Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know Read Online Free PDF Page A

experience.
    Understanding a dog's perspective—through understanding his abilities, experience, and communication—provides that vocabulary. But we can't translate it simply through an introspection that brings our own umwelt along. Most of us are not excellent smellers; to imagine being a smeller, we have to do more than just think on it. That kind of introspective exercise only works when paired with an understanding of how profound the difference in umwelt is between us and another animal.
    We can glimpse this by "acting into" the umwelt of another animal, trying to embody the animal—mindful of the constraints our sensory system places on our ability to truly do so. Spending an afternoon at the height of a dog is surprising. Smelling (even with our impoverished schnozes) every object we come across in a day closely and deeply yields a new dimension on otherwise familiar things. As you read this, try attending to all the sounds in the room you are in now that you have become accustomed to and usually tune out. With attention I suddenly hear the fan behind me, a beeping truck heading in reverse, the murmurations of a crowd of voices entering the building downstairs; someone adjusts their body in a wooden chair, my heart beats, I swallow, a page is turned. Were my hearing keener, I might notice the scratch of pen on paper across the room; the sound of a plant stretching in growth; the ultrasonic cries of the population of insects always underfoot. Might these noises be in the foreground in another animal's sensory universe?

    THE MEANING OF THINGS

    Even the objects in a room are not, in some sense, the same objects to another animal. A dog looking around a room does not think he is surrounded by human things; he sees dog things. What we think an object is for, or what it makes us think of, may or may not match the dog's idea of the object's function or meaning. Objects are defined by how you can act upon them: what von Uexküll calls their functional tones —as though an object's use rings bell-like when you set eyes on it. A dog may be indifferent to chairs, but if trained to jump on one, he learns that the chair has a sitting tone: it can be sat upon. Later, the dog might himself decide that other objects have a sitting tone: a sofa, a pile of pillows, the lap of a person on the floor. But other things that we identify as chairlike are not so seen by dogs: stools, tables, arms of couches. Stools and tables are in some other category of objects: obstacles, perhaps, in their path toward the eating tone of the kitchen.
    Here we begin to see how the dog and the human overlap in our worldviews, and how we differ. A good many objects in the world have an eating tone to the dog—probably many more than we see as such. Feces just aren't menu items for us; dogs disagree. Dogs may have tones that we don't have at all— rolling tones, say: things that one might merrily roll in. Unless we are particularly playful or young, our list of rolling-tone objects is small to nil. And plenty of ordinary objects that have very specific meanings to us—forks, knives, hammers, pushpins, fans, clocks, on and on—have little or no meaning to dogs. To a dog, a hammer doesn't exist. A dog doesn't act with or on a hammer, so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.
    A clash of umwelts occurs when dog meets human, and it tends to result in people misunderstanding what their dog is doing. They aren't seeing the world from the dog's perspective: the way he sees it. For instance, dog owners commonly insist, in grave tones, that a dog is never to lie on the bed. To drum in the seriousness of this dictum, this owner may go out and purchase what a pillow manufacturer has decided to label a "dog bed," and place it on the floor. The dog will be encouraged to