The Nose of a Dog 
A Clear Explanation of How a Dog Is Able to Follow Game by Means of **Scent”’ 
LL of us know that the dog, in 
common with most other ani- 
mals, has a very keen nose, while 
few have any conception of the dog- 
world of scent which is just as im- 
portant to them as sight and hearing. 
Because we can hear and see and feel 
we get along very well without a keen 
nose, having learned, as no other ani- 
mal, how to secure our food and avoid 
cur enemies without depending upon 
the windbourne messages of scent. 
Like so many other things we cannot 
feel and see, this matter of scent is 
passed lightly over as something be- 
longing wholly to the canine kingdom. 
The average conception of the scent 
being that it is a mysterious animal 
smell that clings forever to the foot- 
prints of wild game, enabling a dog to 
follow it over hill and dale. 
Scientists well know that our five 
senses—seeing, hearing, feeling, smell- 
ing, tasting—are all directly related to 
one another, akin in that they are but 
different methods of nerve vibration to 
convey messages to the brain. The loss 
of any one of these senses immediately 
stimulates the others to greater activity 
because they are, to a highly developed 
degree, the sentinels of the flesh that 
guard our bodies from ever present 
danger. 
There is but little doubt but that man 
once enjoyed a much keener nose than 
he has now. Perhavs it is just as well! 
It may be that this organ never re- 
covered with the medieval cities when 
garbage disposals, sewers and sanitary 
measures were not even dreamed of. 
When there was no longer need of a 
keen nose, weapons having put man out 
of immediate animal danger (except 
for himself) the sense of smell atro- 
phied. 
It is a noticeable fact that the eye- 
sight and hearing of dogs, especially 
setters and hounds, have suffered be- 
cause of an overdeveloped sense of 
smell. 
T is a mistake to think that only 
hunting dogs have keen noses. The 
hunted, as well as the hunters, depend 
equally on scent—one to eat and the 
other to escape being eaten. The deer 
has just as good a nose as the wolf, a 
rabbit can analyze a bit of scent in the 
air as quickly as a fox. 
There are, after all, two kinds of 
hunting dogs—one that hunts solely 
with the nose and one that hunts mostly 
276 
By DON CAMERON SHAFER 
with the eyes. All the long-legged dogs, 
the grayhounds, the wolfhounds, the 
whippets, etce., hunt with their eyes. 
That’s why they have to have long legs, 
so they can quickly pull down the game 
before it gets well out of sight. Collies, 
and various other dogs, are sight 
hunters. They have a keen nose to lo- 
cate the game, and will follow a hot 
scent, but they prefer the dash method 
of getting it to the slower cracking 
methods. 

The airedale, a fighting dog with a “nose.” 
LL wild dogs and wolves hunt in 
this way, circling to find the warm 
body scent of hidden game, following 
hot scent trails newly made, then the 
dash, the race for life. Dogs bred and 
trained by man to hunt solely by scent 
would quickly starve to death. They 
depend upon man to kill the game after 
they have found it. The trained 
pointer and setter never tries to catch 
the birds it hunts; the rabbit hound 
cannot catch a rabbit once a year. And 
you know they eat oftener than that! 
The hound is the oldest of all hunting 
dogs. We know how easy it is to tame 
young wolves and wild dingos, or even 
foxes and coyotes, and there is no doubt 
but that primitive man domesticated 
such wolves and wild dogs centuries 
ago. And from this beginning came 
our dogs of today. The original dogs 
of the American Indians were descend- 
ants of wolves and coyotes. 
From these early hunting companions 
of prehistoric man two kinds of hound 
dogs were developed which persist even 
to this very day. The first were the 
“seizer’”’ hounds, with long laps, hunt- 
ing by sight and big enough to pull 
down the game. The second were the 
“trailing” hounds, to find wounded and 
lost animals. 
(BNE the wolf dogs of 
primitive man hunted just as 
wolves and the wild dog do today, using 
both nose and eyes, but the latter more 
than the former. Game, hidden away in 
the tall grass and thickets, was found 
by scent but run down and killed in 
plain sight. All this was many cen- 
turies ago, because the Egyptian monu- 
ments of five thousand years ago show 
carvings of different breeds of dogs 
very similar to some of our canine 
friends of today. 
Admitting that all this is but a 
theory, but a good theory, the hound 
dog as we know it today, the long 
legged, keen nosed dog used to run 
rabbits and foxes, was not an origi- 
nal breed of dogs. It is easy to suppose 
that it was developed by our hunting 
ancestors just as the pointing bird dog 
was developed within our own time by 
crossing the spaniel dog and the hound 
and building upon one of the simplest 
canine instincts. For the bird dog’s 
“point” is no more than the prolonged 
hesitancy, the halt in stride before 
game, common to every dog when his 
nose tells him, by the strong body scent, 
that game is near. This halt in stride 
originally, was to enable the dog to 
definitely locate, or sight, the game be- 
fore leaping in to seize it. 
Imagine a party of our ancestral 
hunters in pursuit of game. They are 
clad in skins, half naked, armed with 
rude spears and bows and arrows. With 
them are the big black and brown 100 
lb. wolf ‘dogs, racing into every clump 
of brush, every bit of tall grass, to 
start the hiding game. When a deer is 
started the dogs dash after it in full 
cry. But the hunters do not chase it. 
Man cannot compete in distance with 
animals. The hunters watch the game 
trails and conceal themselves to get 
near enough to the circling animal to 
use their weapons. Given a good start 
not even these wolf dogs would 
catch a deer very often. But sooner or 
later the deer runs near a hunter and is 
shot through with a stone tipped arrow. 
\WAe such crude weapons those 
early hunters wounded far more 
game than they killed outright. It was 
very important, to them, that such 
wounded game be found. So certain 
hunting dogs were taught to follow the 
trail of the bleeding animal. As evi- 
dence of this we have the bloodhound 
with us yet, which is really one of the 
f 
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