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18th October 2006
DogsRule: Fun Dog Fact
Why do dogs…?
By Dr. Marty Becker and Gina Spadifori
(MCT)
Q: Why do dogs hate it when you blow in their face but love to hang their heads out of the car window?
A: To a dog, the sensations of the wind sweeping by at 40 miles per hour and some two-legged primate blowing the smells of last night’s dinner in the direction of her hyper-sensitive nose are not even remotely in the same category.
Compare your breath, even at its nicest, to the glorious smell-o-rama that is available to the dog who sticks her nose out the window of a moving car. For comparison, you might consider it the canine equivalent of our looking out the window of a high-speed train dashing through the loveliest part of the French countryside. While blowing in her face … well … that’s like looking out a window into an air shaft with some trash cans at the bottom.
The rush of all kinds of scents is irresistible to an animal whose sense of smell is as complex and advanced as the dog. When we drive down the street, our puny noses can barely tell where the coffee shop is, and maybe the bakery. But our dogs can decode so much more from the air passing by when they’re riding in a car, and the experience is surely pleasurable. That’s why the characteristic expression of a dog with her head out the window is one of concentration and bliss - her mouth swept into a doggy grin that’s better to get those scents to her nose and also to another scent organ, called the vomeronasal or Jacobsen’s organ, in the roof of the mouth. The more smells, the merrier, in the opinion of our dogs.
Dr. Marty Becker is the resident veterinarian on “Good Morning America.” Gina Spadafori is a syndicated pet columnist.
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© 2006 Dr. Marty Becker and Gina Spadafori
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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