New Years Eve sniffing dog.
A charming subset of cozy mysteries feature pets with magical powers. Truth is, dogs and cats don’t need an ounce of magic to do what they do. They are descended from a long line of predators whose only job was to track, kill, and eat prey. To perform that job on a daily basis, they were granted skills by nature that allowed them to carry out that task unerringly.
They needed to see in the dark. They needed to spot movement. They needed to hear over long distances. They needed a strong sense of smell. They needed speed and agility to reach that prey. And fangs and claws sharp enough to get the job done. Wolves hunt in packs. Cats were solitary hunters, which made sense since their prey was often too small to share.
By comparison, our ancestors evolved standing in trees, reaching for fruits and leaves. They’d grab something, and if the light was good they could determine if it was good to eat. To do that one innocuous task, those primates needed the following: to be able to stand upright; thumbs; soft, tactile fingertips to judge their meal’s tenderness; eyes that could judge color and ripeness at close quarters. In time, those nimble fingers were handy to make tools, and the focal length of those eyes helped them assess the facial expressions of loved ones and enemies.
If you’ve ever tossed a treat to your dog, you have had ample opportunity to assess the differences in our two species. When the dried liver hits the kitchen floor, the dog sniffs around for it until she locates and snarfs it. The whole time this is happening, you stand on the sidelines, rolling your eyes.
“It’s right in front of your face!” you say.
It is, but dogs don’t see well up close.
Beholding this, we humans feel smug.
Great Dane / Poodle mix.
Bred to retrieve, um, bears in bodies of water while looking poofy?
Yet when the sun goes down, our ability to see color—or anything, for that matter—declines. We’re useless and must retreat to a campfire or a well-lit room. If we didn’t do this 60,000 years ago, we would be just a delicious hunk of protoplasm wandering aimlessly in the dark.
At night, the dog’s vision doesn’t change much from its daytime vision. The common rap on them is that they’re color blind, but that’s not strictly true. The ability to see color varies breed to breed. They can see some colors; they just don’t need color to survive. Their ancestors hunted primarily at dawn and dusk. (They were—SAT word alert!—crepuscular.)
Bred to point birds.
Now: Bacon sniffing dog.
Dogs hear things up to four times farther away than human ears can. Their peripheral vision is optimized for long-distance movement, and they see parts of the light spectrum that we cannot bother with.
Every sense they have is exceedingly useful in low-light conditions. They spy something moving, they smell something alien or tasty, they hear footfalls—and they’re off. Thank goodness for backyard fences.
Until very recently, dogs thought you and I had bad taste in nighttime entertainment. When humans watched movies on analog TV sets, all those little frames of film moved so fast that our eyes—which, mind you, move at the speed of low-hanging fruit—perceived them as moving images. Dogs didn’t see that. On cathode ray tube TVs, dogs saw one image that never moved. Occasionally, the picture flickered annoyingly.
Then digital TVs were invented, and suddenly dogs could actually glimpse what we were gawping at. Modern nature documentaries often evoke a response in dogs, probably because they’re hearing a rich soundtrack aligned with the image of moving animals. Your dog’s favorite thing to watch on TV? Big shock: other dogs.
Former military dog.
Now: Enjoys serene mountain views.
In my previous August-Dog-Days post, I talked about how good their noses are.
They know when you’re about to walk in the door after a long day at work. Can they tell time? No—they know that your scent has declined in the house for eight hours, and you always walk in when your scent level has reached about 15 percent. Oh—and by long association they can tell the difference between the sound of your car engine and everyone else’s on your block.
They know when it’s bedtime because they can feel and smell the temperature dropping in the walls of your house.
If you walked in on a chef making beef stew, your sad excuse for a nose would perceive the simmering dish as a whole. “Oh,” you might say, “you’re making boeuf bourguignon.” Ever watch the Food Network? Even professional chefs have trouble identifying all the ingredients in a complex dish they have tasted. Their failure rate goes up if you blindfold them.
Rover walks in the kitchen and thinks, “How delightful! I smell (cooked) beef, onions, carrots, celery, red wine, all in fragrant abundance! Oh—and is that a bay leaf? When are we eating?”
In other words, dog noses are precise enough to detect each scent independent of others. They’re not thrown off if one ingredient has been combined with something else.
Which is why they are so useful when issued a gold shield.
 |
| Bred to burrow into tunnels and kill badgers. Now: enjoys traveling in large purses. |
It matters not a whit that the perp packed fifty kilos of cocaine in a giant crate of coffee. A police dog smells both scents equally well.
Trainers have tried to obscure the scents of various explosives by dousing them with perfume, swaddling them with dirty socks or—gag—dirty baby diapers. K-9 cops, God bless them, smell right through all that crap.
Drug-sniffing dogs routinely locate waterproof bags of drugs in the gas tanks of vehicles where smugglers cleverly thought they could cache them. Surely, that noxious smell of gas would “throw off” the dogs, the smugglers thought. Yeah, no.
It’s true canines don’t like the smell of citrus fruits or citronella, but that won’t stop them from doing the job they were trained to do.
When asked to ID a suspect in a traditional lineup, humans—using their primate-endowed visual gift for assessing, ahem, fruit and enemies—pick out the perp with a fifty-five percent (or less) accuracy. A dog who has been allowed to sniff around the crime scene can sniff out the suspect who fled from that site with 80 percent accuracy. If they fail, it’s probably for the prosaic reason that, in the aggregate, we humans stink alike.
Terra = earth, hence terrier.
Now: A hit at all the coffee bars.
Those are the breeds used for search-and-rescue work. Cadaver dogs, trained to detect decomposing human flesh, can do their job even when the murderer has weighed down the remains and dumped them in a body of water. When a killer finally confesses to the crime but can’t quite remember exactly where he buried the remains, cadaver dogs point the way. In some cases, cadaver dogs have located remains long entombed, Poe-style, in the cavities of walls.
Besides Dr. Stanley Coren, the psychologist whose books I have consulted to write these two August posts, I have also enjoyed the work of Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, whose dog books routinely hit the bestseller lists. She works at her own dog cognition lab in New York City. In one of her books she observes that researchers know more about lab mice, rats, guinea pigs, and even rabbits than they do about canines, who are the second-most employed species on the planet. This probably has something to do with the complexities and costs of rearing and studying large animals in labs.
That said, besides K-9 patrol dogs and the specialist animals I’ve mentioned, there are protection dogs, seeing-eye dogs, therapy dogs, and emotional support animals. Those are the givens most people would be able to rattle off.
But there are so many others.
Autism service dogs are trained to help autistic individuals, often children, stay safe in their homes and schools, blocking them, say, if they are about to do something that would harm themselves.
Mobility service dogs help disabled folks open kitchen cabinets, pick up dropped items, turn switches on and off in the home, and perform other essential work.
Seizure response dogs have been trained to bark for help, press “lifeline” buttons to summon assistance, or retrieve a phone when their owner experiences a seizure.
Seizure alert dogs, by contrast, have been trained to anticipate when a seizure is about to happen, alerting their owner to take medication.
Conservation protection dogs protect game on wildlife preserves and assist in spotting poachers.
Arson-sniffing dogs have been trained to detect the remains of flammable liquids and other compounds used to torch a property. Even though accelerants have a tendency to evaporate, a dog can smell it for at least 18 days later, which is usually long enough for the damaged site to be stabilized and permit entry and a careful, walk-through inspection.
Natural gas-sniffing dogs are trained to detect gas leaks in pipelines.
Termite-sniffing dogs do a better job of finding infestations than human pest control experts.
Gypsy moth-sniffing dogs root out nests of these pests that could potentially decimate nursery plant stock or forests.
Beehive-sniffing dogs root out the weird diseases and pests that can infect and destroy bee populations.
Mold and mildew-sniffing dogs pinpoint the locations of growths that are making people sick in a home or apartment complexes.
In hospital and lab settings, dogs have detected prostate cancer from urine samples and tuberculosis from slides containing human saliva.
No doubt they could do so much more, but using these marvelous creatures to perform such highly specific work always collides with an unavoidable triple whammy. They’re expensive to train, expensive to buy and keep once trained, and their lives are brutally short. A trained K-9 might well cost an agency $50,000 before its new owners buy it a bowl of kibble. For kicks, I priced out body armor vests for dogs—$1,049 to $1,200 pop. That’s before you spring for the protective doggie eye goggles, protective ear muffs, and rappelling gear. (Well, you have to use something to lower a search-and-rescue dog into a canyon to rescue those foolish hikers who always go missing, don’t you?)
For a while there, I dug deep into the world of mystery writers who feature K-9 cops their books. Some have online stores where you can buy bundles of their books along with dog-themed merch for fans and their animals alike. I have listened to podcasts with these authors, and even enjoyed mysteries where entire scenes were written from the dog’s point of view.
Hands down, dogs are the best people. They enrich our lives and we simply don’t deserve them. And that is why I believe the smartest thing a writer of crime fiction can do is stick a picture of a cat on the cover of their books. Trust me—the dogs in your life will still love you.
* * *
Most of the factoids in this piece came from:
Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, by Alexandra Horowitz.
See you in three weeks, when we return to everyone’s favorite species—humans!
Joe
Dogs are amazing creatures. Thank you for celebrating them!
ReplyDeleteWoof! I mean, you are welcome!
DeleteSometimes dogs' skills fail as a result of human incomprehension. A relative of mine whose vision is severely impaired and who lives with a guide dog was locked out on their balcony for hours. The dog barked to call for help, as it was trained to do, but the super was afraid to enter the apartment—because the dog was barking.
ReplyDeleteThat is an absolutely delightful, ironic story, but only from the POV of a writer.
DeleteJoseph, I am a long-time fan of Stanley Coren - thanks for this great summary!
ReplyDeleteIt's a great book. (He's written so many.) But there's one chapter that discusses those cases when people (and scientists) insist that dog have psychic abilities. It can't be summarized easily but he debunks some stuff and throws his hands up at other stuff. We don't know how animals, not just dogs, know what they know. Ultimately, it comes down to they jacked into nature in ways we no longer are, and have coping mechanisms for dealing with it in ways we have long lost. Worth checking out.
Delete