Aromatherapy

You have just given your dog a bath and she smells like sweet flowers. You take her to the park where she promptly flops over and rolls in the grass with glee. She twists her neck back and forth in a kind of ecstasy and you know immediately that you are not going to enjoy the drive home.

You call her off sharply, and she trots over happily. After all, she has corrected a grievous wrong and made it right. She has covered herself in eau de dead meat and she is not only a dog again, but, like all those women who got Farah Fawcett haircuts in the 70's or the guys who wear their favorite basketball star's number on their t-shirt, she is one of the giants. A predator reeking of the kill. You will have to be impressed.

You, you are not impressed, not pleased, not admiring. Far from being the toast of the pack, your four-footed companion is in deep doo-doo, and this is not a good thing.

There has been an olfactory communications breakdown. This is the worst kind because smell reaches so deep. Studies have shown that divorce is much less common among couples who like each other's smell. It recalls to me Napoleon's famous letter to Josephine announcing that he would return from a campaign in a couple of weeks and that she should not bathe again until then.

The power of smell is often unconscious and so it is often underestimated. The nose is hard-wired right into the deepest part of the brain. Its effects are swift and unmediated by reason. There is wisdom in the nose that modern society tries to erase because it challenges the rational order. In an experiment, college girls were given a series of t-shirts worn by different men and told to smell them and rate their appeal. The women all had different answers depending, of all things, on their own immune system. Apparently they rated as sexy-smelling the t-shirts worn by guys whose immune systems were the most complementary to their own. And they rated as not-sexy-at-all the t-shirts worn by guys whose immune systems were similar to theirs. Their noses knew who would make good babies with them and gave them a shove in the right direction.

Well, in a world whose history includes arranged marriages or at least class-limited choices of spouses from among a restricted genetic group of people, women's sense of smell might lead them out of their class, out of their race even, to seek better genetic diversity for their offspring. Not a happy idea for most societies, hence the denial of smell.

The dogs, they seek odors as a source of identity and information and take the good with the bad. And while a more scent-friendly society might never accept the offal roll as a kennel club skill, we might not tempt transgression so much by sanitizing our animals and ourselves, by denying with sweetness the darker, muskier part of nature by trying to wash and perfume the dogs or our psyches into something unrecognizeable.