Dog Daily News

The best canine news and features, paw-picked by our staff of intrepid news hounds

.

As anyone knows, we dogs see and hear and smell the world very differently from humans. For example, we find olfactory fascination with little spots of urine that humans for some reason don’t even notice even though they’re walking right over it in the park. I’ve never understood their blindness to this sort of amazing find. But until the recent publication of a book about this very topic, the average human had never really come close to knowing just what it was we dogs experience every day.

Enter Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, by Alexandra Horowitz. This book is a must-have tome that will help people better understand what it’s really like to be one of  us. Every dog should get one for his or her human.

If you don’t have enough dollars saved up in your doggy bank yet (List price: $27),  enjoy this delectably written review in The New York Times.  Here’s our favorite excerpt from the review:

Consider one of Horowitz’s examples: a rose. A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume — a recent spray of urine, perhaps — does the rose come alive for a dog. How about a more practical object? Say, a hammer? “To a dog,” Horowitz points out, “a hammer doesn’t exist. A dog doesn’t act with or on a hammer, and 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.” Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only radically different from ours; they are often invisible to us. To get a better view, Horowitz proposes that we humans get down intellectually on all fours and start sniffing.

I think that’s a marvelous idea. Maybe if our people knew more about how we see, hear, and smell, they wouldn’t be so quick to tug us away from the next rock or leaf or patch of sidewalk we’re utterly, completely, joyously obsessed with.

___________________________________

The number of stray dogs and cats in the United Kingdom rocketed up 11 percent in the last year, according to an article on CNN.com. Many are blaming the economy. When the household budget is in upheaval, it seems many people are just ditching their dogs. (Did they see our story about how much dogs cost to keep over a lifetime? We hope not.)

What’s more tragic is that so many more strays are being euthanized. The number shot up from 7,000 last year to 10,000 this year. The Dog Trust is calling on the British government to make microchipping mandatory. It may make it a little easier to track down a dog’s people, but what good will that do if the people consider the dog just a piece of property to be abandoned when hard times hit?

___________________________________

This alarming news just in from Reuters: It looks like another major dog cull will happen tomorrow (Sept 10) in a city near Beijing. Get this: Residents with dogs taller than one foot high are being asked to kill their dogs by tomorrow. If they don’t, police are said to be ready to “form dog-beating squads, combing the district and killing all such dogs. Owners will then be fined for the killing,” the story says.

This is unbelievable. It can’t really be happening. The article doesn’t mention anything we can do to help stop the slaughter. This must be a nightmare, right? Wake us up –  please!

___________________________________

We can’t end our column on such a horrible note. Zulu, Ida, and Jasper are sniffing around right now for something fun and lighthearted so we don’t all go to bed feeling so helpless about our Chinese canine counterparts. (Except for Ida, we’re all shrimps, and would survive the cull. But that doesn’t make it any less painful.) We’ll be back to you shortly…

______________________________________

OK, as promised, here’s a little something to take you away from the trauma of the post about the dog cull in China. Here is a video of a little French bulldog puppy. He is cute as a button, and stuck on his back like some unfortunate beetle. Won’t someone help him get up? (That would ruin our chuckle, but geez, the poor little guy!)