Searching For Ourselves

This is a brief post to suggest you get a copy of How To Speak Whale.

The book is an exploration into the evolving interests and efforts of humans to decode the sounds and behaviors of animals into a language, hopefully creating a deeper understanding and connection between humans and other species on the planet. This exploration is structured around author Tom Mustill’s near-death encounter with a whale in Monterey Bay, CA while kayaking. Video footage of the whale showed what appeared to be a deliberate effort to avoid Tom and his fellow kayaker. Tom wanted to know why this whale would spare a couple of puny humans. He started his quest by trying to find the whale…

Reading a book like this makes it so clear to me that we have a communication gift through the activity of scent work with our dogs. Researchers struggled to track and observe whales until recently due to humans’ land-dwelling limitations and whales’ tendency to go deep and far in the oceans and seas. We have total access to our dogs! And, scent work is a perfect activity for observing our dogs.

The general trend of science is to reveal something previously unknown to us. Often, we think we know – like when we thought the earth was the center of the universe – then we are forced to reconcile new information with our previously held, incorrect beliefs. Even though science has reliably led to continued updating and reframing of our knowledge, we tend to repeat the cycle of deeply held incorrect belief, science reveals new information, deeply held belief must be revised and updated. Why do we do this?!

We used to believe that whales were dumb. Now we know that they (and other cetaceans) are intelligent. In many ways they are more intelligent than our closest primate ancestors. Is it a coincidence that we believed whales were dumb, but we were wrong?

We used to believe dogs had no feelings, no memory, no consciousness. Now we know all of those beliefs were incorrect. What beliefs might we be holding about scent work and our dogs that are wrong? I’m not sure, but if our dogs could talk I’m sure they’d tell us!

In How To Speak Whale, there are researchers spending millions of dollars to collect data on whales. They hope to run this data through AI language interpreters to find patterns in the data and build a whale language.

When we do scent work with our dogs, we are getting tons of data from their behaviors. We use our “AI interpreter” aka our brain, to analyze the data for patterns to build a shared understanding with which to communicate. Or do we? I think we should.

In How To Speak Whale the researchers Mustill writes about are focused on one thing: how do we know what animals -whales specifically – are saying? Partnering with a dog to find a target scent should prompt a similar question: how do we know what our dogs are saying? The devices researchers use to collect whale communications are not also interpreting the communication. We have a tendency to do less communication collecting and more interpreting. We like to interpret dog behavior during a search by chatting – human to human – about what the dog must be thinking and why they are doing what they are doing. If we can first collect lots of behavior data, then we might begin to interpret it. The researchers in Mustill’s book have been working for decades and spending countless dollars and hours on data collection. Any scent work partner to a dog has a long way to go before making confident statements about the meaning of a dog’s behavior.

Aside from Mustill’s book being an enjoyable read with interesting ideas, the spirit of How To Speak Whale is perfect for the nose work enthusiast: let’s agree that whales (or dogs) are intelligent and purposeful and have something to say that’s worth listening to. This is markedly different than saying, “let’s agree whales (or dogs) are intelligent and can learn to do what we train them to do.” Scent work is so uniquely not about training! It’s about dogs being intelligent mammals with something to say that’s worth listening to. Why would a dog’s perspective and language be worth listening to? As western humans, what we need most is a reconnection with the world outside ourselves, so that we may rediscover ourselves. We need our awareness and aliveness to come online. We need to practice respecting the wisdom of things outside ourselves. We need to learn (or relearn) the art of living in the moment and giving our full attention to things we don’t yet (or will never) fully understand. With help from our dogs, we may find out that it was never birch or clove or vetiver that our dogs were helping us search for and find, it was always a deeper connection with ourselves, with each other, with our dogs. The source of that deeper connection is our awareness.

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Happy Sniffing!