Dogs do not just detect odors better than we can. This sniffing “gaze” also gives them a very different experience of the world than our visual one gives us. One of Horowitz’s most startling insights, for me, was how even a dog’s sense of time differs from ours. For dogs, “smell tells time,” she writes. “Perspective, scale and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction — but olfaction is fleeting. . . . Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed.” While we mainly look at the present, the dog’s “olfactory window” onto the present is wider than our visual window, “including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.”
Read all the review here. I'd love to know what the dogs know, just for a few minutes.
4 comments:
I read that whole review and found it very interesting, and also loved the language used to describe the dog's "umwelt." In my younger days, I had this romantic notion that stories blew in on the wind, but in the case of dogs, it seems to be true. And that whole part about dogs and time brought back my trying to understand Heidegger in college! Oh, and I loved the part about dogs looking into our eyes to try to see our "umwelts." I guess they know secrets about us that we'll never ever know about.
Like one of those Venn-Euler diagrams, our worlds, dog and human, overlap for some unknown area. In that space we all seem to understand one another pretty well. I read somewhere that dogs can sort out dozens of smells at once, so they might smell beef and red wine and thyme and bay leaf and garlic and onion and carrot all separately and individually from that smell of cooking stew. Not to mention hearing; my goofy blue dog knows the sound of a sardine can popping open, and the beloved gone-but-not-forgotten dog would come running from two rooms away to the sound of a bread knife cutting through the crust of a baguette [she loved French bread].
I had a cat that could tell the difference from a yard (as in the neighbors yard) away whether I was opening a can of beans versus a can of tuna..........however, I'd be really happy if my dog, having the forward looking ability, would give me a hint of my employment prospects.........
Is surfer dude a job description?
Post a Comment