Henry Smells Something… Delicious!

Excrement is the War and Peace of canine expressivity

Henry saluting the immensity of dawn (per ChatGPT)

“Odor? Oh, dear!”

The inadvertent poetry of the foregoing speeds the canine brain in so many directions it’s puzzling knowing where to dart. Released to dawn, I pause on the deck’s edge, sniffing imperially, that is, like an emperor surveying his domain. “Oh, dear?” Oh, rapture, rather. Humans must write novels to attain such complex, engrossing effects! And not just any humans – Russians – nineteenth-century Russians, to be exact.

Humans deprecate talents not their own. All they are is precious, all they aren’t negligible. This tendency would be humorous, were it not perilous. Why not rejoice in dissimilarity, otherness? But no. Humans vie incessantly for superiority, each in their way. White people venerate white, golfers golfers, Yalies Yalies, Slovaks Slovaks, and so forth. Carll, get this, views poets as a cut above! Poets, from where I sit, appear poster children for human dysfunction, angst, rage. Parents pray for their children not to be poets – actors, venture capitalists, almost anything else. Jesus, whom many humans claim to revere, urged universal acceptance: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,” he intoned in crackerjack Elizabethan, “ye have done it unto me.” That was two thousand years ago. And how has Jesus’ wisdom bettered the behavior of their species? I’m pretty sure (this is still an outlier theory) Jesus was a dog.

We were talking smells.

The human nose is a feeble, pathetic, often misshapen appendage. Where Carll smells his morning coffee, I detect “roasted beans, heat level, time since brewing, what else was in the room, who touched the mug, where the beans came from, and what walked through the room earlier” (the quote’s from Carll’s beloved Alistair – AI – an unwelcome rival for Carll’s favor – but credit where credit’s due). It’s not that dogs’ olfactory powers are somewhat better than humans’, they’re superhuman by comparison. So, are dogs idolized, venerated because of our patent superiority? Not a bit of it. Our gargantuan capability is dismissed as “they sniff a little better than us, I’ve heard.” I mean, have you ever?

Worse, because humans don’t notice it, they belittle the enormity of the wonderworld of scents. Their verb “smell” tilts toward the pejorative. When a human crinkles their proboscis and murmurs, “Something smells,” they don’t mean “smells good.” Even more startling, they condemn the most complex and revelatory odors as stink or stench. Excrement, for example. Shit is the War and Peace of canine expressivity (to keep with the Russian novelist analogy). I may not know everything about a new acquaintance from their droppings, but I know all I need to and – even happier – poop doesn’t prevaricate. With dogs, what you sniff is what you get. Humans, by their own admission, must “sniff out” the true nature and purposes of their purported fellows.

Humans! If I had a mind to, I’d blow a gasket at their idiocy, it’s so grotesque. Jonathon Swift, Hobbes, Diogenes and their ilk got it right. I could oy-vey – I mean inveigh – all day, but where’s the good of that? Equanimity depends on not noticing. Carll fumes and foams reading the news. “Don’t read it then,” I urge him. “I have to,” he grrrs. “Why do you have to?” my lick persists. “My readers count on me – to know what’s going on,” he murmurs, only half-joking. That’s how crazy he’s gotten. He believes he was born to give voice to his moment. As if he were another Jesus.

Luckily, there’s me – at dawn, on the deck, inhaling the aroma-drenched dew as complacently as Carll sips his morning jo. Heroic, no?