Soldier Dogs (22 page)

With a dog, though, you have to stop the car more frequently than you might normally, so the dog can have a bathroom break and stay comfortable. And you can’t just race around from one attraction to another when you’re hoofing it with a dog. A dog will, by his very nature, force you to slow down a bit. In other words, to use a cliché I have used too many times in my talks: Dogs help you stop and smell the roses.

I never really thought too much about the literal meaning of a dog smelling a rose until I came across this description by Alexandra Horowitz in her wonderful book
Inside of a Dog: What Dogs, See, Smell, and Know
:

Since reading that passage, and learning a great deal about dogs’ sense of smell, I have been more understanding when Jake stops and spends a full minute inspecting a neighbor’s hedge. I am so awed by what a dog’s nose is capable of, in fact, that I try to add a little time to our walks so I don’t have to rush him from his rich world of fascinating odors. That hedge is imbued with odors representing many things, including all the dogs who have preceded Jake. “Dogs read about the world through their noses, and they write their messages, at least to other dogs, in their urine,” psychologist and prolific dog-book author Stanley Coren told me. Who am I to tear Jake away from his favorite news and gossip blog?

I’m now also slightly less discomfited when Jake and another dog greet each other by heading right for each other’s nether regions. Chances are the dogs are learning far more about each other than the other dog’s owner and I are learning about each other; we make idle chitchat and try very hard not to notice our dogs’ utter fascination with each other’s anal area and sexual organs; exactly what the dogs are learning about each other, and what they do with that information, has yet to be figured out by science. But it’s very likely far beyond “Nice weather we’re having, eh?” “Yup, how ’bout them
Giants?” It’s probably more along the lines of “How old are you, and what’s your personality like, and what did you have for dinner, and are you gonna be nice or a jerk?”

The canine proclivity for sniffing out what we might consider the more intimate olfactory signals may have helped the Allies in World War II: Nazis stationed along the Maginot Line were using dogs as messengers. French soldiers attempted to shoot the dogs, but the dogs were quick and stealthy.

Enter a French femme fatale. She was a little thing, a messenger dog who had just gone into heat. She went on her mission, and when she returned to her post that evening, about a dozen German military dogs were close behind. It was a small victory played out in the battlefields
. Toujours l’amour
.

Figures abound about how much better a dog’s sense of smell is than ours. There are so many variables that it’s almost impossible to quantify. I’ve seen figures indicating that it’s from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 1,000,000 times better. Bradshaw explains that dogs can detect some, if not most, odors at concentrations of parts per trillion. The human nose, by contrast, is lucky to get into the parts-per-billion range and is often relegated to parts per million. That makes a dog’s nose between 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than ours. The range is obviously very wide, and the sensitivity depends on variables like the dog and the odor. Research continues.

Coren gives an example of what this extra sensitivity looks like. Let’s say you have a gram of a component of human sweat known as butyric acid. Humans are quite adept at smelling this, and if you
let it evaporate in the space of a ten-story building, many of us would still be able to detect a faint scent upon entering the building. Not bad, for a human nose. But consider this: If you put the 135-square-mile city of Philadelphia under a three-hundred-foot-high enclosure, evaporated the gram of butyric acid, and let a dog in, the average dog would still be able to detect the odor.

If a dog can detect BO in such tiny amounts, imagine what it’s like for a dog to be immersed in a world of sweaty humans in a far smaller space. Coren was recently able to observe one of his dogs in just such a situation, when he was out picking up a friend at the gym. He brought along Ripley, his young Cavalier King Charles spaniel, whom he held in his arms. When they entered the gym, Ripley’s nose flew up in the air and he went stiff—a clear-cut case of olfactory overload.

This same dog would go on to nearly blind Coren in one eye the week before we spoke in October 2011. Coren had fallen asleep in his favorite chair. The nine-month-old Ripley, being both a lap dog and a face-licker, took advantage of the moment and, in the process of enthusiastically slathering Coren’s face, got one of his nails lodged in the inner margin of Coren’s left eye. The dog, unable to extract it, used his other paw to press against Coren to dislodge it. When I interviewed him, Coren’s eye had ruptured, the iris and the lens were gone. He’d had two surgeries, with two or three more to go “before they give up,” he said. He takes it in stride. He would have started to go blind in that eye from a progressive eye disorder within a couple of years anyway, so he says the dog just speeded up the process. I wondered if maybe the dog had some sense of his eye problem and was trying to help him, like dogs I have read about who try to chew away cancerous moles. Coren,
perhaps not surprisingly, does not give Ripley any accolades as a diagnostician or surgeon.

A handy way a dog’s olfactory sensitivity manifests itself is with something called odor layering. This enables a dog to separate a chosen scent from the “background noise” of all the other scents, much as humans could visually sort a bunch of miscellaneous items spread out on the ground. Dog handlers have variations of analogies for odor layering, and they’re all based on food. Probably the most common: We humans can smell the pizza. A dog can smell the dough, the sauce, the cheese, and all the spices and toppings. A dog might even be able to smell the components of each of those. Not just dough, but flour and yeast. Not just sauce, but tomatoes and basil and oregano. Some handlers and dog trainers use chocolate cake as an example, others use stew. But it all boils down to the fact that dogs have very sensitive noses that are capable of teasing apart scents as you and I could never dream of doing.

As Navy Lieutenant Commander John Gay was driving me to the submarine in Norfolk to see little Lars do his detection work, he told me that even his late boxer, Boris, was adept at odor layering in his heyday. (Boxers are generally not renowned sniffers.) Gay’s wife used to bake all kinds of muffins and cookies, and Boris would show no interest. But when she made a particular kind of cookie that Boris was allowed to eat, he waited eagerly by the oven door, even though she gave no indication the cookies were for him. Oh, and the dog could also smell flies. Flies.

We humans have, not surprisingly, found plenty of ways to put this exquisitely sensitive olfactory apparatus to work in detecting
odors of importance to us. Some of them seem nothing but miraculous.

Dogs are proving very adept at sniffing out a variety of cancers, including lung, ovarian, skin, and colon malignancies. Specially trained dogs can predict seizures in those prone to them, or sense dangerous changes in blood sugar levels in diabetics. Dogs can detect pests, including bedbugs and termites. They’ve been used to sniff out cell phones in prisons, oil and gas pipeline leaks, flammable liquid traces in arson investigations, toxic molds, diseases in beehives, and contraband foodstuffs. They can tell when a cow is going into heat. They can even use their noses to find cash. Jake has shown no talent for this I’m afraid.

Former Marine Sergeant Brandon Liebert, whom you may remember from an earlier chapter (his dog, Monty, found six hundred rounds of antiaircraft ammunition), was stationed at Cherry Point, North Carolina, in 2005. One day he sent out a dog team to sweep the convention center in Morehead City prior to a Marine Corps Ball. The team went out on what was a formality. But a few hours later Liebert received a call to say that the dog had responded to something in one part of the convention site. Verification was required. Liebert was the only handler available, so he got Monty and rushed off to investigate.

“When we got to the area of where the other dog had responded, Monty began to circle the room multiple times and then finally stopped in the middle of the room. I asked the handler what his
dog did, and the handler stated that his dog had responded on the tables behind me. We got out of the area and informed the local authorities.”

It would later turn out that there had been a Ducks Unlimited show the previous weekend and that there were a lot of guns and ammunition for sale. The vendors had placed the ammunition on tables, and so it was a residual odor the dogs had picked up on. The ball went on as planned.

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N
ot all dogs have the same genius for sniffing. Dogs with longer snouts generally have more sensitive noses than dogs with stubby noses, like bulldogs. This is one of the reasons why you will probably never see a pug as a military working dog, unless the military decides it needs something rather amusing-looking to distract the enemy.

Let’s see why size matters. If you have more odor analyzers in your nose, you are going to be more sensitive to smell. We humans have about five million odor receptors in our noses. The area these take up if unfurled would be about the size of a postage stamp. Dogs with long noses have far more of these scent receptors. Dachshunds have 125 million. But German shepherds have 225 million of them. So do beagles, which is pretty amazing considering they’re half the size of shepherds. Bloodhounds have the most, with three hundred million. A bloodhound’s olfactory receptor area is about the size of a handkerchief. (You will not see bloodhounds in the military, though. Doc Hilliard explains that while they have great
noses, and can be excellent trackers, most do not retrieve or play with Kongs or balls the way they need to for the training. I wonder if another reason could be that their droopy, drooly countenances don’t seem very “military.”)