How do dogs remember?
My father wanted to call my family dog “Cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthrene”.
My mother wouldn’t allow it, and she settled on “Quill” because he picked up a feather once. We — everyone except my mother — now call him “Krill”.
Anyway, this article is about a prediction that I’d like to make about something that I think might be discovered in years to come about dogs and other animals.
Based on a lot of spending time with dogs (I’m verging on being a pro!), and my natural assumption of a great depth of consciousness in all living things, I’ve been wondering about dogs’ memories. How might dogs, and other living things, store equivalently rich memories as we do, but without a structure of language?
My guess is that they use smells more than we currently realise.
My prediction is that we will discover that dogs (and other animals) rub themselves in smells that they encounter not wholly to give themselves a scent for others, but perhaps more for themselves — to remember.
My friend Nick told me about his dog Hugo having what seemed to be the best meal of his life, of various kinds of seafood. After he was done, he rubbed himself for an inordinately long time in the remains.
Wouldn’t you want to remember the emotions of the best meal of your life?
I have been wondering if this is why pets hate to be given baths. Perhaps it’s not just that we’re inconveniencing them and putting them through a relatively unnatural process. Perhaps we’re also wiping away some of their best memories, and they have to say goodbye to them.
We know that, for humans, smells link to some of our strongest memories and emotions, yet when we think about our own memories, instead of smells, most of us conjure up pictures and moving images, words and sounds — things that we can find on computers too. Perhaps this is because we’re conditioned, by culture and societal demands, to prioritise these kinds of memories, since they’re the most likely to contain communicable knowledge.
If my prediction is true, then perhaps we should learn from our furry friends, and get better at remembering our emotions by finding better ways to store smells that we can use to connect back to our most affecting moments in life.
And perhaps we should also spare dogs too soapy a bath!
