My first dog, as an
adult, was a Golden Retriever named Finn. Like most Goldens, Finn had an oral
fixation. He wasn’t happy unless he had something in his mouth. He regularly met
me at the door and took my book bag from me, which led to relieving female
visitors of their purses. He had a very soft mouth and once chewed on the
handle of a filet knife while sitting on our waterbed without cutting himself
or the bed. But Finn’s real claim to fame was that he loved refried beans;
unopened cans of refried beans.
He’d grab them off
the counter and puncture hundreds of holes into the can with his teeth. Then he’d
crush the can with his teeth, squeezing all the beans out. We’d come home to
find flat little metal discs, which once were cans of beans, stuck beneath the
couch cushions, or hiding under the table. Any trace of refried beans had been
licked up and all that remained was crumbled and flattened tin cans.
Amazingly, he never
tried it with anything else. It got so we did experiments, leaving a row of
cans on the kitchen counter. There’d be a can of corn, a can or two of green
beans, a can of peas, and a can of refried beans when we headed out to work.
And when we came home, the corn, green beans, and peas where all still there,
but the refried beans had been crushed and eaten.
“He can’t be
smelling through the can,” my husband insisted.
“Well, I doubt he’s
reading the label,” I replied.
A dog’s nose,
though, is a super power. Better, I think, than x-ray vision or the ability to
leap tall buildings in a single bound. According to NOVA a dog can smell 10,000
to 100,000 times as well as humans. Forty percent of a dog’s brain is devoted
to smelling. They have 300 million smell receptors in their nose.
James Walker of Florida State University is quoted as
saying, “If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third
of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well.” (NOVA) But he’s not seeing it, he’s smelling
it!
That’s why dogs are used to detect snakes in cargo from
Guam, search for explosives, drugs, and hidden currency, seek out agricultural
contraband, used by termite exterminators to find termites, sniff out cancer, and
even search for drowned corpses on open water. So, smelling refried beans
through an unopened tin can is easy for a dog.
And then there’s the jaw power involved in getting the beans
out of the can.
I don’t think as a fantasy writer I need to dream up
incredible powers for my characters. I can just give them the normal gifts of a
dog and they’d be pretty incredible.
