summer reading :)

 






 

...hee hee, me too.  i bet he makes some admirably massive poopie snakes! 

 



okay,  where did i leave off? lessee... "Strictly speaking, the dog doesn't smell the bomb. It deconstructs the odor into its components, picking out just the culprit chemicals it has been trained to detect....'When you walk into a kitchen where someone is cooking spaghetti sauce, your nose says aha, spaghetti sauce. A dog's nose doesn't say that.  Instinctively, it says tomatoes, garlic, rosemary, onion, oregano.' It's the handler who says tomato sauce, or, as it happens, bomb.' "   hey, quit shoving.  this is very interesting!   alrightchoo can have two pieces of my lunchy kibble but that makes like ten gummy worms you owe me now. 

blah blah blah...oh, here "When the air enters a dog's nose, it splits into two separate paths - one for breathing and one for smelling.  And when a dog exhales, the air going out exits through a series of slits on the sides of a dog's nose.  This means the exhaled air doesn't perturb the dog's ability to analyze incoming odors; in fact, the outgoing air is even thought to help new odors enter.  Even better, it allows dogs to smell continuously over many breathing cycles - one Norwegian study found a hunting dog that could smell in an unbroken airstream for 40 seconds over 30 respiratory cycles."  hee hee, yeah i know!  okay okay, next time we play guess whose foofie, to make things more fair, i promise i will plug one of my nostrils and only smell for half the time u do. but don't tell chocobot because he's always using his magical powers anyway so fair's fair.

okay...blah blah blaahhh...ooo, types of dogs best for finding bombs.. "The best breeds for finding bombs may be German Shepherds, Belgian Malinoises and Labrador retrievers, more for their tireless work ethic than any special olfactory prowess. Shepherds are so-called 'play-reward' dogs....There's a shepherd named June [who]...will work all day for her tennis ball.  Labs, perpetually hungry, are 'food reward' dogs.  Shepherds will accept criticism; Labs won't - the stress of not measuring up takes the starch right out of them.  What about bloodhounds, you say? True, a bloodhound will follow a straight-line scent - an escaping convict, say - as if it's being pulled by a string. 'But they're way down on the intelligence scale,' says Wynn, who worked with bloodhounds as a patrol dog handler...'Also, they stink like livestock.' "  heeey, he said that like it is not a bonus - sheesh!

 "Golden retrievers can outsmell everybody, but it's tough to get them to buy into the system. 'They're so intelligent that if they don't want to do something, they just don't do it,' says Wynn."   hee hee, yeah they just don't do it.  and they always take the best seat on the school bus no matter if u are sitting in it already or not. boy i am so glad the golden twins are moving this summer so we do not have to put up with all that next year, arentchoo duk duk? 

ps after the stink we made about having to read this article, we probably should not tell mom how much we are enjoying it. 

 




promise you will not tell, either, will you? :) :)



















ps - if you would like to read the same super cool article we are reading, visit the smithsonian article here :)