Stories for dogs

To me, it appears to be a nondescript sprawl of grass and mud with a few trees. It’s surrounded by a chain link fence and tucked between the a jogging path and a busy road. There are a few fountains just inside the airlock style gates that make it easy to enter with your dog and let him off leash. As dog parks go, it’s nothing special; no water features (unless it’s rained recently, as it had when we went Friday, and then there are big muddy puddles).

To Teddy, it is the most interesting place in the world. This was our third trip, and he was excited before we got into the parking lot. As we came closer, he strained on his leash, even though there were no other dogs there on a cool Friday morning. He stood by the gate, tail wagging, eager to get inside and… sniff.

It surprised me the first time we went. Chasing a ball? Not interesting. The other dog that showed up? Not interesting. (The other dog wasn’t a runner, so just wasn’t that much fun for Teddy.) But the ground? The fence? The trees? Captivating.

As I watched Teddy run around, I started thinking about his nose, and his brain. When we try to imagine what the world looks like to a dog, I think most of us imagine it looking more or less like what we perceive, but with stronger smells. We know that the canine sense of smell is amazing – I’ve read that a dog can smell a few spoonfuls of sugar in a swimming pool. But with our human minds and our tendency to anthropomorphize our pets, we imagine them seeing the world more of less the way we do.

Watching Teddy in the dog park, it occurred to me that this is probably all wrong. For us the world is primarily a visual place. No surprise, as our eyes are our most acute and important sensory organs. Hearing isn’t that far behind, and smells and tastes are evocative and incite powerful emotional reactions in us, but the eyes are the main event.

But given a dog’s amazing sense of smell, perhaps everything is reordered in their minds. They can see and hear and taste and feel, but they can smell in ways we can’t even imagine. That must have an effect on how their brains make sense of the world. And so I tried to imagine Teddy at the park, taking it in as a smell-oriented creature.

That drab patch of grass that dogs run over all day long must be amazing.

For us, smells are an accent, the spice that sets the tone of the scene. For Teddy, I think those scents are the scene. And so that dog park must be filled with a cacophony of dog "voices," telling him stories of what’s gone on: I was here. I ran here. I rolled on this grass. I was afraid. I was happy. I’m a big dog. I have long hair and left some behind. We chased things. We growled. I saw my friend. I wanted to go home.

What depth does it have? With a sense of smell so acute, can a dog tell the difference between the scent of a happy dog and a frightened dog? A healthy dog and a sick dog?

I know there are researchers who study these things, but that’s different than really knowing, and I wondered as I watched him what the world really feels like to Teddy and his sharp nose. Probably something a visually-wired human brain can never quite understand.

Teddy was eventually distracted from it all by the arrival of Carla, a big white poodle who loved to run. The two of them shot off making giant arcs around the park while Carla’s owner and I chatted about dog training. After a while Teddy was tired, Carla and owner had to go, and our morning at the park was done.

As we walked down the path to the parking lot, I imagined the park "sounding" like a receding din to Teddy, a movie still playing behind us, a thousand dog "smell-voices" that now included Teddy’s, playing endlessly on the grass until the next dog arrived to make his contribution. In the car on the way home, Teddy sniffed at his paws, listening to what they told him.