My brown dog, Emma
In my last post I mentioned a book I was skimming through at the time: Animals Make Us Human, by Temple Grandin. I’ve also been reading a book called Inside of a Dog, by Alexandra Horowitz. Can you tell I read a lot of books about dogs? 
Anyways, this book has been truly fascinating for me. It’s not what you might expect, a book about how dumb dogs are and how we’re wrong to read human emotion into them. It’s also not a book about how dogs are just like us. Instead, it’s a research-driven book about what we actually know about what goes on inside our dogs: how well they can smell, how they interact with one another, how they solve problems.
One of the things I found the most interesting is the discussion about how highly developed their sense of smell is. Horowitz refers to dogs all peeing on the same spot at the park as a sort of “conversation” — they can tell who has peed there, how long ago, etc. So it really is a conversation to them — just one that we are (blissfully) unaware of.
Every dog owner has experienced the frantic sniffing of your hands and clothes after you get home from someplace interesting. My dogs do a lot of that when I come home from a house where I was petting other dogs, for instance. We don’t even think of it, but our dogs probably know everything about that other house and its dogs, just by the smells we carry home with us.
Hotel rooms must carry tons of smells — like a guest book of everyone who has stayed in that room recently. I remember staying at an Atlanta pet friendly hotel once where my brown dog — the only one I had at the time — went crazy sniffing everything in the room. She always does a fair amount of sniffing about, but never like this! Even after she stopped sniffing everything, she seemed kind of restless that night. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but she probably smelled something she didn’t like. Who knows what — an unfriendly dog, trace scents from an old mess some other dog had made?
When you’re staying in hotels with your pets, there is of course nothing you can do about the smells. Cleaning crews are human, and are going to clean a room so that it smells good by human standards. But Horowitz says that a dog’s sense of smell is possibly as much as a million times better than ours, so what smells clean to us probably comes in as a cacophony of smells to a dog.
But I did think of an idea that might help dogs settle in to a strange-smelling hotel room. If you don’t already, try bringing something with you from home to help comfort them — their bed, if it’s small enough, or perhaps a favorite blanket or throw pillow to snuggle with. I don’t know whether or not it will actually help, but I would think that having a tangible link to home, even when in a strange place, ought to be comforting to an anxious dog.
Tags: Alexandra Horowitz, Atlanta pet friendly hotel, Inside of a Dog
