Whoever really really really smelt it...

I read in a little factoid book that a German Shepherd’s sense of smell is more than 30,000 times more acute than a human’s. I knew dogs had a great sense of smell and all, but Christ, that’s not even a competition! We suck at smelling! I can’t even imagine smelling certain things 30,000 times more acutely than I do now. A skunk sprayed something near my house one night and it actually woke me up. An odor actually was so unbearable that my brain got frightened enough to wake me about it.

The only other time I was awakened by a smell was when I was pet-sitting two wonderful dogs for a friend of mine. I was staying at their house while the family was away, and the dogs were used to sleeping in the bed. One night, I woke up to a strong odor; there was a gas leak. And it was coming from the ass of Jake, the basset/beagle mix. Worse, I awoke with my head turned, staring into…I didn’t know. It was familiar, but my brain needed a second to figure it out, since I’d never seen an anus so closely before.

Dog farts have a distinct stink, but this one was an award-winner. I gasped and tried to sit up, but I gagged on the funky pong hanging in the air and needed to roll sideways off the bed before I could take in enough oxygen to yelp, “Jake! Out! Out of the room! You wanna to go outside?” I turned on the ceiling fan and let Jake and Mabel outside for a couple minutes, in case Jake was having issues. It took a while to clear the room enough for life to survive inside it, when we could all go back to bed. I wondered what I’d fed Jake that had led to a gas attack unlike any since the trenches of World War One.

It brings me back to dogs’ noses. Why, since they have such a spectacularly acute sense of smell, were Jake and Mabel not giving a hoot about something that my simple sense of smell found so repugnant it actually awoke me as if a potential emergency might be afoot? My brain wakes me up at night when I have to pee or when something seems terribly wrong that I might need to deal with or flee. Two dogs with me act as if they’re breathing air from the Swiss Alps. Humans have evolved over time to be repulsed by the smell of poo, rotten food, corpses, Rush Limbaugh, because those things are dangerous to us and can make us sick or dead. But dogs routinely put their noses right up to a fresh turd, will gladly eat a rotting squirrel or a piece of old cheese. These things just don’t seem to be a danger to them, so the smell isn’t considered so horrendous, perhaps.

Not that the smells are exactly pleasant to them, either. And dogs are not above pranks, as our dog Tiffany showed when I was a teen. Tiffany would walk into a room, look at us, and then leave. And then the stink would hit us. Tiffany had felt a fart coming, gotten up, walked over to the room we were in, cut one, and walked away. It happened enough times to rule out chance. She knew what she was doing. She didn’t feel like sitting in the pewey cloud, but why waste it, so she crop-dusted us, and I think she got a kick out of it.

I was maybe 10 feet down the aisle from my sister, in a toy store not too long ago, when a nasty shitty smell assaulted me. I crunched my nose and said, “Oh, KIM, Jesus! What the hell?”

Kim’s eyes widened almost fearfully, as if she’d seen the ghost of a Bigfoot. “How did you smell that so fast?” she stuttered. “I just did it…you smelled it all the way over there just as it came out, it couldn’t even have gotten to you that fast!”

“That’s how bad it was,” I said. “It was so awful it warped time. You farted into the future.”

We still remember that and laugh about it, the time my sister farted into the future. I wonder, knowing my primitive nose smelled it before it was even created, how soon Jake or Mabel or Tiffany would have noticed that nasty in the toy store aisle. They might not even have come into the store with us with their sniffers. All three of those dogs are gone now, including Mabel, who ended up being my dog and almost never cut the cheese. I’d happily spend the rest of my life breathing a Jake-Level-Five haze to have them back.

(c) 2010 Scott Teel.  All rights reserved.