FOOTPATHS

Walking the Dog

By Ellen Morris Bishop

In my house, nothing creates pandemonium like changing my shoes. It is an instant message to the dogs that a WALK might be immanent. Dogs, like us, are superb walkers. But beyond just the exercise, to a dog, the world is brilliantly different every day.

Based upon the dog’s keen senses and human management skills, dogs and people have maintained a partnership for at least 12,00 years. In hunting and service dogs, this relationship continues. They point to the pheasant. We bring home the proverbial bacon. They get a warm bed. We have a successful hunt.

But we often overlook this functional alliance when walking with the dog. On go the ear buds. Out comes the leash. We’re off down the trail with exercise as our mission.

Yet our canine companions offer entrée to a world more astounding than we could imagine, and rich with detail. Their super-sensitive noses and wide-range of hearing compliment our own superior vision. Hiking with a dog invites us to sharpen our own limited senses, and transform a walk into an exploration.

From safety, as well as scientific and aesthetic perspectives, paying attention to what your dog is thinking makes good sense. Once, on a hike along the North Fork of the John Day River, my dog, Meesha, simply sat down in the trail, nose in the air, ears up, and refused to go any farther. I thought maybe she was tired. And importantly, that maybe she sensed something I didn’t. So we camped in the meadow where she sat. The next morning there were unmistakable signs of a bear — ripped logs and overturned rocks — about a quarter mile from where we had pitched the tent.

Dogs’ keen olfactory and auditory talents stem from both genetics and biology. They employ up to 200 million olfactory receptors. We clock in with only about 10% of that. A dog’s nose includes structures (Jacobsen’s organ) that hold odors and analyze them in detail, and their genome boasts 971 active genes specific to odor. In contrast, we have only a single-membrane nose and a piddly 339 intact genes dedicated to smell. This combination of more genes, more receptors, and better air entrapment provides canines with sensitivity to odors about 10,000 greater than ours. We smell pizza. They smell pepperoni, mozzarella, and anchovies. It is no wonder that, to a dog, a walk is an olfactory feast.

Hearing is another sense where dogs excel. Our ears detect a frequency range of about 50-23,000 Hz. Their range is 60-45,000, with the capacity to hear extraordinarily high-pitched sounds that to us, simply don’t exist. And with ears directed by 18 muscles, and more sensitive receptors than ours, dogs can hear sounds (like a distant bear ripping up a log) that are much more faint than we can detect.

There are two reliable strategies to partner with your four-footed fellow traveler.

First, there is simply observing your dog, and using canine behavior to become more aware of the world beyond your visually oriented senses. Try sitting with a dog, tuning in to whatever you can hear — and wondering what lies beyond your own senses, but remains accessible to your friend.

What you see and hear may surprise you. When I’ve followed Meesha’s gaze, toward what she heard, smelled, or pinpointed by her heightened capacity to detect motion, I’ve seen elk, river otters, and even an eagle spiraling high above that I would otherwise have missed. Her senses have lead us to wrecks of past life, but also to exquisite fairy-rings of mushrooms, secluded off-trail ponds, and places of quiet, subtle beauty.

The more extreme course is to let your dog lead for a day. Alexandria Horowitz, author of Inside a Dog, highly recommends this — what she terms a “Smell Walk”. Follow the dog, observe all the best sniffing spots, and while you’re there, listen to the world, and look. Sight is one sense where we up-stage the dog with our Technicolor, fully binocular vision, verses their faintly green-blue world that is slightly blurry up-close. We can see clearly and in vibrant colors, the objects that are a tableau of odors to our canine friends.

This ancient partnership of dog and human can reveal a landscape of extra dimensions. And because we (probably) trump the dog with our imaginations, walking the dog can extend us to the limit of our senses, and inspire us to imagine what may lie beyond. Now, where’s that leash?

Ellen Morris Bishop is a geologist, writer, and photographer who uses all three vocations as excuses to hike and explore with her dogs. She is Programs Director at the Oregon Paleo Lands Institute, and teaches at Columbia Gorge Community College.