What it would look like if we could see the way dogs smell?  Would it be like a Scottish moor, hazed and thick, with ghosts and temptation?  Would it look like a map of the land, the boundaries defined by ancient treaty- an ambling, acrid line of scent separating what is yours from what is mine?  Would it be good to know what the neighbors down the street are having for dinner, or merely a nagging temptation?

And what of sight?  A less colorful world for sure, but what meat eater really needs color anyway?  Better to be good at spotting the anxious movements of a grass-fed fawn than to know the color of something’s eyes, or the toxins in a crimson plant.  Flight, when seen, leads to dinner, and that’s the thing. 

Sound?  To hear the high frequency twittering of a field mouse fifty feet away, while the human beside you hears only the rustling of the leaves?  To tilt and rotate your ears at will, discerning that the same mouse is being quietly stalked by the neighbors cat?  Or to hear the chatter of raccoon babies on a rainy spring night in a barn down the road?  Ah, if only humans knew what was out there in their own back yards.

Taste- a thing people do better than dogs, perhaps, as we need to eat a more varied diet.  And why taste when you can smell?  But dogs have the mysterious ability to taste water, so important to an athletic animal whose diet consists mostly of sodium-rich meat.  They don’t sense “salty” all that well, but do understand sweet, and bitter.  Tasting like a dog, though, would be a letdown for someone as in love with food as me.

To feel like a dog- that is, to experience touch- would be novel, for sure.  Whiskers all over the face and head tell a tale of wind, position, and temperature, and even give spatial info in the dark.  Like human hands, paws can literally feel temperature, ground texture, and even the vibration of an approaching animal or car. With four naked paws on the ground, feeling like a dog would be rich indeed.  And, though fur mutes feel, it also keeps out the cold and wet, something I wish I could do during this damp, dreary Seattle spring.

And what of expediency, and common sense?  Would it feel better to see, smell, taste, touch, and hear, then simply act, instead of passing all we sense through our endless social filters, mores, and opinions?  What would it be like to simply experience and act, instead of denying the certainty of what our senses say is there right in front of us?

 
A dog fights, flights, eats, plays, contends, sleeps, dreams, loves and makes love, all in the immediacy of the moment, without judgment, but without justice either, at least not in the human sense- after all, is it fair to slay something and eat it?  If you asked your dog and he could answer, he’d probably say “hey, man, a dog’s gotta eat.” 

And, to a dog, that makes perfect sense.