(++++) WHAT THE NOSE KNOWS

A First Guide to Dogs: Understanding Your Very Best Friend. By John Bradshaw. Illustrated by Clare Elsom. Penguin Workshop. $7.99.

Genius Noses: A Curious Animal Compendium. By Lena Anlauf & Vitali Konstantinov. Translated from German by Marshall Yarbrough. NorthSouth Books. $24.95.

     Readers will learn a lot about the noses of animals, both the familiar ones and the unfamiliar, from both these books – in fact, adults as well as the children for whom the books were created will likely discover information they did not already know. But the way that information is imparted is quite different in these two factually focused works, so some families may well find one approach more congenial than the other. Actually, congeniality is the hallmark of A First Guide to Dogs, which – despite the title – is not about how to obtain, care for and enjoy canine companions. At least, that is not the way Bradshaw focuses the book. Instead, he very cleverly structures the book as a day-in-the-life story – told from the point of view of a terrier named Rusty. But this is not a typical, anthropomorphized day in the life: Bradshaw keeps Rusty and his experiences real from a dog’s point of view, explaining dogs’ way of perceiving the world and showing how canine perceptions color everything that happens to Rusty during the day. This means a strong focus on dogs’ sense of smell: “You and I recognize someone mainly by what their face looks like, but dogs recognize people by their smells.” And not just smells as we humans think of them: yes, dogs use that sort of odor perception far more efficiently than humans do (and Bradshaw clearly explains how and why), but in addition, dogs “have a secret way of smelling people that most humans don’t know anything about.” Bradshaw describes this as “snuffling” – licking something or someone and using the tongue to push the lick to the top of the mouth, where it is interpreted by special smell detectors. Other animals have similar body arrangements – snakes have Jacobson’s organs that are foundational to their perception of the world, for example, and humans actually have similar organs, too, but they are much less important for people. What Bradshaw emphasizes is just how crucial these body parts are for dogs. Formally called vomeronasal organs – Bradshaw uses correct scientific terminology throughout the book – these organs mean that dogs can remember hundreds of other dogs, and people, and other things accurately, simply by smelling/snuffling them the next time they encounter them. The smell-pervaded world of dogs is the key to the entire day through which Bradshaw takes readers from Rusty’s point of view, as the terrier encounters known people and dogs, new ones, and all sorts of other fascinating elements of the world (definitely including poo). Bradshaw discusses other elements of dog perception and behavior as well: tail use, sleep and dreaming, training, being left alone, the look that humans perceive as “guilty,” responses to feeling nervous or afraid, confusion, and much more. Again and again, Bradshaw finds ways to explain that dogs “are always trying to work out what their owners want from them, and that’s why they make such wonderful friends.” Indeed, he says dogs “can easily learn a lot about us in a way that no other animal can manage.” Bradshaw’s scientific bona fides mix to excellent effect with his pleasantly paced, easy-to-follow narrative of a typical dog’s typical day. And the illustrations by Clare Elsom help, too: they provide anthropomorphic elements that Bradshaw assiduously avoids, showing Rusty in human-like poses and with human-like expressions as the day goes on. There may be nothing explicit in A First Guide to Dogs about setting up the house and learning how to care for a new canine arrival, but there are plenty of places to get that sort of information. What Bradshaw offers is much rarer and at least equally valuable: his book does an excellent job of explaining how dogs perceive their world, including the human portion of it, and how people can interact with much greater understanding to the dogs around them – to the benefit of both species.

     Genius Noses takes a much more conventional approach to presenting facts about animal noses – although the animals themselves are, in general, far less familiar than dogs. Instead of a breezily written day-in-the-life story, Lena Anlauf and Vitali Konstantinov offer page after page of straightforward facts and accurate-but-somewhat-humanly-expressive drawings of animals that, like dogs, perceive and interact with the world largely on a nasal basis. The book is divided – sort of – into sections called “Flying Creatures,” “Ground-Dwellers,” “Underground Diggers,” “Happiest When Hanging Out in Trees,” and “Water Creatures,” and includes mostly mammals but also a few reptiles and even some fish and insects. But the words “sort of” are important to keep in mind: for some reason, the authors do not group the types of animals within the sections into which they fit, but instead present them in largely random (and somewhat confusing) order. Among “Underground Diggers,” for example, the aardvark appears as early as page 6, the kiwi not until page 46, long after the ground-dwelling giant anteater (page 30), the tree-hanging koala (page 36), the water-creature elephant seal (page 42), and many others. The unclear arrangement of the book means it is best sampled bit by bit instead of read straight through – indeed, it invites random exploration. Luckily, the information is so intriguing that dipping into the book here and there is both fun and informative. For instance, the authors explain that “every koala nose is as unique as a fingerprint” because of the noses’ individual markings, and they exclaim that “to the human nose, koalas smell like eucalyptus candy!” Quite a few of the creatures in Genius Noses will likely be unknown to young readers and adults alike. Among those are the desman, a semiaquatic mole; the bilby, an Australian marsupial that “has been suggested as an Easter Bunny alternative”; the dik-dik and saiga, two types of antelope; the pig-nosed turtle, which “sticks its nose out of the water like a snorkel”; and various insects that “seem to have impressively gigantic noses” but actually smell through “fine little hairs on their antennae or proboscises.” Scattered among the less-familiar entries here are some that are very well-known indeed, including not only the koala but also the elephant and the pig. Even for these animals, though, the nose-related information is fascinating. For example, the authors point out that there are many different pigs, but all share a “disc-shaped nose at the very tip of the snout,” and their sense of smell is so good that they were long used to hunt for valuable, fragrant truffles – except that they tended to eat what they found, so now “people prefer to use dogs for the job.” Genius Noses is essentially a forthright presentation of facts, written clearly despite occasional missteps in translation: one supposedly complete sentence, about proboscis monkeys, reads, “Only the males that grow the giant schnozzles.” It is certainly true that the information in this book can be readily found online, but that would require a directed search for each individual creature discussed here. It is the discovery of the nasal prowess of many different critters, which use their noses in ways both expected and surprising, that makes Genius Noses enjoyable in a way that an Internet search is not: the book juxtaposes information in ways leading to new corridors of knowledge. And readers are further regaled with a well-prepared glossary at the back of the book – along with an alphabetical list of the scientific names of all creatures, great and small, contained within the tome. The subtitle implies that the book itself is a curious one, which is true in some ways – not all of them positive, in light of the work’s odd organization. In reality, though, this is a book for the curious, one that may well interest readers, younger and older alike, in learning still more about olfactory organs and their many uses.