Can we ever understand our dogs?

Dog people tend to be pretty confident they know what’s going on with their animals.

When we put out a call on the Explain It to Me podcast for dog owners to tell us about their connection to their furry friends, the responses ranged from “soul dog” to “love of my life” to “I believe I can read my dog’s mind.”

But how well can we see inside a dog’s mind, really? That’s a question Alexandra Horowitz has been investigating for decades. She runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College in New York City and has written four books on how dogs experience the world.

When we called her up for our episode, she told Explain It to Me guest host Noam Hassenfeld that understanding that experience starts with the nose.

“They are smelling animals. Smell is their primary sense,” Horowitz said. “My interest is in saying, ‘Okay, let’s try to understand the dog’s way of seeing the world through their nose, instead of just assuming that they’re just like us, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I’m sitting on a couch.’”

Horowitz talked to Hassenfeld about her experience with nose-first living, how dogs’ smell shapes their perception of time, and whether, after all these years of research, she feels any more confident she knows what’s going on with her fuzzy friends. Below is a transcript edited for length and clarity. But make sure to listen to the whole thing — it’s a great interview.

How do you start to take a dog’s point of view? You did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog? Or how should I put that?

Yeah, I tried to step into some of the dog’s behaviors in order to understand them a little bit. Humans are visual creatures, right? We see the world first, and we assume the world is out there looking like it is to everybody, the way it looks to us. Of course, it doesn’t.

But if you’re a smelling creature, how do you see the world? Smells don’t just appear when you open your nose. If you look at dog behavior, they go and search out smells, right? They spend a lot of time with their nose on the ground or smelling objects that are nose height. And they sniff a lot more than we do. Our sniffs are pretty feeble, and they’ll do seven sniffs a second if they wanna get a really good sense of something. And so I tried to do those things.

That was just the first step, going around and saying, like, “Alright, what are smells down at dog height? And what does something smell like if I put my nose right up to it?”

I feel like I need to get a bit more detail here. Where are you walking around trying to smell things at dog height?

Well, I did this in New York City. Right where I live.

So no one gave you a second thought, right? Because it’s New York City.

Oh, no, people moved away from me, that’s for sure. But I walked out of my house and followed what my dog did. Where he sniffed, I would lean down and sniff with him. Is it a tree post protecting a tree from people on the sidewalk? Is it a bush? Is it the grass? I didn’t sniff other dog butts ’cause there are other issues involved there, but, you know, if a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend.

What do you think this experience of trying to smell everything the dog smells told you about what it might be like to be a dog?

The big lesson for me was that, unlike the way I had characterized smells in my life — which I think is very human, as good or bad, right? — smells are something appealing, maybe a food smell, or something unappealing, like in New York, garbage in the summer is a very distinctive smell. But for dogs, smells are just information about the way the world is. So their world is wrought of smells the way ours is wrought of visual images.

You know, when I think of looking at the world, I create a spatial map of the world, right? Like, I’ll walk through my apartment and I’ll look around. Here’s the door, here’s the window, here’s the hall. What does that mean for the world you live in if you’re mapping it by smelling it?

Smells move, and that’s one of the interesting things about them. We know this — you have a cup of coffee, you put it on the table, and you can smell it on the other side of the table. So where that coffee is, is a slightly different space to a, let’s say, purely olfactory creature than to a visual creature. It’s right in the cup to me, but to somebody who’s seeing the world through smell, it’s in this whole kind of universe around the cup as the smells go into the air.

Oh, that’s fascinating.

So things are casting off smells all the time. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing concrete and real. It just means that it’s a little more transient than we see.

Does the way a dog relies on smell also change their perception of time?

Yeah, I think time is in smell. My presence in this room really smells to my dog. And when I’ve been gone for an hour, I’m still sort of in the room to them, but a little less. After a day, I’m a lot less in the room. And so they’re sort of...noting time, time passing by the changeability of smells.

Wow. That is kind of beautiful and also kind of sad. I don’t know, imagining you fading slowly out of a room, it feels like a very different type of thing to experience.

Maybe I haven’t ever thought of it as sad. I mean in a way, there’s something reassuring in the fact that I’m still here when I’m not here for them. When I come home and I’ve been with another dog or I’ve had some experience which might potentially leave an odor on my clothes, they can experience that by just smelling me, and seeing where I’ve been. To me, that’s extra neat, you know, not melancholy.

A lot of the people we’ve heard from in this episode — they talk about this ability to understand their dog and this connection they have. And then talking to you, it seems we’re actually just really different. What does that difference mean to you? Do you find that difference exciting? Do you find that difference daunting?

As an experimenter, I do find it daunting that they’re quite different than we are perceptually, and therefore probably cognitively, but also exciting, right? There’s a lot of possibilities, a lot of things we can investigate and learn. As a person who lives with dogs, there’s the mystery of it — the mystery of what it’s like to be a smelling creature. Even though there’s this fundamental difference between us, we coexist and seem to share a lot of things. We share space and share a life. I find that mystery delightful, and I don’t try to solve it in my ordinary life.