DOES LIFE SMELL?

Penny Lane having a bad hair day

© Darius A Irani, 2023

AND OTHER STRANGE QUESTIONS!

In the wild, many species spend their entire lives in tight knit groups and stay within well-defined territories. Within this space their group teaches them what food to eat, and how to find it. They also learn where to find water and shelter. Even animals that migrate over long distances usually follow the same path and the young learn by copying the elders who have done the journey before. None of this education is available to a domesticated dog. It barely gets to open its eyes before it is snatched away from its mother’s nurturing bosom and shipped off to a human family who could be hundreds of miles away for all it knows. Nothing prepares it for the sights, sounds and smells it will encounter in its new home. Yet, the dog adapts. Most importantly, it knows what it should and should not eat in a world full of alien smells. How does it know this? We believe that a dog’s primary interface with its environment is its sense of smell, and have devoted much research to the mechanics of smell. We can estimate that a dog’s sense of smell is thousands of times better than ours, but do we know what it is that they smell? And, can their noses detect something other than just chemical compounds?

Penny Lane is a Shihtweiler, a little girl with a big identity crisis. She is convinced that she is a 90 pound Rottweiler cleverly disguised to look like a nine pound Shih Tsu. Her attitude to the world around her is consistent with this grand delusion: if it moves attack it; if it is alive kill it; if it smells good eat it; if bored because nothing is moving, take a nap. Things are bound to be more interesting when she wakes up.

Last fall a leaf happened to be drifting across the back yard. To most dogs, motion is synonymous with life and prey, so Penny took off full tilt and pounced on it. What happened next was interesting. She took one sniff, realized it was not alive and immediately lost interest in it. On a typical walk she encounters millions of such leaves - same size, same shape and same color - and pays no attention to them. So it was clearly the motion of this leaf that launched the attack. How was it that with a single sniff she was able to decide that the leaf was not alive? Here is where it gets interesting. One cannot make a decision based on a single piece of data. To make a decision one needs at least two bits of information. So what was the second bit of information in her brain? Something that told her that ‘life’ had some property X and the leaf did not have this property so leave it and move on!

One possibility is that her chestnut sized brain contains a complete data base of the smell of every living creature she might ever encounter, so she can compare and discard as necessary. However, to have inherited such a list in her genes would require that her ancestors had, at some point, collectively encountered the smells of every living creature and stored them away for future generations to use - extremely unlikely. Another possibility is that all living creatures have a generic smell that identifies them as animate and vital, begging the question “Does Life Smell?”

On the other hand, it might not even be a smell that she was sensing? Basic Physics provides a very plausible proof that all moving creatures are surrounded by an electro magnetic field. Their “Aura,” or Chi/Ki in the Chinese and Japanese traditions respectively. Good Reiki practitioners can routinely connect and channel an individual’s Ki. What if dogs can also sense this Ki and use it to determine if something is alive or not? We could go even further and speculate that a universal force like Nature can also tap into this Ki to know where we are and whether we are alive or dead!

Sadly, although such a theory explains some of the phenomena, it still leaves many questions answered. For example, what happens to a chicken’s Ki after it has been killed and then boiled in water. To Penny, this is a scrumptious treat - why? What is she sensing that makes it palatable? What about processed foods like cookies which were never alive? What tells her that it is ok to eat them? Some experts argue that most dogs just grab at everything and worry about sorting it out later. Even if this were so, it merely pushes the decision from a very sensitive nose to a much less sensitive mouth. Moreover, in all the time I have known her, Penny has NEVER allowed anything to enter her mouth before first smelling it and satisfying herself that it is edible. Clearly, there is a lot left for us to understand about canine behavior and how they interact with the world around them.