Dogs View World Differently Than Most Humans Think, Best-Selling Author Says

Dog owners know all too well that a walk with their pets will involve countless stops so the dogs can sniff...and sniff...and sniff some more.

Rather than jerk the dog's leash - with the comment "You've smelled there long enough" - dog owners ought to let their pets sniff as much as they want, says Alexandra Horowitz, author of the New York Times' best-selling "Inside of a Dog."

"Maybe you take a half-hour walk and get 35 yards. Who cares?" Horowitz, a professor at Barnard College in New York, told a full house in Fairfield Public Library's Memorial Room Sunday afternoon. "That's his world."

While humans mostly see the world through their eyes, a dog sees the world through his or her nose - and it's a pretty powerful nose too. Horowitz said a dog can detect a teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic-sized swimming pools of water, something she said is off-the-charts for a human to fathom.

Trying to understand a dog's experience and point of view - what it might be like to be a dog - begins with the nose, Horowitz said.

"The dog is the nose...Their sense of smell is so much more acute than ours. That's their main way of seeing the world," Horowitz said. She said dogs have more and different kinds of receptors in their noses than humans, as well as "a second nose" that detects pheromones, or hormones.

"When we're stressed, they can detect that hormone," Horowitz said.

A dog that sneaks into the library doesn't see the library the way a human does, Horowitz said. Rather than looking at the library, the dog is interested in odors, such as paths people walked and air coming in from vents and windows, Horowitz said. "Unless it has some interesting scent on it, some meaningful scent on it, it's not a part of his world view," she said.

That's why fire hydrants are so interesting to dogs - they can tell who's been there, how recently they've been there and learn information about visitors to the fire hydrants by the smell of their urine.

Ginny Bales, president of the Barnard Club of Connecticut, which co-sponsored Horowitz's appearance, said she has a friend who is convinced her dog knew she was pregnant before she did because the dog became very protective of her.

Horowitz wasn't surprised, saying dogs can detect from hormones whether a woman is pregnant, whether someone recently had sex and can even be trained to detect if someone has cancer. "Dogs can detect if something has changed in you and that can be as subtle as whether your stress level has changed. They certainly can smell it on you," Horowitz said.

But dogs don't get overloaded with sensory input because they tune out a lot of what can be seen and heard. "It's not smell on top of what we see. It's smell in place of what we see," Horowitz said.

Dogs who are especially good at tracking also have long ears that kick up odors as they drag along the ground, she added.

People shouldn't view dogs as an extension of themselves, or assume they know why dogs behave a certain way or what they're thinking, Horowitz said.

Horowitz said dog owners in Manhattan will put raincoats and little boots on their dogs during a walk in the rain, thinking dogs, like humans, don't want to get wet.

But dogs evolved from a wolf-like ancestor, and one way wolves mildly rebuke a younger wolf is to stand over the younger wolf and press on its back, Horowitz said. She said when people put a raincoat on their dogs, the dogs often freeze, thinking, "Somebody bigger is around me, and I'm getting scolded."

Horowitz said people also misinterpret dogs' kisses and licks on their faces as love or affection, when that behavior also has ancestoral origins. Wolves in packs excitedly greeted a wolf who returned from hunting by licking its face, Horowitz said. The younger wolves were undoubtedly excited to see the hunter, but the licking was "also a request to regurgitate some of the food eaten and consumed," Horowitz said.

"It is a greeting," she said of a dog licking its owner's face, "but does it show love? Not necessarily. It shows we are part of the same family pack and we've been out eating."

An audience member said her dog won't kiss her or her husband but will kiss other people. Horowitz said that was probably due to the dog not liking an odor and not a lack of affection.

A common way people project their thoughts onto dogs is by saying they know their dogs' "guilty look" - the look on a dog's face when it's misbehaved and is about to be scolded, Horowitz said.

Horowitz said she put that theory to the test by visiting dog owners' homes and having the owner leave a treat for the dog on the floor, making clear the treat was not to be eaten before leaving the room.

When the owner returned, Horowitz said, she would falsely tell the owner half the time that the dog had eaten the treat when it hadn't. "Sometimes the dog was innocent and got scolded, sometimes the dog was guilty and got scolded," Horowitz said, adding that the scolding was only a mild verbal rebuke.

"The amount of the look doesn't seem to correlate to whether they're guilty," Horowitz said. "It correlates to the action of the owner. The dog is watching you all the time; they know when something's slightly different. Even before you scold them, they sense we're about to scold them."

The "guilty look," Horowitz said, was really a "submissive look."

"That's a look they put on when maybe they're a little scared or about to be punished, not a look because they feel guilty," she said.

Researchers in England put to a test humans' assumption about another animal - the chicken, Horowitz said. Humans figured chickens would want a lot of space to roam around, but when chickens were given that space, they tended to congregate together. The test results didn't mean chickens liked to be packed together in cages like sardines; just that the idea a chicken wants to wander off in a lot of space by itself wasn't correct, Horowitz said.

Horowitz also disputed the notion that dogs don't have a sense of time, saying dogs "have plenty of markers of a day's passage," such as the return of its owner, when it's time to go for a walk and the weakening of an odor's strength or changes in a room's odor.

The bond that formed between humans and dogs was mostly due to a dog's interest in making sustained eye contact with its owner, which Horowitz said was unusual for an animal. She said dogs aren't naturally fearful of humans and use sustained eye contact to gain information from their owners and to impart the idea that "We're in this together."

Horowitz said she thinks dogs do love us, but isn't sure it's love as humans would define it. "They want to affiliate with us. They seek us out. They form attachments to us. They form a bond," Horowitz said. "I'm not sure our definition of love is the same."

Dogs have different personalities and not all of that can be attributed to their breed, Horowitz said. "Dogs can vary enormously, and I don't think it's inappropriate to call them different personalities. Part of it is due to breed...but there's going to be individual variations. That's the magic of the genetic code," she said.

Horowitz advised new dog owners to observe their pets and not assume they know right away what the dog likes and doesn't like. "You're meeting an animal who has its own personality. Just try to observe him, without knowing what he's like. Just observe behavior, see what he likes, and encourage things he likes and you like. Just embrace its personality," she said. "Occasionally organize your life around the dog. Indulge the dog."

Patti Schott of Trumbull, an audience member and owner of Isabella, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, said she thought Horowitz's talk was "very interesting."

"It really did give you a whole different perspective on how you view your dog's life," she said.

Schott and Gail Andreyka of Monroe, who owns three Daschunds, agreed that dogs have their own personalities.

"They all have their quirks," Andreyka said of her Daschunds. "One's a little more friendly, one's a little more affectionate. They have basic Daschund traits, but they definitely have different personalities."

Andreyka said she loved Horowitz's advice to just let a dog be a dog. "Love your dog for who it is and just let it be," she said.