Here, in its entirety, for
posterity or for sticking up on your fridge, is a lovely little,
unsigned editorial from Saturday's NYT:
How well do you know your dog? The answer is, not nearly as well as
your dog knows you. Given the right incentives, humans can certainly be
perceptive enough. But most dog lovers discover, sooner or later, that
dogs have an alertness to the behavioral signs of their owners that
humans rarely equal. And that's nothing. Scientists have recently
discovered that dogs can distinguish, with almost unerring accuracy,
between breath samples from people with lung cancer and from people
without. The dogs have to be trained to do it, of course. But the fact
that they can do it at all is remarkable. There aren't enough biscuits
in the world to teach a human to smell at such an extraordinary level
of subtlety.
This news will give pause to almost anyone who lives with a dog. Just
what a dog "knows" is hard to say, because the human idea of "knowing"
is so closely related to the ability to express what you know. Even
trained cancer-sniffing dogs express their knowledge - their
distinction between samples - only by sitting or not sitting. But this
is what always happens. We tend to forget the extraordinary powers of
the animals we live with simply because we live with them. We tend to
humanize them, which means, if nothing else, that we tend to reduce
them - in terms of their sensory powers - to our muddling level. We can
barely take in the fact that when a dog comes up and sniffs us, it is
really giving us a nasal M.R.I.
Not that this will change the dynamic of our relations with man's best
friend. For a while - remembering the cancer-sniffing dogs - some of us
will wonder when we see our pets cock their heads, "What are you
looking at?" But time will pass, and humans will be humans, and we will
forget, at our end of the leash, that the beast we are walking with may
already know things about us that we will discover only too late. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
