Or “Sighthounds, my arse!” Our confession today is that we have never, ever, had lurchers who sniffed things so much as the two we have at the moment, Django and Chilli. Never in the field of canine endeavour have so many supposedly brisk walks turned into an hour of standing there looking stupid while the Sniffing is underway.

The Sniffing

We had intended to write about the ‘sight’ part of sighthound crosses  and sighthounds in this article, but the recent cold weather has highlighted just how appalling it is to wait in a freezing wind, often with driving rain, whilst the dogs… sniff a clump of grass . Again and again and again, the same clump.

The process goes something like this:

US: Right, we’ll go across this field quickly, because it’s sodden and we’re frozen. Let’s head for the shelter of those nice trees.
DJANGO: OK.
CHILLI: Look, grassy clump!
DJANGO: Oooh!
CHILLI: Sniff sniff.
DJANGO: Sniff sniff.
CHILLI: Need pee here <PEES>.
DJANGO: Oooh, pee. Sniff sniff. Me need pee on this pee <PEES>
CHILLI: You peed on my pee. Sniff sniff <PEES>.
DJANGO: Oooh, pee. Sniff sniff <PEES>…

This can repeat itself three or four times for one clump alone. Django is the guy you meet at the party, who always have to have the last word. Or in this case, the last urination. Which leads to a circle dance as the dogs seek to make the final definitive comment, and a confusion of leads wrapped around our legs. Then it’s off across the field, three paces, and…

CHILLI: Look, nettley clump!
DJANGO: Oooh!
Etc.

Our seaside jaunts are even worse, with every footprint, dead fish, discarded ice-cream cone, crab and length of seaweed deserving quarter of an hour’s study – but we usually do that more in Summer, so it isn’t so harrowing.

CHILLI: Look, rotting sea monster!
DJANGO: Oooh!
Etc.

Being dogs, this is for them the equivalent of reading the neighbourhood notice board – if the neighbourhood was completely swamped with noticeboards saying “Spot was here”, “Rex peed here yesterday” and “Ring Fluffy for a good time”. What the local foxes write we have no idea – probably “I really shouldn’t have eaten from that second rubbish bin last night, Doreen”.

In Chilli’s case, being a domineering female, the message will no doubt read “I did this. This is mine. I am your Empress.” Django sniffs and marks so incredibly often that the only message we can imagine is “Me is leaking. Send plumber.”

It is important to let your pup have quality time when on a walk, and we’d agree with that even more strongly if it didn’t mean stopping so bloody often in Winter. As the twosome constantly change sides during the sniffing process, it means swapping hands every three seconds, during which fingers get colder and colder, whilst wind and rain gradually erode remaining humanity. Half an hour of this and there are snarls of “No, you don’t need to sniff that bloody bush!” and “If you stop to sniff and pee one more time, Django, I’m tying a knot in it.”

We shouldn’t be surprised. Dogs in general are so much better equipped than humans for this sort of thing. With ten to sixty times as many nerve endings for nasal fun, and much more of the brain devoted to the Sniffing, they can’t help it. Add to this their vomeronasal system (nicer than it sounds) which is an extra olfactory system that detects chemical stimuli, and they have us beat. The VN system, whose core is sometimes called the Jacobson’s Organ, is jolly useful for pheromone detection, for example.

We’re also suspicious of those very long noses of lurchers, which probably include serious extra room dedicated to the job – maybe a small forensic laboratory or something. If that’s the case, however, and dogs can smell the chemical signs of fear, sadness and illness in people, how come ours can’t smell us losing our tempers as we freeze to death?

N.B. Human beans have some advantages, but not many. For example, humans are more sensitive than dogs to amyl acetate, as in bananas, presumably because identifying ripe fruit was more important to our own ancestors and irrelevant to those of dogs. And we can sniff pretty flowers, which a dog finds quite useless and uninteresting – except to pee on. Daffodils preferred, in Django’s case.

So a lurcher, longdog or sighthound is also a scenthound in its way, whether you like it or not. A specific scenthound breed might be better at following a smell than the average lurcher, but unless trained, not phenomenally better than a Chilli, who does pretty well. And given that lurchers and sighthounds are also cool at high-speed charging, and at spotting and tracking moving objects at a distance, we know where our loyalties lie.

Non-Lurcher Trivia: The Bloodhound and the Basset Hound are generally rated the best sniffers as dog breeds/types go. The Bloodhound is said to have most scent receptors of any breed. It’s argued that the long ears help disturb and lift scent molecules, whilst the folds in their faces help trap scents near to the nose. We have no idea if anyone’s tested this with a well-ironed Bloodhound wearing a hair-net, but there you go.

Our other complaint today is that our dogs like to invoke the Sniffing at the worst possible moments. They whuffle their long noses into a bush with ecstatic intensity just as someone is bringing two massive ice-eyed malamutes down the same route, or a dog walker with a huge bulldog, a pram, shopping and small children appears. Our minds fill with impending catastrophe, and the Little Donkeys are hauled, grumpling, from their nose-games, so that we can escape.

(We won’t mention that being quite tall, Chilli also likes to sniff crotches and bums with some enthusiasm, particularly those of complete strangers who aren’t sure of dogs anyway and only stopped you to ask where the bus stop was. No, we won’t mention that.)

All we can ask is that they keep the Sniffing down until the weather improves, when a walk might at least mean a pleasant stroll with pauses, not a jerky series of frostbite-inducing emergency stops in sleet and snow…