Best friends, but worlds apart | In Focus

We humans tend to see animal behavior and anthropomorphize them from our perspective—our sensory bubble. This is especially true of dogs, “man’s best friend.”

In actuality, animals perceive their world differently than humans perceive theirs. In 1909 the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Üexkull coined a German word to describe this sensory bubble—Umwelt. The English equivalent of this word is “environment” or perceptual world (all the facts and references described below come from Ed Yong’s An Immense World).

“To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.” Dogs, according to Yong “are in a state of olfactory exploration all the time.”

If you examine a dog’s nose you will see that it is “prominent and moist, with two apostrophe-shaped nostrils curving to the side.” When humans exhale, the odorants or smells are expelled. In some dogs, the smells stick around for about 40 seconds, even though the dog may have exhaled 30 times during that period.

In experiments, dogs have been able to tell identical twins apart by smell. Dogs have “been trained to detect bombs, drugs, landmines, missing people, bodies, smuggled cash, truffles, invasive weeds, agricultural diseases, low blood sugar, bedbugs, oil pipeline leaks and tumors.”

If you have ever taken a dog for a walk or observed someone else do so, you have undoubtedly noticed that “dog owners deny their animals the joy of sniffing. To a dog, a simple walk is an odyssey of olfactory exploration.” Humans walk to exercise or as a way to get from one point to another. Dogs wanting to sniff are seen as an annoyance. This is an example showing that dogs live in a different Umwelt than humans. “Time and again, people impose their values—and their Umwelt—onto their dogs, forcing them to look instead of sniff, dimming their olfactory worlds and suppressing an essential part of their caninehood.”

Those who let their dogs stick their heads out of car windows are allowing their pets to smell the air passing by them. Dogs are entranced by the meandering trails of odor that they are able to smell. It isn’t that dogs like the air movement in their faces. They’re actually enjoying the plethora of smells hitting them in the face. At least one dog could pick up the smell of Orca poop by perching in the bow of a speeding boat.

“Smells travel through darkness, around corners, and in other conditions that vex vision. Dogs can smell into closed bags…. Smells linger in a way that light does not, revealing history….the odorants emitted by humans arriving home can send their dogs running to a door. These skills are sometimes billed as extrasensory, but they are simply sensory. It’s that things often become apparent to the nose before they appear to the eyes…. Animals [including humans] are leaking sacks of chemicals, filling the air with great clouds of odorants.”

When one dog researcher began her study of dogs, she “focused on things like their attitudes to unfairness—the kind of topic that’s interesting to psychologists. But after reading Uexkull and thinking about the Ümwelt concept she shifted her attention to smell—the kind of topic that’s interesting to dogs.”

For this researcher, her conclusion was: “Let dogs be dogs. Appreciate that their Umwelt is different and lean into that difference.”

That seems to be pertinent advice to all dog lovers and owners. “Vive la Difference.”

Ed Yong’s book, An Immense World, only starts with dogs because they are familiar and popular. Yong also deals with animals that possess hundreds of eyes, each seeing their Umwelt differently than us humans. He deals with octopuses whose brains are spread throughout the body. Yong describes the fact that flies can smell with their legs, which explains why they like to land on food.

To read his book is to challenge our egocentrism and humble us. I challenge you to change the bubbles we all live within. Expand your mind by rethinking how you think.

Richard Elfers is a columnist, a former Enumclaw City Council member and a Green River College professor.