemicals are pheromones: hormonelike substances released by one animal and perceived by another of the same species, and usually prompting a specific reaction-such as readying oneself for s.e.x-or even changing hormonal levels. There is some evidence that humans unconsciously perceive pheromones, perhaps even through a nasal vomeronasal organ.*

Dogs definitely have a vomeronasal organ: it sits above the roof (hard palate) of the mouth, along the floor of the nose (nasal septum). Unlike in other animals, the receptor sites are covered in cilia, tiny hairs encouraging these molecules along. Pheromones are often carried in a fluid: urine, in particular, is a great medium for one animal to send personalized information to members of the opposite s.e.x about, say, one's eagerness to mate. To detect the pheromones in that urine some mammals touch the liquid and do a distinctive, mortifying, lip-curling grimace called flehmen. flehmen. The face of a flehmening animal is notably unlovable-but it is the face of an animal who is on the hunt for a lover. The flehmen pose seems to hurtle the fluid toward the animal's vomeronasal organ, where it is pumped into the tissue, or is absorbed through capillary action. Rhinos, elephants, and other ungulates flehmen regularly; so do bats and cats, which have their own species variations. Humans may have vomeronasal organs, but we do not flehmen. Neither do dogs. But a regular observer of dogs will notice an often very intense interest in the urine of other dogs-sometimes an interest which lures them right ... up ... into ... wait, gross! Stop licking that! Dogs may lightly lap up urine, especially urine of a female in heat. This could be their version of flehmen. The face of a flehmening animal is notably unlovable-but it is the face of an animal who is on the hunt for a lover. The flehmen pose seems to hurtle the fluid toward the animal's vomeronasal organ, where it is pumped into the tissue, or is absorbed through capillary action. Rhinos, elephants, and other ungulates flehmen regularly; so do bats and cats, which have their own species variations. Humans may have vomeronasal organs, but we do not flehmen. Neither do dogs. But a regular observer of dogs will notice an often very intense interest in the urine of other dogs-sometimes an interest which lures them right ... up ... into ... wait, gross! Stop licking that! Dogs may lightly lap up urine, especially urine of a female in heat. This could be their version of flehmen.

Even better than flehmen is keeping the outside of the nose nice and moist. The vomeronasal organ is probably why a dog's nose is wet. Most animals with vomeronasal organs have wet noses, too. It is difficult for an airborne odor to land squarely on the vomeronasal organ, since it is situated in a safe, dark interior recess of the face. A hearty sniff not only brings molecules into the dog's nasal cavity; little molecular bits also stick onto the moist exterior tissue of the nose. Once there, they can dissolve and travel to the vomeronasal organ through interior ducts. When your dog nuzzles against you, he is actually collecting your odor on his nose: better to confirm that you're you. In this way, dogs double their methods of smelling the world.

THE BRAVE SMELL OF A STONE.

When Pump got her nose into a good smell in the gra.s.s-when she really dug her nose deeply into the earth-I came to know what was going to happen next. She'd hop around, resniff the smell from different angles, then take a tentative swipe at it, upending a dollop of turf. More deep sniffing, some licking, smus.h.i.+ng her nose into the ground-and then the climax: an unrestrained dive into the smell, nose first, throwing her whole body down after it, and wriggling madly back and forth.

What, then, do these noses enable the dog to smell? What does the world look like from the vantage of a nose? Let's start with the easy stuff for them: what they smell of us and of each other. Then we might be ready to challenge them to smell time, the history of a river stone, and the approach of a thunderstorm.

The smelly ape

Humans stink. The human armpit is one of the most profound sources of odor produced by any animal; our breath is a confusing melody of smells; our genitals reek. The organ that covers our body-our skin-is itself covered in sweat and sebaceous glands, which are regularly churning out fluid and oils holding our particular brand of scent. When we touch objects, we leave a bit of ourselves on it: a slough of skin, with its clutch of bacteria steadily munching and excreting away. This is our smell, our signature odor. If the object is porous-a soft slipper, say-and we spend a lot of time touching it-putting a foot in it, clutching it, carrying it under an arm-it becomes an extension of ourselves for a creature of the nose. For my dog, my slipper is a part of me. The slipper may not look to us like an object that would be terribly interesting to a dog, but anyone who has returned home to find a ravaged slipper, or who has been tracked by the scent they've left thereon, knows otherwise.

We needn't even touch objects for them to smell of us: as we move, we leave behind a trail of skin cells. The air is perfumed with our constant dehumidifying sweat. Added to this, we wear in odor what we've eaten today, whom we've kissed, what we've brushed against. Whatever cologne we put on merely adds to the cacophony. On top of this, our urine, traveling down from the kidneys, catches odorous notes from other organs and glands: the adrenal glands, the renal tubes, and potentially the s.e.x organs. The trace of this concoction on our bodies and our clothes provides more uniquely specific information about us. As a result, dogs find it incredibly easy to distinguish us by scent alone. Trained dogs can tell identical twins apart by scent. And our aroma remains even when we've left, hence the "magical" powers of tracking dogs. These skilled sniffers see us in the cloud of molecules we leave behind.

To dogs, we are are our scent. In some ways, olfactory recognition of people is quite similar to our own visual recognition of people: there are multiple components of the image responsible for how we look. A different haircut or a newly bespectacled face can, at least momentarily, mislead us as to the ident.i.ty of the person standing before us. I can be surprised what even a close friend looks like from a different vantage or from a distance. So too must the olfactory image we embody be different in different contexts. The mere arrival of my (human) friend at the dog park is enough to set me smiling; it takes another beat before my dog notices her own friend. And odors are subject to decay and dispersal that light is not: a smell from a nearby object may not reach you if a breeze carries it in the other direction, and the strength of an odor diminishes over time. Unless my friend tries ducking behind a tree, it's hard for her to conceal her visual image from me: a wind won't conceal her. But it might conceal her from a dog momentarily. our scent. In some ways, olfactory recognition of people is quite similar to our own visual recognition of people: there are multiple components of the image responsible for how we look. A different haircut or a newly bespectacled face can, at least momentarily, mislead us as to the ident.i.ty of the person standing before us. I can be surprised what even a close friend looks like from a different vantage or from a distance. So too must the olfactory image we embody be different in different contexts. The mere arrival of my (human) friend at the dog park is enough to set me smiling; it takes another beat before my dog notices her own friend. And odors are subject to decay and dispersal that light is not: a smell from a nearby object may not reach you if a breeze carries it in the other direction, and the strength of an odor diminishes over time. Unless my friend tries ducking behind a tree, it's hard for her to conceal her visual image from me: a wind won't conceal her. But it might conceal her from a dog momentarily.

When we return home at a day's end, dogs typically greet our c.o.c.ktail of stink promptly and lovingly. Should we come home after having bathed in unfamiliar perfume or wearing someone else's clothes, we might expect a moment of puzzlement-it is no longer "us"-but our natural effusion will soon give us away. Dogs are not alone among animals in seeing in scent. Sharks have been seen to follow the same zigzaggy path through water that an injured fish took some time before: through not just its blood but also its hormones, the fish has left a bit of itself behind. But dogs are unique in being encouraged and trained by people to use scent to follow someone who is visually long gone.

Bloodhounds are one of the supersmellers among dogs. Not only do they have more nose tissue-more nose nose-but many features of their body seem to conspire to enable them to smell extra strongly. Their ears are terrifically long, but not to enable better hearing, as they fall close to the head. Instead a slight swing of the head sets these ears in motion, fanning up more scented air for the nose to catch. Their constant stream of drool is a perfect design to gather extra liquids up to the vomeronasal organ for examination. Ba.s.set hounds, thought to be bred from bloodhounds, go one step further: with their foreshortened legs, the whole head is already at ground-scent-level.

These hounds smell well naturally. Through training-rewarding them for attending to certain scents and ignoring others-they are easily able to follow a scent left by someone one or many days before, and can even specify where two individuals parted ways. It doesn't take very much of our odor: some researchers tested dogs using five thoroughly cleaned gla.s.s slides, to one of which a single fingerprint was added. The slides were put away for a few hours or up to three weeks. Dogs then got to examine the array of slides, and tried to choose the human slide: they were rewarded with a treat if they guessed correctly, which is sufficient motivation for them to stand and sniff at gla.s.s slides. One dog was correct on all but six of one hundred trials. When the slides were then placed outside on the building roof for a week, exposed over the course of the seven days to direct sun, rain, and all manner of blowing debris, the same dog was still correct on almost half the trials-well above chance.

They track not just by noticing odors, but by noticing very small changes in odor. Each of our footsteps will have more or less the same amount of our scent in it. In theory, then, if I saturate the ground with my scent, by running chaotically to and fro, a dog who tracks by noticing that smell won't be able to tell my path-only that I've definitely been there. But trained dogs don't just notice a smell. They notice the change in a smell over time. The concentration of an odor left on the ground by, say, a running footprint, diminishes with every second that pa.s.ses. In just two seconds, a runner may have made four or five footprints: enough for a trained tracker to tell the direction that he ran based just on the differences in the odor emanating from the first and fifth print. The track you left as you exited the room has more smell in it than the one right before it; thus your path is reconstructed. Scent marks time.

Conveniently, instead of becoming inured to smells over time, as we do, the vomeronasal organ and the dog nose may regularly swap roles, to keep the scent fresh. It is this ability that is exploited when training rescue dogs, who must orient themselves to the odor of someone who has disappeared. Similarly, scenting dogs who trail a criminal suspect are trained to follow what is delicately called our "personal odor generation": our natural, regular, and entirely involuntary butyric acid production. This is easy for them, and they can then extend this skill to smelling other fatty acids, too. Unless you are wearing a body suit made entirely of scentproof plastic, a hound can find you.

You showed fear

Even those of us who are not fleeing a crime scene, or in need of rescue, have a reason not to underestimate just how good a sniffer the dog is. Not only can dogs identify individuals by odor, they can also identify characteristics characteristics of the individual. A dog knows if you've had s.e.x, smoked a cigarette (done both these things in succession), just had a snack, or just run a mile. This may seem benign: except, perhaps, for the snack, these facts about you might not be of particular interest to a dog. But they can also smell your emotions. of the individual. A dog knows if you've had s.e.x, smoked a cigarette (done both these things in succession), just had a snack, or just run a mile. This may seem benign: except, perhaps, for the snack, these facts about you might not be of particular interest to a dog. But they can also smell your emotions.

Generations of schoolchildren have been admonished to "never show fear" to a strange dog.* It is likely that dogs do smell fear, as well as anxiety and sadness. Mystical abilities need not be invoked to account for this: fear smells. smells. Researchers have identified many social animals, from bees to deer, who can detect pheromones emitted when one animal is alarmed, and who react by taking action to get to safety. Pheromones are produced involuntarily and unconsciously, and through different means: damaged skin may provoke release of them, and there are specialized glands that release chemicals of alarm. In addition, the very feeling of alarm, fear, and every other emotion correlates with physiological changes, from changes in heart rate and breathing rate, to sweating and metabolic changes. Polygraph machines work (to the extent that they work at all) by measuring changes in these autonomic bodily responses; one might say that animals' noses "work" by being sensitive to them as well. Laboratory experiments using rats confirm this: when one rat is given a shock in a cage, and learns to be fearful of the cage, other rats nearby pick up on the shocked rat's fear-even without seeing the rat being shocked-and themselves avoid the cage, which was otherwise not distinguishable from nearby cages. Researchers have identified many social animals, from bees to deer, who can detect pheromones emitted when one animal is alarmed, and who react by taking action to get to safety. Pheromones are produced involuntarily and unconsciously, and through different means: damaged skin may provoke release of them, and there are specialized glands that release chemicals of alarm. In addition, the very feeling of alarm, fear, and every other emotion correlates with physiological changes, from changes in heart rate and breathing rate, to sweating and metabolic changes. Polygraph machines work (to the extent that they work at all) by measuring changes in these autonomic bodily responses; one might say that animals' noses "work" by being sensitive to them as well. Laboratory experiments using rats confirm this: when one rat is given a shock in a cage, and learns to be fearful of the cage, other rats nearby pick up on the shocked rat's fear-even without seeing the rat being shocked-and themselves avoid the cage, which was otherwise not distinguishable from nearby cages.

How does that strange, menacing-looking dog smell our apprehension or fear as he approaches us? We spontaneously sweat under stress, and our perspiration carries a note of our odor on it: that's the first clue to the dog. Adrenaline, used by the body to gear up for a good sprint away from something dangerous, is unscented to us, but not to the sensitive sniffer of the dog: another hint. Even the simple act of increased blood flow brings chemicals more quickly to the surface of the body, where they can be diffused through the skin. Given that we emit odors that reflect these physiological changes accompanying fear, and given the budding evidence of pheromones in humans, chances are that if we've got the heebie-jeebies, a dog can tell. And as we'll see later, dogs are skilled readers of our behavior. We can sometimes see fear in other people in their facial expressions; there is sufficient information in our posture and gait for a dog to see it, too.

In these ways, the fleeing criminal being tracked by dogs is doubly doomed. Dogs can be trained to track based not just on pursuit of a specific person's odor, but also based on a certain kind of odor: the most recent odor of a human in the vicinity (good for finding someone's hiding place), or a human in emotional distress-fearful (as one running from the cops might be), angry, even annoyed.

The smell of disease

If dogs can detect trace amounts of chemicals we leave behind on a doork.n.o.b, or in a footprint, might they be able to detect chemicals indicating disease? If you're lucky, when you come down with a disease difficult to diagnose, you'll have a doctor who recognizes, as some have, that a distinctive smell of freshly baked bread about you is due to typhoid fever, or that a stale, sour scent is due to tuberculosis being exhaled from your lungs. According to many doctors, they have come to notice a distinctive smell to various infections, or even to diabetes, cancer, or schizophrenia. These experts come unequipped with the dog's nose-but more equipped to identify disease. Still, a few small-scale experiments indicate that you might get an even more refined diagnosis if you make an appointment with a well-trained dog.

Researchers have begun training dogs to recognize the chemical smells produced by cancerous, unhealthy tissues. The training is simple: the dogs were rewarded when they sat or lay down next to the smells; they weren't rewarded when they didn't. Then the scientists collected the smells of cancer patients and patients without cancer, in small urine samples or by having them breathe into tubes able to catch exhaled molecules. Although the numbers of trained dogs are small, the results were big: the dogs could detect which of the patients had cancer. In one study, they only missed on 14 out of 1,272 attempts. In another small study with two dogs, they sniffed out a melanoma nearly every time. The latest studies show trained dogs can detect cancers of the skin, breast, bladder, and lungs at high rates.

Does this mean your dog will let you know when a small tumor develops in you? Probably not. What it indicates is that dogs are able able to do so. You might smell different to them, but your changing smell might be gradual. Both you and your dog would need training: the dog to pay attention to the smell, you to pay attention to behaviors indicating your dog has found something.* to do so. You might smell different to them, but your changing smell might be gradual. Both you and your dog would need training: the dog to pay attention to the smell, you to pay attention to behaviors indicating your dog has found something.*

The smell of a dog

Since odor is so conspicuous to a dog, it gets great use socially. While we humans leave our scents behind inadvertently, dogs are not only advertent, they are profligate with their scents. It is as though dogs, realizing how well the odor of our bodies comes to stand for ourselves (even in our absence), determined to use this to their advantage. All canids-wild and domestic dogs and their relations-leave urine conspicuously splashed on all manner of object. Urine marking, as this method of communication is called, conveys a message-but it is more like note-leaving than a conversation. The message is left by one dog's rear end for retrieval by another's front end. Every dog owner is familiar with the raised-leg marking of fire hydrants, lampposts, trees, bushes, and sometimes the unlucky dog or bystander's pant leg. Most marked spots are high or prominent: better to be seen, and better for the odor in the urine (the pheromones and affiliated chemical stew) to be smelled. Dogs' bladders-sacs that serve no known purpose except as a holding pen for urine-allow for release of just a little urine at a time, allowing them to mark repeatedly and often.

And having left smells in their wake, they also come right up to investigate others' smells. From observations of the behavior of the sniffing dogs, it appears that the chemicals in the urine give information about, for females, s.e.xual readiness, and for males, their social confidence. The prevailing myth is that the message is "this is mine": that dogs urinate to "mark territory." This idea was introduced by the great early-twentieth-century ethologist Konrad Lorenz. He formed a reasonable hypothesis: urine is the dog's colonial flag, planted where one claims owners.h.i.+p. But research in the fifty years since he proposed that theory has failed to bear that out as the exclusive, or even predominant, use of urine marking.

Research on free-ranging dogs in India, for instance, showed how dogs behave when left entirely to their own devices. Both s.e.xes marked, but only 20 percent of the markings were "territorial"-on a boundary of a territory. Marking changed by seasons, and happened more often when courting or when scavenging. The "territory" notion is also belied by the simple fact that few dogs urinate around the interior corners of the house or apartment where they live. Instead, marking seems to leave information about who the urinator is, how often he walks by this spot in the neighborhood, his recent victories, and his interest in mating. In this way, the invisible pile of scents on the hydrant becomes a community center bulletin board, with old, deteriorating announcements and requests peeking out from underneath more recent posts of activities and successes. Those who visit more frequently wind up being at the top of the heap: a natural hierarchy is thus revealed. But the old messages still get read, and they still have information-one element of which is simply their age.

In the annals of animal urine marking, dogs are not the most impressive players. Hippopotami wave their tails as they spray urine, better to scatter it, sprinklerlike, in all directions. There are rhinoceroses who follow their high-powered urination onto bushes with destruction of the same bushes with horn and hoof-to ensure, presumably, that their urine is spread far and wide. Pity the owner whose dog is the first to discover the spreading-efficiency of high-powered, whirling-sprinkler urination.

Other animals also press their rear ends against the ground to release fecal and other a.n.a.l odors. The mongoose does a handstand and rubs itself against a high perch; some dogs do what gymnastics they can, seemingly deliberately relieving themselves on large rocks and other outcroppings. Although secondary to urine marking, defecation also holds identifying odors-not in the excreta itself but in the chemicals dolloped on top. These come from the pea-sized a.n.a.l sacs, situated right inside the a.n.u.s and holding secretions from nearby glands: extremely foul, dead-fish-in-a-sweatsock kind of secretions with apparently individual-dead-fish-in-individual-sweatsock odors for each individual dog. These a.n.a.l sacs also release involuntarily when a dog is afraid or alarmed. It may be no wonder that so many dogs fright at their veterinarian's office: as part of a routine examination, vets often express (squeeze to release the contents of) the a.n.a.l sacs, which can get impacted and infected. The smell, covered for us by the familiar scent of veterinary antibiotic soaps, must be all over the vets: they reek of epic dog fear.

Finally, if these mephitic calling cards are insufficient, dogs have one other trick in their marking book: they scratch the ground after defecation or urination. Researchers think that this adds new odors to the mix-from the glands on the pads of the feet-but it may also serve as a complementary visual cue leading a dog to the source of the odor for closer examination. On a windy day, dogs may seem friskier, more likely to scratch the ground; they may in fact be leading others to a message that otherwise would waft away.

LEAVES AND GRa.s.s.

Science, out of decorum or disinterest, has not definitively explained Pump's mad wriggling in a funky spot of gra.s.s. 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 s.p.a.ce, a place rid entirely of organic smells would be an impoverished one for dogs. Better to keep the occasional well-worn T-s.h.i.+rt 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 gra.s.s. We deprive dogs of an important part of their ident.i.ty, 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 st.i.tches 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 gra.s.s 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 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. 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; 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. 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.