Doing what comes naturally

I know Dieter's just doing what comes naturally. In dogdom, he's being polite. Or at least I think that's what he's doing. I don't want to think of the alternatives.

Evidently I'm just the right height. I'll be at the kitchen sink, rinsing dishes and getting them ready to put in the dishwasher, when all of a sudden this pointy dog nose is poking away at my butt. Multiple times. "Hi mom, hi mom. Mom? Mooooommmm?" By this point I'm in hysterics, as I am quite ticklish, and I think by now Dieter has figured this out. It's fun to make mom laugh and jump around. It also doesn't help that his human dad eggs him on. "Go on over and help mom. She likes it when you stick your nose in her butt."

I have a good sniffer.

It reminds me a bit of what my brother-in-law would say to my nephews. "Go on over there and show Grandpa how much you love him. Bite him in the leg." My dad would chuckle, but I think he secretly was afraid that one day one of his three grandsons would do as they were told. My mom always said she thought the kids knew their dad well enough to know better. Either that, or they looked at their grandpa's bony legs and figured they'd chip a tooth.

I did a little research on dogs' sense of smell. I found that the part of a dog's brain used to analyze and identify smells is 40 times larger than that of a human's. In other words, dogs can identify smells between 1,000 and 10,000 times better than humans. Humans have 5 million scent receptors and a German Shepherd has 225 million--the same as a Beagle and not quite as good as a Bloodhound, which has 300 million. (From: Understanding a Dog's Sense of Smell, by Stanley Coren, PhD and Sarah Hodgson, from "Understanding Your Dog For Dummies.")


I'm getting more inured to the daily butt pokes and crotch sniffing. And on the positive side: Dieter's still growing, so soon it'll be Lloyd who gets the friendly pokes.