00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening toast, you can't predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit first light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That's f I R S T L I T E dot com. All right, everybody, you're gonna learn everything you ever want to learn about about Oh, what's shoot? I can't even say the word old faction, old action? Like how do animals smell? What do they smell? Do humans really suck at smelling? What does a hound dog smell? When it smell something? When you when a deer catches your wind? What's happening? Is there any way to have a deer not catch your wind? How good are they? How bad are we? We're gonna learn everything you ever want to know about about human animal ability to smell. Giannis putell Us is here as well, and he's going to ask a lot of very pragmatic, practical questions about how good are hound dogs really and what what conditions make them you know, I know, when do they do their job and not do their job? And who's going to teach us all? This is doctor Lucia F. Jacobs. She's an evolutionary biologist, neuroscientist, and Professor Emerita retired but in good standing, yes, Professor Emerita of Psychology and Neuroscience at u C Berkeley, where she directed the Jacobs Lab of Cognitive Biology. Her research explores how animals use scent to map environments, navigate complex terrain, and solve spatial problems. A world renowned expert on animal cognition, doctor Jacobs has studied squirrel behavior extensively. Her pa, I'm gonna point this out. This isn't in your written bio. You've studied the eastern gray squirrel, an animal of great importance. 00:02:23 Speaker 2: To us since nineteen eighty one. 00:02:25 Speaker 1: Yeah, the the wiley Eastern gray squirrel. She's writing her forthcoming book on squirrel cognition, examining the surprising intelligent intelligence behind how rodents store, recall, and protect thousands of hidden food caches. To get us started, well, welcome to the show. To get us started, let me tell you a thing that I've always thought. And then I came across your work. I got two balls in the air now. I came across your work in a book called Super Navigators and it's a book about how animals navigate, and there was a bit about old faction, and I found your name, and that's how I found you. A thing I've always thought. And I tell this to my kids. I tell them, like humans, we humans suck at smelling. We can't smell anything. But now a bear. Now there's a guy that can smell, right, It Like, do we suck at smelling? I mean, are we experiencing a world that we can't even understand what an animal is experiencing when it walks outside and takes a whiff of the air, or are we not that bad at it? 00:03:48 Speaker 2: Yeah? So, I mean there's there's two kinds of old faction. And there's orthonasa where you're sniffing in and you're using that you're like, what's out there in the world. 00:03:58 Speaker 1: That's when I go right right. 00:04:01 Speaker 2: And then there's retro nasal, which is not which is asking what's in my mouth and to do and to and when to kind of sniff what's in your mouth? You breathe out, so you're sending air over the stuff in your mouth out through your nose. The nose doesn't really care the nose. 00:04:18 Speaker 3: I have to ask the what the what's in the mouth? That is just scent molecules that have accumulated in your mouth. 00:04:25 Speaker 2: So if I'm not a wine connoisseur, but if you are, you know, they put wine in their mouth and then they breathe. They take a little bit and they're breathing out. So what they're doing. But anyway, but that's what that's what I mean. They're they're neuroscientists who Gordon Shepherd's written some great stuff about this. But yeah, and so then it's. 00:04:47 Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be a physical thing, right, And I'm. 00:04:51 Speaker 1: Just you don't have any idea you're doing it right. 00:04:53 Speaker 3: Okay, So you have to be like eating something. 00:04:55 Speaker 2: Well, if you're if you if you know, you eat something, you'll only got like five taste receptors. You know, sweet, sour, you know, salt, but you've got hundreds of all factory receptors. 00:05:09 Speaker 1: So you if. 00:05:10 Speaker 2: You put food in your mouth, what is it You're going to breathe out and and it's going to go past your you know, your receptors and your nose and you're going to get all that information. I mean, sure, you can also sniff a plate of food and get a lot of information that would be orthoonasal, but then once it's in your mouth, you breathe out and then you're getting retro nasal. So humans are really specialized on flavor, which is you know, both taste and and and odor. And we've met for hundreds of thousands of years, we've been specialized on processing food, cooking food, all that and so and so we've got yeah, we're special in that sense, but at this ahead no, But at the same time we are we're not We're not clueless about the other I mean about where we are in space. And I would say mostly it's because people assume we can't do it, so there aren't any studies of it. And it wasn't untill I really started beating the drum that Oldfaction is being used by across the animal kingdom to orient space a lot like importantly that I started. Actually, we did a study of humans where we had people in the big room and we had two like literally Q tips of odors that were hidden and with all these decoys, so they didn't know what it was, and we had them, you know, they were blindfolded. We had you know, ear plugs. The only one the odors we we used actually what people use for nosework, So that's Annis and Birch. It just those are just ones that are those are the classic ones that people used to train pet dogs and and but we really had a tiny, tiny amount like you walk in, you wouldn't think this is smelly room. And then people are blindfolded and we in a large room, and we would we took them to a specific place, but we we did very neandering path and turn them around around, so they really had no idea where they were if they couldn't use path integration to know like where they had come in for the door. And then they were given one minute to smell that's it. And then we would do the same meandering turn them around, turn them around, bring them back out. We take off the blindfold and the ear and the ear muffs and then say okay, can go back and find that place and the only odor. And we did all this you know carbon you know, scrubbing the room of odors before and after. So it was really we just had those two odors and people could find that space again statistically above above chance. And and when I did it, as you know. 00:08:06 Speaker 1: When you see that space, that spot, they were saying. 00:08:08 Speaker 2: Spot that spot. Yeah it's and so no one's ever done that experiment with any other animal, we think that. But but but we did it with humans because the humans are easy to train. And you know, I was in I'm in a psychology department, and as I say, humans are really good for some things, and this was an experiment where humans were really We started doing dogs first and it was like a real pain to train them accurately, so we switched to humans and then it turns out humans could do it. So but the point of it is so much of our our processing is unconscious that humans are probably orienting to odors all the time and don't know it. I see now, I was when I ran the experiment as a subject. I told the students, I mean I designed the experiment, and I said, I have no idea where I was. I'm never gonna and I would still go back and I would be back in their accurate place. So consciously I thought. 00:09:10 Speaker 1: I didn't know where you had a nasal sort of like like the relative odors hitting you. This is where you'd have to go yes, yes, to find that same blend of smells. 00:09:25 Speaker 2: That's exactly. And that's the thing about odors is you think about the world. There's all these odor plumes coming from a forest, a stream, a lake, all that, and they've and you know, wind direction can be fairly standard. I mean, it's gonna come down of slope. You know, it's gonna come along a plane a certain way. And so when you've got two streams of odors crossing, then that blend can become predictable. I mean, that's what that's what we proposed, and that's what we found in humans, even though without conscious awareness necessarily. 00:10:01 Speaker 1: What is it, like, what is the smell that we smell best? Because I've heard people explain that we're super good on sulfur, you know, I is there like, is there some truth to that? There's like some things that we can detect at parts per parts per million that maybe other things wouldn't know, Like we're good at certain smells. 00:10:24 Speaker 2: No, I and I'm I'm I know that. I think the smell of a corked wine is apparently something that maybe that's the sulfur. I don't have those facts right at my fingertips right in this minute. But they're definitely people like Gordon Shepherd have shown that humans are better at there. There are sense that humans can detect better than a dog definitely. I mean, you know, our old factory system is really specialized for the species. Like we all have different components. You know, we've all got these old factory receptor gene but people actually, even in different continents, will have different receptor genes. And then plus over your lifetime, you can change the function of those genes by your experience. That's called these epigenetic processes. And that's been shown in mice, so that and actually in humans there have been there's certain odors that most there's like I don't know, a certain percentage of people can't smell, like twenty percent of people, and you can take those people and train them for two months and then they can smell it really yes, yes, and and and there's some evidence that with a lot of training, you know, the old factory bulb, which is the part of the brain that detects everything, actually changes in volume and size and can actually increase and in most in all other vertebrates, humans it's it's it's a little less a little more controversial, But the old factory bulb has continues to add new neurons new nerve cells throughout life, and so and in mammals, there's really only two places that keep adding neurons throughout life, and one is the old factory bulb, and the other is this brain structure that it's massively connected to, which is the hippocampus, which is guess what, a navigation center. 00:12:33 Speaker 1: Oh no, kid, huh. 00:12:35 Speaker 3: I had a question about that. Just the way our sense of smell developed, I'm getting from the sort of the whole reason for it is just because we liked to eat different things. 00:12:48 Speaker 2: I mean that, No, that's actually true. I mean we know we but we had a really good sense of smell before that. And and so that's that's something that I've actually published on, is why humans are the only great ape that has an external nose. So if you think about gorilla orangutang chimp, I mean, there's very few great apes species left. There used to be a lot, but now there's just five of us. But if you also think about all the the hominids that came before our genus Homo, if you think about all the Astralopithecus. We've got their skulls, and you can see from the skull that there's a bone right here, the naxon that you can feel your own bone, and it's kind of like a ski jump. And so if you look at a human skull, like your skull, you've got a bone that sticks out on top and then a bone that sticks up on the bottom. And so there's actually forensic psychologists or pathologists. You can give them a skull of human and they can reconstruct the nose of that person like one hundred percent accuracy, whereas they say, you can never do that with an ear, you know, but the you know, but the nose, because so they and they do that, they take a picture of the person before they were, you know, dead, and then they've got their skull and then they you know, so they've really nice controlled studies to show that no shape is extremely individual and it can get reconstructed from the skulls. So we can go back and look at Astrolopithecus and know they didn't have an external nose. 00:14:33 Speaker 1: When you say an external nose, you mean just. 00:14:35 Speaker 2: Like this stick out thing, right, this stick out thing. 00:14:38 Speaker 1: I never thought about that, like like a gorilla. 00:14:43 Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. And if you look at a gorilla skull, it's you know, it's just it's completely flush. Yeah, or any any of the great apes. 00:14:52 Speaker 1: What is that? Why? Why is our nose stick out? 00:14:55 Speaker 2: So that's my That was funny, you should ask so well. No, so actually, you know, I'm a squirrel biologist. But there was only one hypothesis to propose why, and that was proposed in nineteen thirteen, which was it humidifies the air before it hits your lungs. You know, if you've got cold, dry air, you know, you don't want that in your lungs. I mean, that makes sense, you know, it's it's so, it's an air conditioner. But I came on the scene and thinking about you know, animal noses, think, well, doesn't have something to do with old faction. And the anthropologists had never considered that the human nose had an old factory function. I mean, it was all been the air conditioning hypothesis. And so this was like twenty fifteen and just then I was really lucky there were some really great anthropologists who were coming out and saying, you know, the old air conditioning hypothesis does not hold we've tested it these assumptions, it's not working anymore. And so it was perfect timing for me to waltz in and say, you know, hey, I'm a squirrel person, but I think we know, I think we need to consider this this And so basically what I proposed is if you look across the animal kingdom, how animals orient in space is by using stereo olfaction. So if you think about stereo vision, that's like, you know, if you can close one eye, you've got mono two eyes stereo, and predators have stereo because it's for depth perception, right, I mean, you can estimate distance better. Well. Nineteen sixty four there was great Hungarian biologists who suggested why can't olfaction work that way? And in the sixties people are already testing it with honeybees. So if you've got they've got antenna, right, And so if you immobile one antenna or you cut one antenna, and then you give them a really simple choice test it's called a why ma, So you know, do you turn left or right to get to the reward? Honey bees were they couldn't do it if it was fixed, and they couldn't do if it was if it was cut and and so. 00:17:22 Speaker 1: Like to say, so, just make sure I'm getting this. I mean the same way stereo hearing. 00:17:29 Speaker 2: Right, how do you no stereo stereo audition? 00:17:33 Speaker 1: Yet I can close my stereo honey talks. I know he's over here exactly right. If I didn't have two ears, I would just know it would feel like an omnipresent sound. That's right, not directional. Yeah, so you say it these honey bees, You clip one and he can't tell if the smells coming from left or right. 00:17:51 Speaker 2: Right, right, right, And so meanwhile, what's if you They did it with slugs who have intenseles. You know, they don't have antenna, but they've got tentacles. Exactly the same result. They did it. They've done it with hermit crabs, which have not hermit crabs they do. I think it was lobsters because they have entennials and the same thing intent of form things, and they cut it the same thing. And then the really cool result was garter snakes, which have you know, foked tongues. And it turns out the FOURD tongue they take, yes, yes, and they if you cut one timee of that FOURD tongue, they they are less. They you know, they're slightly disoriented. If you give them a simple task, like you know, left or right, they're worse at it, you know. Yeah, and that's because what they're doing is, you know, they are out there with the tongue sampling airborne odors, and they pick it up on the two times of that tongue, they bring it back in. They're actually using a different old factory system that's called the Vomer nasal system. And there's two pits in the palette, the hard palate of the mouth, and they bring the tying in and they literally pick up with chemicals bringing it and they stick it into those pits. 00:19:18 Speaker 1: No way, Yes, each little tongue, each prong has his own little pit pit well. 00:19:23 Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and and. 00:19:26 Speaker 1: They deliver it back into his mouth right exactly. 00:19:29 Speaker 2: And that's what and if you see a snake do it, that's exactly what a snake's doing. It's going check, you know, sample, sample, sample, and then what is. 00:19:37 Speaker 1: It about that tongue business? 00:19:40 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And is what's really cool is that these evolutionary biologists, if you look at there's lizards, you know, snakes are basically really just specialized lizards and they're lizards that have forked tongues versus lizards that don't have a don't have a forked tongue, and the lizards with four tongues are more mobile, they're more predatory. They move it for your speeds, all that kind of stuff. So it's it's it's definitely. 00:20:08 Speaker 1: Man, I didn't know that. Have you ever? I don't know if you ever noticed this. If you're let's say, you'd like be walking around the woods, okay, or walking down the road and you'll all of a sudden get hit where you know there's something dead and rotten. Yeah, yeah, it is so hard to find it. 00:20:25 Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting, do. 00:20:27 Speaker 1: You know, Like you're like, you know what I'm talking about, dude, something is dead, but you can't. You can't. It's it's like it's like here in a high pitched noise, you can't tell where it's coming from. You become aware something's. 00:20:40 Speaker 2: Dead somewhere right right right and that. 00:20:42 Speaker 1: But I feel like if you have a dog with you, that's some of bitches on that smell like in seconds, like to him, it's not confusing. 00:20:49 Speaker 2: Well, and it could be because we are really sensitive to that smell. And so like you know, we're probably like that that could be something that we are incredibly sense and so it's all around us. But a dog, I mean, is specialized to track location of scent. So they've got a completely different Not only do they have twice as many olfactory receptors as us, but they also like inside the nose, they have a whole area where when they're sniffing in it's it like like they open up the front of their nose and it gets sucked in and it goes straight to the old factory area. It's really like there's a little corral that the air comes in and boom, it goes right into that corral. And we don't have that. Ours is kind of flat. So you know, we're never going to be as good at localizing odor as a dog. 00:21:52 Speaker 1: Got it. You know. Another one that hits you like you can't tell where it's coming from real bad is the smell of a skunk. 00:22:01 Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting, and that's that's. 00:22:04 Speaker 1: Just like it's everywhere, yeah, but nowhere. 00:22:07 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. 00:22:08 Speaker 1: And I have personal experience where I had I had a like a cattle hyperdermit needle in my garage and I had had some skunk essence in that thing, and for weeks it was a family mystery. Why did the whole garage smell like skunk? No, you could walk around that garage all you want, and no one was able to go like, oh, it's coming from right there. That's it was just everywhere, all at once. 00:22:35 Speaker 2: Well, I wonder if that's because it's so potent, like we are so sulfur it were so sensitive to sulfur, or if whatever that is, that it just needs one molecule and it overwhelms you, and well you know so and and how odor moves. It's it's mostly through it's through air temperature actually, so convection and people. It's so you can put like if you had skunk in a room with vacuum seal, it wouldn't move at all. It would stay in that one place. But as soon as it's it's you've got higher than you've got wind, I mean tiny amounts of temperature differences will will start winning small wind movements. And so your garage you've got wind, even though it doesn't feel like you've got air. Gimp and so imagine that your nose only needs three molecules of skunk to say there's a skunk, And every single place in the garage has three molecules of skunk, so there's just no way to find it, whereas the dog is like, I mean, the other thing about odor is that you habituate to it, and so then it becomes a background. That and that then you can smell something. You can smell the four ground. 00:24:00 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:24:01 Speaker 2: And and in fact, when mice, the faster they smell, the more they could have like a smell they're looking for. And the faster they smell, the more it separates the foreground from the background. So when a dog it starts looking for something, you know, they'll be sniffing really fast. They they'll they'll be they're trying to discriminate, right, And that's that's what they're doing. They're trying to you know, background one set of smells and foreground you know the other. 00:24:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's funny, yeh. He's dog when he's got his hound dog for that dog, Like if you set a doffel bag in my house, I have like a little mutt dog, it's going to be like not that it'll give it a passing with uh huh. His dog basically has to sit down and spend fifteen minutes on that doffel bag. I mean, like, wow, every aspect of that duffel bag that like explores it. 00:25:04 Speaker 2: Wow. 00:25:05 Speaker 1: It's like so even within that, even within dogs around a separate Yeah, they're like these two dogs are on a whole separate trip. 00:25:13 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:25:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, what they like with what they're thinking and. 00:25:17 Speaker 2: Doing absolutely and and a lot of that is breed, you know, obviously that's why people have different breeds for different kinds of hunting, but also personality and and and experience. 00:25:31 Speaker 1: And you know, just something you don't think about personality experience. 00:25:34 Speaker 2: Yeah, that This is actually a huge area now in animal behavior is personality and showing that animals have different personalities from the you know, and you can measure it throughout an animal's lifetime and they will respond differently to the same circums, the same situation. 00:25:56 Speaker 3: Reliably, the same animal will respond to the animal. 00:26:00 Speaker 2: The same animal respond like the animals who are actually works done in chickadees who are bold, who explore more, and then who the others who are cautious and who explore more slowly. And as it's even genetically based, so you can have a bold father and a cautious mother and they will have chicks some of which are bold, some of which are cautious. And depending on what the food situation is that year, it might be that a bold bird does better, and then you'll see the ones with more bold chicks do better, and there's more bold birds in the next generation. 00:26:41 Speaker 1: Is then someone's got a house cat outside and the bold. 00:26:45 Speaker 2: Birds right right right right, right right right, Hey? 00:26:53 Speaker 1: What a what? Okay? When we smell like, it's all through the air right or like you said, you taste it. But what's going on when a fish smells something? Is he smelling like yes, yes, is he tasting it or smelling it? Or what is he doing well because it's all in. 00:27:08 Speaker 2: The water both, I mean both actually, Like you know, fish have kind of have taste receptors all over their body like catfish, so they can literally taste with their whole body. That's different. They're really specialized, like something like a catfish. They're real old factory. 00:27:22 Speaker 1: Special Theoretically, take a catfish and hold his head out of the water and put yeah, he dunk his body in the water and he's conducting some smell type actata. 00:27:32 Speaker 2: He's like delicious, Yeah, with. 00:27:35 Speaker 1: His head out of the way. I mean I know that it wouldn't work. 00:27:37 Speaker 2: But like, theoretically, theoretically, I think that right, because I mean, I know and I think that's true of a lot of I think goldfish, catfish, but their olfactory system is incredibly good, and they I mean, we're basically fish, you know, we never we have the same brain as a fish. We have the same skeleton as a fish. We just like you can take a fish skeletons and stretch it and and you know, it looks like our skeleton is not that different from a fish skeleton a four hundred million years ago. So, and the brain everything, and and and most of the brain, not the big cerebral cortex, but most of the brain, most of the other things in the brain that I've talked about, that's all. The fish is all there before we left the water. So, but fish, the big difference is bony fish have four nostrils, so they've got two sets. They've got anterior and a posterior, and so they've got water comes in through the anterior, it goes through the old factory epithelium that's us up here, that's where ours is goes through it and on the top of the snout and then it comes out the back and yeah, because they've got like four holes in their in the top of their snout, so two are input, two are output, and so they come in and goes out. But what's different about fish is because they can smell anything that can be dissolved in water. So you can have like big molecules, huge things like peptides that fish can suck in to their nostrils and they've got receptors to to tell them what it is. And so you've got aquatic animals like completely different olfactory receptors because they can smell tiny things, big things, as long as it can be dissolved in water and they can suck it in. 00:29:42 Speaker 1: They can smell it anything water soluble. 00:29:46 Speaker 2: And then you get frogs which live, you know, both in water and in the air, and they've got some water you know, receptors and air receptors, and you look at their. 00:30:01 Speaker 1: Also, he can a frog can smell out of like like a bullfrog and smell up in the air or down in. 00:30:06 Speaker 2: The water right right, And they've got they've got like a valve that they can close so that they can smell, you know, one way or the other. And other animals have done, like sea turtles can do that. But but then when we came onto land, when you know, when vertebrates came on to land, and then we never went back. You know, you can't what happens. And we became completely land based terrestrial animals, right, and then we lost the ability to smell things in water because you know, you can't snuff up, you're not gonna smell anything the water. And we became air specialists so once and so if you look at the you know, the genome of land animals, it went from the fish genome to the frog genome, which is kind of fifty to fifty, and then it became that, you know, the land genome, which is all air air jenes. And so that's when we became really specialized for orienting only in air. And but that means that our nose can only detect little molecules that are volatile that are in the air. We can't detect big, big molecules because guess what, they don't travel in the air. So so what I what I realized was all these other animals are using antenna for stereol faction and they need it to orient. And it turns out that basically what we've what this external rubbery mammal nose is is a couple of tubes. And if you and the physicists have shown that if you suck air through a tube fast, what happens. It kind of acts like an antenna. So an antenna is where you know you can if you're on an orient in space, you want to have a sample here in a sample here right, So you don't want the samples close together. You want the fire apart. And so if if you've got tubes on your face and you suck in air fast, the air comes from further away. It's just it's just they did this purely with tubes physics. In my collaborator, John Carmaldi did this. And so what I propose is that humans are basically tube noses. And the other tube nose group is the seabirds, albatross and the shearwaters. Those are called literally the tube nosed. Prosolariforms are called tube nose seabirds. And those seabirds like petrels Albert crosses, they are specialized. They spent most of their life in the air looking for you know, food on the ocean, which is like as gabby Nevid says likenedl and haystack. And the way they orient, and she's done work on this, is they orient to a smell. So there's when krill eat phytoplankton, they emit die sulfide. 00:33:28 Speaker 3: What was it? 00:33:29 Speaker 2: Anyway, they met a sulfur compound and the birds can detect that from far away and then they come in because yes, and that means because the krill means that's where they're going to find fish and and food. 00:33:44 Speaker 1: Kidding, they can smell krill under the water somewhere by what's coming up. 00:33:49 Speaker 2: By what's it's being released. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a disulfide compound. 00:33:55 Speaker 1: What it is I won't I won't have heard of it. 00:33:57 Speaker 2: No, it's methyl diceol. I'm just trying to show off my my chemistry, which is like kind I can't just remember that one. It's methyldized SULFI. No, it's and and birds. Actually, there's studies now in seagulls and homing pigeons and little songbirds that if you block their olfactory system they are disoriented. Yes, yes, no, it's and birds. And you know up and people saying that doesn't make sense, but then you know there's atmospheric winds that are carrying odor from like continents, which is actually a lot of information. 00:34:35 Speaker 1: Oh, you can find his way back to land. Right. 00:34:38 Speaker 2: So so anyway, so there's the tube nosed birds. And so what I proposed is humans are the tube no apes. We you know, we were the only ape that have this thing. And and then since there's been studies showing that, yeah, if you block one nostril with humans, when if you if you blindfold them and put the to track a coconut I mean a chocolate trail across some grass that if you block one nostril or you swap the inputs to the off, they put a big mask that either blocks one or swaps that. This with nome Soaples work at Berkeley was great work that the humans are disoriented. So yeah, and so humans can orient just like a dog, you know, to a trail, I mean they can track. And then Ken Cantanyon did this work with moles where he put tubes in their star nosed moles and he put little tubes in their nose and all they had to do was, you know, move a few centimeter to find an earthworm. And if you block one two or if you cross the tube, so you've got the inputs coming cross completely disoriented. The mole is just like walking over the earthworm and can't mind it. So that shows you that it's not just the amount of data that's coming in, it's where is it coming in on the left of the right. So it's just like you were saying about your ears, I'm. 00:36:14 Speaker 3: Gonna be walking through the woods navigating in a whole different sense here in two weeks when September kicks off. 00:36:22 Speaker 2: You know, I would. 00:36:23 Speaker 1: Here's the deal though about the birds, uh a lot, Like if you're hunting a lot of stuff, you need to be very aware of the wind because you got to come in from now when girls is gonna smell you. But when you know no one plays the wind with turkeys. 00:36:46 Speaker 2: Well that but but turkey actually, well turkey vultures are really good sense. 00:36:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no maybe it's just a thing people miss. There's no sense of needing to hide from a turkey's. 00:36:57 Speaker 2: Nose, that's right, and and that's probably true though. 00:37:00 Speaker 1: Oh you think that is true. 00:37:01 Speaker 2: Well, there's more work now. Birds, little songbirds they avoid nest holes that have if you put a predator odor in there. There's work work now about mate choice and birds even like zebra finches, little desert birds that are choosing mates based on odor. 00:37:18 Speaker 1: So you think it's possible that a turkey could smell. 00:37:20 Speaker 2: You, Oh, but I think it's it's I think vision and old faction. We all have. We all have both, and it and what you use depends on who you are and the context. And so turkey has got such great incredible vision, you know, color vision, incredible acuity and hearing, you know, and they're probably getting ninety percent of their But I bet I wonder if there, if there isn't. 00:37:48 Speaker 1: Some that'd be some good study for you to work on. Is can a turkey get a whiff of a person? Yes, yeah, and change its course because it winded you and we are we assume that they have no ability to catch your wind. 00:38:05 Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say it's it, you know, it isn't no ability. It's kind of like if you look at like David next work on the wolves. They start by its old factory, and then at some point they you know, they they know from the concentration that they're right on, they're very close, and then they're gonna switch to vision. And I'm sure you know this from your your you know your dogs that so it's not like they don't have one or the other. And and sighthounds, of course are going to be more visual because they're big, open plain desert breeds, right, so it's gonna vision makes more sense than old faction because when things are dry, that's you know, that's bad for old faction. Old faction. You want you want it cold and and well actually warm of humid is perfect, but definitely humid. 00:39:04 Speaker 1: And yeah, we know, I'm looking at him to see if this clicks with with houndsman. 00:39:10 Speaker 3: Lower Well, yeah, I'm and I'm I'm just reserved because I don't know if we're gonna are we get it. We're gonna get get into the hounds and stuff before we get to the hound, no question. I think we've we had this one. And just when we were discussing having Lucia on. But like does a speaking of animals and their relationship to you know, wind and smelling each other and the predator prey relationship. Does a predator like a mountain lion, know that it emits an odor and thus it has to be downwind when it's approaching a prey animal. 00:39:45 Speaker 2: They play the absolutely absolutely they I mean, because they're incredibly I mean they're you know, mountain lions are very different. I mean, felids are gonna use odor less than canids. So so wolf, wolf coyote is going to be using odor very differently than a mountain lion, which is an ambush predator. So they're they're going to be up and perch right, going to ambush that they're going to use odor, and they're going to certainly be aware of their own odor. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I mean, I mean, we live in this. I was just thinking this about this. It's like the odor Internet. You know, the world is is basically an odor landscape that we're we're stupid about. But all these other animals, they, i mean, the plants have got their own odors. The plants are communicating, the animals are, you know, communicating, and and what's what's it's actually interesting is that sometimes predator odor is actually attractive to a prey animal because they recognize that is not a scary, that that predator is not a problem because I know that predator and so I'm gonna, you know, I'll be attracted. I'm going to get more information by spending more time with that predator. And so you can do the same experiment where that another individual is like, no, no, I'm I'm a little smaller and that's a dangerous predator to me. So if I smell that, I'm going to be out of here. But what was that? There was a study this is insane in great kangaroos in Australia that were they gave them, and which are like sixty sixty one hundred pounds animals. You know, they're big right there. If you just a naive one was not at all put off by the smell of a Tasmanian devil, which is, you know, an aggressive carnivar. It's much smaller, but it's aggressive. But if you gave them Tasmanian devil scent, they they didn't avoid it. This is like an experimental situation. But if you gave them the scent of Tasmanian devil who had eaten ray kangaroo, it was incredibly aversive. So the wait, really, yes, the kangaroo. 00:42:06 Speaker 1: Knew he's smelling that little combo. 00:42:09 Speaker 2: That that predator, that twelve kilogram predator eats me, and therefore I'm going to avoid that predator. And they didn't before. So I mean that's the kind of information that is in scent. 00:42:24 Speaker 3: Okay, but see people, there have been hunters that have tried to switch over to a vegetarian diet. 00:42:30 Speaker 1: That's interesting. Yeah, dad, my dad had a buddy. My dad had a buddy. They would eat all kinds of apples, you drink all kinds of apple juice before both. 00:42:43 Speaker 3: But I think that was so that when they would ye, they would make a scent that would be attractive to deer, being. 00:42:49 Speaker 1: Apples seeming like a not meat. Yeah, he's right about that. 00:42:52 Speaker 3: He would just seem like, how long would it take for me to eat a completely I don't know, vegetarian. 00:42:59 Speaker 2: Diegan for two months? No, no, I mean. 00:43:05 Speaker 3: Deer right until deer be like, oh no, worries, worry about that guy. 00:43:11 Speaker 2: You know, you also have you know, in general, if one per human is not eating eating me, but everybody else is, you know, they might say, you know what, I'm just going. 00:43:23 Speaker 3: To be it's not an individual basis. 00:43:26 Speaker 2: But you know, that's an interesting that's an interesting question. I think if you had if you were tracking one particular deer, like you know, just you had an individual relationship and then you you went vegan for six months I mean, I don't know how you know, people do these experiments, you know, like how longs it take for you to be able to smell garlic on your breath or something human eating? I mean, I it comes out, you know, all that everything you're eating is coming out through your skin. Apparently this actually I read that that in Vietnam War, the viet Cong could smell American troops coming in because they smelled like as what they said, spoiled milk, because they were cheese eaters, and that wasn't in the knees culkine. 00:44:11 Speaker 1: My dad, My dad said that he was in World War two. He said, the smell of Germans and make the hair on the back of his next stand up. But he thought was this. He thought they had a kind of cigarette. Uh huh, uh huh, and they had, you know, the crowd, the whole crowd thing, right. He thought they had a kind of cigarette and he could smell that cigarette. And he said to make the hair on his next stand up. And he said he could smell their food and make the hair on the back. And he said, if you walked into the building, yeah, like when you were pushing them out and you came into the buildings that they were in. He said it was just like the like the worst because just the association. 00:44:47 Speaker 2: The association, right, that's right, that's right. No, that's well, that's why. And I bet you know, forty years later, I bet you if you could bottle that smell and give it to him, he would immediately be back in that in that situation. I mean, this is why. 00:45:03 Speaker 1: Oh he never, yeah, he never. I can tell you that his hatred stayed through life, so it would have been a bad smell. 00:45:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, bad smell right right, No, I mean, oh, factory PTSD, you know, people, real real thing, you know, combat smells and things like that. 00:45:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, before we do our hound dog chapter, I got I got a I got another dear question for you, well to deer questions, would it makes sense? And you're in a weird position now where you're giving like hunting advice, like do you picture a world in which you like, a world in which you acclimated, like like Yanni has a property in Wisconsin, the family place they like the deer on is there a world in which you somehow broadcast throughout the year, you had a canister that just broadcasts human odor, so that the landscape was just a washing human odor throughout the year, and that you would create a scenario where deer were just that was just what the area smelled like, and they would never and then when they smell the person, it just didn't matter because the area was constantly awashed. Like he hung all his clothes and stuff in a tree and just had to be that that tree just smells that way, and then it would be that later when you're there, they wouldn't even know because it always smells that way. 00:46:32 Speaker 2: The thing is that they it's you're going to walk in and they're gonna say, oh, there's the guy who atea hamburger yesterday. It's a fresh scent. 00:46:44 Speaker 1: You know, it's not like you're never gonna like because they're picking it apart too much. 00:46:48 Speaker 2: But I mean, at the same time, you know, you go to like Galapagos Islands where they've never had predators. You walk up to any animal and and you know it's cultural. I mean, whether or not they're afraid of a friend who study elephants and they the massill used a certain kind of you know, clayed. It was kind of a decoration, but it would you know, had a scent and as soon as an elephant smelled that they were out there because the MUSSI were you know, elephant hunters. So I mean it's association. Now, what you could do is I mean if you say that you there was something like that the deer liked that they that was their favorite food or something like that, and and you put you could do an association between your scent and their favorite food. You could maybe counter condition it so that they're going, oh, that's good. You know, that's that's a good thing, that's a good particularly. But you know, the first time one deer sees you with a gun and gives that signal, it's all over, you know, because all the other deer are gonna because your scent is around and the other deer is around. I mean no, And you can there's there's animals have to learn, you know, sometimes who predators are, and that's been shown in ferrets that they you know, they have to they learn like the first time they have a bad experience or they see another adult with a bad experience, they go, Okay, that's predator. I didn't know. Now I do, and I'm never going to forget that. Yeah, And you can do there's like the study of blackbirds in Europe where they the naive bird in the lab never heard and never seen a predator. And then you have another blackbird and you have a stuffed owl, and the one whose experience sees the owl gives an alarm call. And it only takes one trial for the bird who has never seen an owl to see the owl and go, oh, that's a predator. And from the rest of us, you know, with them and season OL, it's going to give an alarm call. And every time it gives an alarm call, a naive birds going to see what's it looking at OL, that's an ol and you can and they did. And then they took away the owl and they put a milk bottle there and they trained and they like played the alarm call to a milk bottle and the bird in the lab says, oh, that's a predator and really yes, And they. 00:49:27 Speaker 1: Trained to think that a milk bottle was troubled. 00:49:29 Speaker 2: They hear you know, they hear that that. It's like all they need is a call. And so they did that for seven generations, training, you know, blackbirds to be afraid of milk bottles. So I mean, it's it's the same thing an odor is that's crazy. 00:49:43 Speaker 1: Then you got like you got like generations of birds that they've never seen a milk bottle do anything bad, but they just carry it with them that a milk bottle. 00:49:51 Speaker 2: Is no good because you know, the thing is, if that's information, you don't want to have to learn by trial and error. If you've got someone in your population says that's a predator dangerous, it's like good enough for me, you know, I mean it takes a lot. So all the deer in in your property, they already have know very much that humans are. You know, you've got a human odor. They also know that your male. They also know what you're eating, they know your stress level, They probably know if you've got a cold. I mean, all that is right in your signature. So you can't escape. 00:50:28 Speaker 1: So on this not on the deer chapter. We're here, let's stay the deer chapter. So let me hit me a couple like, uh, let me hit me a couple of things that are sort of that float around and hunter legend. Okay, One is that there's this product that was on the landscape for a long time. What was this idea that you could wear certain clothing mm hmm with like what is the carbon's charcoal. You could wear this charcoal impregnated what exactly carbon carbon? You could put a clothes. 00:51:03 Speaker 2: On, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, and. 00:51:05 Speaker 1: Deer wouldn't know you were there. Do you buy that? 00:51:11 Speaker 2: I mean, most of your odors are coming out of your hair, and I mean so to humans. That's the other thing. Humans, we are more scent glands than any other grade ape. We are the smelly ape. So we've got and they're all concentrated in our hair and our armpits growing. So we are just you know, we're just walking bags of scent. So if you're gonna wear anything carbon blocking, you definitely want to be wearing a full head hood. 00:51:41 Speaker 1: I think the head neck. 00:51:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. 00:51:44 Speaker 1: So there's that. There's some that makes some that makes like a little bit of sense to you. 00:51:49 Speaker 2: It makes a little bit of sense. 00:51:50 Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, there's another one that you do. 00:51:53 Speaker 2: But I can I just say that. I bet it depends. It wouldn't take much for a deer to realize, oh, that's a carbon sense and it comes with a gun, and then all they associate this expensive suit with a hunter, and so. 00:52:08 Speaker 3: Can you explain what's going on? There is a scent being eliminated. Is the scent being masked. 00:52:13 Speaker 2: Is well, it's I mean you're masking the human body odor. Maybe you're not masking and you're not masking the face. 00:52:20 Speaker 3: You're not like removing it. Because I think the whole thing about what this carbon technology was it somehow it was soaking it up. 00:52:28 Speaker 2: I mean it would be soaking it up. I mean but on the inside, yeah, I mean it would be like a filter. But but for one thing, if you've got any exposed skin, you're constantly emitting, sure, you know volatiles, but also the suit itself has an odor, right, I mean it's not the outside of the suit is not odorless. And so all you need is for one deer to figure out that suit smell means a hunter, and then that deer to give an alarm call to a suit, and then all the other deer note that suit is a predator. So I mean, I mean you have to do some experiments on this. 00:53:05 Speaker 1: But yeah, there's another there's another one that goes like, uh, you create you put a natural odor down in such enormous quantity. Like let's say you take like a they call it like a masking scent. Okay, take something like, well, it's not offensive to deer, but it smells strong. So let's say like a female the urine from a female deer it's in heat, like it's attractive, but also it's super powerful. Right, he won't be the deer won't be able to find my. 00:53:40 Speaker 2: Smell right right, right right, that is applied in the voice. 00:53:43 Speaker 1: I'll drown it with this odor and he won't be able to pick my odor out from this overpowering odor that I'm putting here. 00:53:51 Speaker 3: Vanilla has been popular lately, Like it's this overpowering vanilla that's interesting. 00:53:58 Speaker 2: Vanilla is very interesting. I just want to say, it's kind of like the skunk in the garage. It could be that the male the buck is so sensitive to female you know, in in heat that that it just addles his brain and no, but man, that that that he he's got to be tracking females across huge distances, right, so he's going to be incredibly sensitive to that. So if you so it's so so, that would be an odor that you might be able to just overwhelm his system because his unless his brain habituates him. Well he does, but then he there's no female here, and then then it turns into background. It's like people who live next to pig farms, they don't they can't smell it after what you know, and they go away and and then there's there's like people study this because you know, there's lawsuits about pig farms. And I think if you go away for a couple of years, you come back, you can smell it again because you've got you know, like turnover. 00:54:57 Speaker 3: It happens to me every time our water the house is pretty soul free. Yeah, if I'm gone for a week, my first shower back, I'm like, whoa, yeah, exactly, second shower, it's just like normal situated right right right. 00:55:10 Speaker 2: So so, but it was. 00:55:12 Speaker 1: Never mind the dough and p thing. Then let's take vanilla. 00:55:15 Speaker 2: Vanilla. Vanilla. 00:55:16 Speaker 1: You would put a smell down and you'd be like just just wall of smell. Yeah, and it would hide the human part. 00:55:24 Speaker 2: Well, vanilla is interesting because it actually smells like milk, mammalian milk from like human milk. This this has been like, that's problem. Maybe one reason we're all attracted to manilla vanilla. That's just interesting. The vanilla is universally considered a very pleasant odor in human cultures. But yeah, so I I mean again, you know it's it's also the problem is you're hunting for dinner and they are trying to save their life, So you've got completely different motivation. Sure, and they're going to be much more concerned unless unless they're there's some reason they're not going to be because there's they're really just speak to the mechanics of the mechanics. 00:56:10 Speaker 1: Like, could you put from from an animal standpoint, never mind, dear, just like an animal man overwhelmed? Could you overwhelm them so much with one odor that they're not finding another? Or like let's say this. Let's say I'm baking a pizza in my oven, but then I take an ounce of skunk smell and pour it on the counter. You're not going to come in and be like, oh, I see all the skunk, but I get a little pizza too. You're just getting skunk. So is it theoretically possible that you would replicate that scenario and have it be that you're putting out so much vanilla or piss or whatever, yeah, or zucchini bread that that a deer is like all I'm getting is zucchini bread. 00:56:59 Speaker 2: No, I think it's possible at the same time, that's an area they wouldn't want to hang out in because it's too dangerous, because you're just making them odor blind and that's their And you know, when I've studied kangaroo rats, we radio transmitted, you know, and track them in the desert. It was so interesting. On a windy night, the kangarots will not come out of their burrows. And I think it's yeah, and and I think it's it was because I mean, partly it's the sound is but I think it's I think it's odor. It's like you've got turbulent suddenly they don't know where the coyotes are and and so I think of deer. I bet him a very windy day. So what's your hotly debated Okay, that's interesting is where. 00:57:42 Speaker 3: If ELK as an ELK guide for a decade. Yeah, we definitely felt like extreme wind conditions would sort of would would settle the movement. 00:57:50 Speaker 1: A little bit. Deer, But here's the here's where this gets tricky. They got deer on collars. Yeah, yeah, next to the eye of her that are like twenty miles from the eye of hurricane and they don't change tune at all. Well, it depends like they go about their business. 00:58:04 Speaker 2: Yeah, but see, so I always say again context where you know, is that wind coming in reliably laminar from one direction or is it like you know, turbulent. So a hurricane is one thing, but I mean they're actually if there's a study of blue crabs orienting to odors in in in in streams, artificial streams, they are more they're more accurate orienting to in turbulent streams than than laminar flow because they are adapted to their whole evolution has been life is turbulent. And so I met, I mean it depends where it is, like if if they're in a windy habitat that they they know how wind works and they've learned about it. Versus a forest Elkimore forest. Now, actually that's not true, right, and they are more open white tail anymore more closed. But you know, you imagine a forest animal where it's not expecting a lot of wind movement would be more freaked out by Well, I. 00:59:09 Speaker 3: Think both those animals, elk and deer, live in a wide variety of habitats. Both could be open or closed, and probably the one that lives up on near Shoto, Montana on the uh what they call that the Rocky Mountain front where the wind blows a lot. Yeah, they like learn to figure out a way to deal with it, right and use their olfactory senses deal with it. But when the wind blows like that in Wisconsin, maybe the deer lay low a little bit, you know. 00:59:37 Speaker 1: What works best for them from a from a predator perspective, like a human predator perspective. 00:59:41 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are. 00:59:42 Speaker 1: At a huge advantage in a swirling wind. 00:59:46 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, huge interesting. 00:59:47 Speaker 1: Oh and I mean people just be like a swirling wind, you're like, never mind, oh. 00:59:52 Speaker 2: Because they no matter what you do, they can smell you. 00:59:54 Speaker 3: Yeah, you're not. 00:59:55 Speaker 1: I could get up on them in a non like. What you want is a what a predator want is a very strong west wind, like a consistent west Like Okay, I know exactly what I'm gonna do when you get there, and it's like hitting this cheek and then you start in the back of your neck. Happen, right, and so you know everything that's going on. 01:00:14 Speaker 2: And I bet that's why this is so controversial, because I bet everyone's reporting different things based on where they are with different wind conditions. And you've got you know, animals adapted to local wind conditions, and so sure in Wisconsin it's this, but in that great you know that place where the rocky mountains are, it's that. And so everyone, the deer are going to have different strategies. They're going to learn different The fawns are going to learn from the parents. You know, it's all I mean, there are long lived animals, social animals, so there's a massive amount of social learning going on. I'm sure they're learning from the adults in. 01:00:51 Speaker 1: Our mind, Like in our mind, what they like is without being able to interview them. Speaking of a deer, white, let's say what he likes. He likes an obstruction to his back, yeah, huh okay, something behind him. Yeah, he can see out here. Yeah, and he's in a spot that has swirling wind. Like in our mind, that's like. 01:01:13 Speaker 2: Where he's that's interesting. 01:01:15 Speaker 1: Then he's like his chill. 01:01:17 Speaker 2: So this is what you do. You set up artificial swirling wind on your property and all the deer come in and they love it, and it's swirling wind, and then you go out just turn it off. 01:01:30 Speaker 1: It's big bucks galore. Okay, now we're gonna move into the hound dog chat. 01:01:34 Speaker 3: It's like a very like big box, like very expensive to set that up circulating system forty acres. 01:01:41 Speaker 1: You know. 01:01:42 Speaker 3: All right, you're ready for hound questions. 01:01:44 Speaker 1: This is the hound dog chapter, the anticipated hound dog chat. 01:01:47 Speaker 3: I don't know if these are in order, but we'll just start with what we have for fifty one. Yeah, well let's start with the cold nosed dog and the hot nose dog. And I think the nay explain that. 01:01:58 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, basically, a dog that hot is like a recent trail and the cold is like it's been there for a while. 01:02:08 Speaker 3: Yeah. There are dogs out there that are in the same pack. Yeah that one will see find a mountain lion track. Yeah, but it is old enough to where they smell it and they just no reaction whatsoever that we can see. 01:02:25 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they know, and they keep going. 01:02:27 Speaker 3: Another dog in the same pack goes over there that has the cold nose, yeah, and gets on it, and yeah, here it starts and they're off to the races. And it could be some people think that they run it. They don't like that because they're running a three day old track and you know, the lion could be you don't know, it could be in two counties over right, anyways. But so but what causes that? 01:02:49 Speaker 2: So, I mean definitely you said nature nurture, that's definitely both. I mean, you're gonna have different personalities. Dogs obviously have different personalities and they have different experiences. And so you've got a dog who has successfully been paying attention to cold, and and what's cold is you know, you've got all this dead skin falling down. You've got all this I mean, the heavy molecules that are falling off you and the mountain lion, and it's all falling into onto the trail. And the more the heavier the molecules are, and the more the trail has texture to it. It's not like a you know, a rock surface, but it's like you know, grasses, vegetation, that kind of stuff that's going to hold those big, heavy molecules longer. 01:03:40 Speaker 1: And so it's going to be it grabs on. 01:03:42 Speaker 2: To them, It grabs onto it there. Yeah, literally you know has placed for it the other thing that I mean. And so so there's going to be a lot of signal there. And that might be a dog who's had a good lot of good experiences with that on that cold, on that and it could be. 01:04:01 Speaker 1: Like before, right, He's like, I've picked up smell this. 01:04:06 Speaker 2: And exactly, and that's a huge positive reinforcement. You know, it's like that dog is going to remember. The Other thing about old faction memory is that there you know, we don't forget odors, and dogs don't forget odors, and they I mean that the odor comes into the brain, it goes right to your emotional centers, and so even in humans, you know, odors are encoded really deeply and emotionally. So I mean, so that's why I can give you the smell of your grandmother's kitchen and you can you know, you recognize it. And so anyway, so you can have a dog that had a really good experience catching, you know, doing succeeding on a hunt using those heavy molecules and so. And also it could be like I said about the chickadees, this would be exactly the same thing and be a really interesting study to do, to study a pack that had these different personalities, because it could be that you've got kind of an adhd dog that just wants to you know, trail nose in the air, and the other one's like, no, I'm kind of quiet. I've got two dogs, two MutS and ones. The ones you know absolutely will jump on anything, and the other one's slow and actually learns faster because he doesn't jump on things. You know, he will learn a problem faster. And so you could have a slow, deliberate personality that say, you know what, I am going to specialize in these heavy molecules. 01:05:34 Speaker 3: And I'm assuming you're gonna tell me that it could be nature or nurture, like it could be passed down through generations in their genes because they succeeded running cold tracks. And then you could also teach that to a dog. 01:05:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think you've got you know, probably you've got a you know, a little puppies. You might have cold you know, future cold nose, future hot nose in the in the litter. But then depending on their experience, how they're trained, what they're you know, did they have a really good experience using that strategy, then there you know, then what they're going to do. I mean, what any predator would do is that they keep working on that. You know, they get better and better and the rich get richer, right, and then and then another dog it's like, well that never worked for me, or I had one frustrating thing. I lost it. I'm gonna whereas I I trail and I pick up. You know, I do this fast sniffing in the air, and I'm that works for me, so I'm going to do that. But it could be that. I mean interesting to ask your people, like what else do those dogs vary about? Like, you know, are there what else are they doing? 01:06:50 Speaker 1: You know? 01:06:52 Speaker 3: Yeah? 01:06:52 Speaker 2: Do they do they rush the gate? Does this one? 01:06:55 Speaker 1: You know, let's say you're like, I SS like you got a cold nose and hot and no dog? Where you put them all in a situation where they're like a minute behind it? Are they do they still have different attitudes? 01:07:06 Speaker 2: Yeah? 01:07:06 Speaker 1: Or do they kind of like coalesce around some level of excitement yeah? 01:07:11 Speaker 3: Yeah? 01:07:12 Speaker 1: Or is he always like no and you giving easy. 01:07:16 Speaker 2: Or you give them a problem they've never seen before. You know, there's a lot of work now on you know, problem solving in dogs and how do they how do they tackle it? You know, do they do they have different strategies to tackle it? I bet? I bet the cold hot nose is like it is like just a signature of maybe differences in like overall problem solving strategy. And that's what that's what you That's what we talked when we talked about animal behavioral syndrome or personality. It's like a lifelong way of attract of attacking a problem. Basically, I got. 01:07:48 Speaker 1: A buddy who's got a beagle and his dog's like, his dog's a blood trailer, so it can find a wounded deer. 01:07:54 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. 01:07:55 Speaker 1: And one day we put it on a deer and it knew the path like one hundred percent because we need to pass you because we lost the blood trail. But the dog just lost interest and he said he knows he won't find it. Oh really yeah. So it's like it's like he knew where it went, but he's like he knows he'll never find the way. 01:08:14 Speaker 3: That was explained to me because I called out a you know, a deer tracking dog a few years ago and the same thing happened. We kind of just ended up doing circles and there was a lot of just you know, dead ends, and eventually said, I think that that deer that we're trailing or trying to trail is not wounded enough that it will die because it emits right from its through its hooves. It emits a scent that says I'm wounded, I'm in danger, I'm dying. 01:08:44 Speaker 1: Whatever. 01:08:45 Speaker 3: That's what that blood, that's that's what the dog's trailing. Is not trailing the blood. 01:08:49 Speaker 2: Trailing corticosterone, I mean the stress foremones. 01:08:53 Speaker 3: Yea. 01:08:53 Speaker 1: And actually that's interesting the dogs like he's not hurt. 01:08:56 Speaker 2: There was a study in Jurbils where they had one dur that I think was stressed or killed by a cat or something, and and they get they took blood from a gerbil who had been attacked and one who hadn't been attacked, and another gerbil could tell the difference between the two the blood. Yeah, so that I mean, so that because you've got you know, you know, you've got stress foremones coming through. Your blood is coming out. It smells like it. 01:09:23 Speaker 3: Yeah, right, all right, Differences in scent molecules like conditions, dry ground versus wet, warm versus cold, rising versus steady tempts, rough ground versus soft ground. You kind of said already, the rougher the ground is, the more scent molecules it traps. 01:09:43 Speaker 2: Right, But that's good for you know, that would be good for tracking, but not for trailing. Right, So if tracking is the ground trailing. I mean that's how you use it to Okay, I know what air the dog. 01:09:57 Speaker 1: Keeps his nose in the air, and the dog keeps the. 01:10:00 Speaker 2: Ground right right, And so I mean the search dog and the search dog is the world. It's like tracking, tracking, nose down trailing. 01:10:11 Speaker 1: Like we had a guy on that trains the apprehension dogs and you talked about yeah, yeah, a dog that goes into a building to find a suspect, his nose is in there. 01:10:20 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:10:21 Speaker 1: The dog that, like you're like a guy, a suspect last night ran off into the woods. Yea, and now we're wondering where he went. That dogs noses on the ground. 01:10:30 Speaker 2: That's exactly that. 01:10:31 Speaker 3: I think it depends on conditions too. I think that at times hounds sometimes we'll have their nose down. If the conditions get right and they don't have to have their nose down there, they can set when their head is up, they can move faster. They will switch to that as long as they're still getting that well. 01:10:48 Speaker 2: And so we did a study of search dogs in California where it's cold and wet in the morning and it's in the East Bay, and then it's hot and dry in the afternoon and then cold and damp again in the evening. And so we were using search and rescue dogs really really well trained and very carefully controlled. We had like a quarter mile track with a human walking on it and and waited at the end and and then we just measured the location of the dog GPS. And we also developed this thing to measure whether the head up was head up or down, and we every ten meters, we took a weather station and we measured the wispeed, temperature, everything and so, and what we found was it basically they were more accurate when it was cooler and more human, So that definitely and the reason. 01:11:44 Speaker 3: And probably faster to. 01:11:45 Speaker 2: That well well, so that was interesting. What we found is that when they started off, if so we would these are search and rescues, so we you know, we'd give them a sniff of a T shirt or something, and they take off first. Once they have the scent, they know exactly what they're going. They start off fast with the trailing hitting air in the air, but then if they start losing it, then they slow down. They're still trailing and they slow down. But then if they then they start you see him circling, so they after if they slowed they slowed down, and now they're circling like ten twenty yards away from the trail and they're they're and they're they're still trailing, but they're circling. Then they really lost it. Then they they they may move like up to like forty yards away from the trail. They're circling and they're on their ground on the ground. So and what we found is when you had the like here was a trail and if there was a big wind coming the actual there was a lot of probably these heavy molecules blown down off the trail because there was this one place where our our the track went next to small hill there was wind coming down and all the dogs kind of scooped down so they didn't stay on the trail. They still Yeah, so it's like the exactly they they and they're so accurate and and so but but that so there was like three strategies, you know, and basically, when you know what, you know exactly where you're going, your your high speed air and then if you start not sure, you move away from the trail and now you're you're using air, but you're moving, you know, you're kind of circling your you're away from this. 01:13:33 Speaker 3: Once they start circling, they've lost it. They're looking they lost. 01:13:37 Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. Yeah, And that's exactly what you see in all animals butterfly, you know, and moss. I mean, all animals that orient to space. Humans. We've done this in humans in virtual environments. You know, it's casting. You know, they're trying to find the plume and and yeah, and then but they didn't really do the head down to the ground unless they were really lost. And then they're looking for like some big heavy molecules. But so I think it's it's like, you know, if you want to go fast find them, you want you know, you want to just his air. But then if you lost it, then you have to Okay, you know, you got to do something slower, harder. But then you say, okay, that is they were here. 01:14:21 Speaker 3: Do you think that can be trained? 01:14:23 Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely? I mean I mean these search dog people I worked with Shay Cook and others, I mean they start training their dogs when they're eight weeks old. I mean they you can't just take any dog. And I mean, you know, well search and rescue is a whole training thing. 01:14:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, but I bet. 01:14:42 Speaker 2: I mean I think so. I think you've got breed differences. You know, obviously hounds, beagles, I mean they are all no's but so you but you've got layers. So you've got the breed, You've got personality, which is going to very within a litter. Then you've got experience, which is training, and then its own experience maybe also you know, they're gonna learn from each other, so like, is there a really experienced dog that is leading the pack that other the younger dogs can pick up on. So all that's gonna and you know, complexity, which is probably why you end up with some amazing dogs, you know, that are doing things. Shay had a dog, Zinca, who she was hired to go to an orchard in southern California to find a you know, an invasive pest insects pest. And this was like five acre orchard and the dog found both the insects you know, I mean, and didn't look and because she trained her on that insect, I mean that's the other thing. Oh tiny tiny you know, like not like a big old cocka no, no, no, little a little tiny thing. And and you were asking about, you know, can they learn different things? Well that you know, you've got the dog who's only will go for blood or or go for whatever's coming out of the hoofs I mean search and rescue. You've got car you know, you've got cadaver versus live, you know, and and I mean we you know, we also and you can have six people run out into a field site and the dog is only supposed to find one person, and that dog will only go to that one person. 01:16:36 Speaker 1: Yeah, that level of details. 01:16:38 Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, that question on that. 01:16:41 Speaker 1: Question of of that, there's certain climatic conditions that are good for a dog or any animal smell. Yeah, I'm assuming to be saying for like like so in general, you say, can can you hit me again real quick? 01:16:54 Speaker 2: No, it's it's a physics really, So it's more humid is better, and that it turns out that's because water molecules. There's only so many places that an odor can sit on the surface, and when there's a lot of water molecules in the air, they fill up all those places and so odor molecules stay in the air. That's this is what the physicists have. 01:17:20 Speaker 1: Really have said. Yet it seems like and it's warm better than cold, and. 01:17:25 Speaker 2: Warm is better than cold because warm is more You've got more air movement, I mean, molecules move more when when it's warmer. So you want but you don't want you So you want warm and human and probably a textured surface, not like you know, not bare rock. 01:17:48 Speaker 1: But assuming that, like assuming that through time odors degrade, yes, would there ever be a situation? Could it be that you went somewhere, a dog went somewhere, and it was and the coldest part of the day, So there's already an odor laid down, okay, and animal's already gone by. Yeah, you take your dog there the coldest part of the day. Yeah, and it can't do it. It's good, but it ever makes sense you'd be like, I'm gonna come back when it warms up and let them take another swing out. Now the odor is older. But would the climatic conditions ever override the age and somehow activate the odor? 01:18:29 Speaker 2: I bet, I know, I bet they would. I bet they would. And then the other thing is, you know, dogs have a really interesting way that they activate odors in the ground. So when they I mean, you know, the dog knows they got two holes in front, right, they're bringing odor in, and when they sniff in they in the back, there's like a little valve that opens up, and that odor gets sucked in that valve and goes right up to this place where like you know, that collects all the odors for detecting. Then that's an inspiration. Right when they're there's they're breathing in. When they breathe out, that valve closes and they breathe out through the those slits on the side, and that sends the air to the side and down and backwards, and so when they breathe out, they're not contaminating what they're trying to breathe in with what they're breathing out. 01:19:31 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:19:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, this is Gary Settles did. This work is amazing, amazing work. And it's even more amazing is that he showed he studies aerodynamics that when they they jet air out of the slits of the nose, it becomes turbulent and it actually creates a little turbulent field like this is when the dog's nose is close to the ground, and that turbulent field moves forward and sucks air from in front of the nose into the towards the nose. So when they breathe out, so it's like this incredible feedback where the dog as he's breathing out, he's also making the odors ahead of him come towards him. 01:20:18 Speaker 1: God's growble. 01:20:21 Speaker 3: So I think we've kind of covered this, but just just so that all the hound folks out there know. But like there's someone that lives in Texas and doesn't want dogs that run bobcats, only wants them to run lions. Oh yeah, he seems to have successfully done so. And you feel like that's that should be very easy to do, very training. 01:20:44 Speaker 2: Absolutely, I mean that's what the search and rescue people do all the time. I mean they all I mean they will train one dog to do one thing, or they will train to I mean, I think they're dogs that do more than like do cadavers and live humans and you know, and then there's drug dogs that are only looking for one kind of drug. 01:21:02 Speaker 1: So it seems like from what you're saying, it seems like it could be possible not only for it to know a mountain lion from a bobcat, but it to know that mountain lion from that mountain lion. 01:21:11 Speaker 2: Absolutely absolutely, and maybe you could say train it just to go for female you know, bobcats I mean they would be able to do that. 01:21:19 Speaker 1: They know that absolutely. 01:21:20 Speaker 2: I mean, you know you'd have to. I wouldn't want you to do that, and I don't know how you do that, but but there. 01:21:28 Speaker 1: Smell would be that that it could tell. 01:21:30 Speaker 2: The difference, right, I mean it just like you know, the kangaroo knows that that was a Tasmania devil that has eaten kangaroo. There's you know, mice voles. Actually two males know that that male has eaten in last twelve hours and this one hasn't. So this one is more of a competitor because it's you know so I mean, it's just like it's there's there's a massive amount of there's no privacy in old faction. Everything that you are comes out through your skin and an animal and their scent marks and oh that's the other thing is scent marks. How do you how you know odors like when animals, you know, urinate defcade. I mean there's a lot of oils and heavy molecules and those all prevent the odors from evaporating. And so if you're like, if you're marking what you on purpose, you want you know, everyone to know that that's your territory and I marked it, and you don't want it to disappear because you want them to think I just marked it, because that means I was just there. And animals are really sensitive to how long an odor has been was last there and in fact, oh this was a dog. Result is that if you take a search dog and you bring them in at a right angle to a trail, and are they going to turn left or right to follow a human? Well, there's two studies of this and where they only need five human footsteps to know which way the human went. And that's so you've got a human who laid down a trail like you know, twenty minutes ago, and the dog comes in and three steps isn't enough. Five steps isn't enough. That means that the light volatiles have you know, have blown off the difference between the first step and the fifth step. 01:23:30 Speaker 1: I mean, so he can go like weaker, weaker, take five steps stronger. 01:23:35 Speaker 2: Stronger exactly, And so they know that the mike prey is going, you know, went left, not right. And so that's the kind of discrimination between you know, a human wearing shoes five steps that the dog knows that that's the difference I mean, and that was and they were stepping on carpet, so it wasn't like crushed vegetation or anything. I mean, it was really just the steps. 01:24:00 Speaker 3: So it should be I mean, if it's doing that with a human in boots, it should be no different with a lion or a bobcat. 01:24:09 Speaker 2: Or because they're sweating through their pads. I mean, animals have all these sweat glands in their pads to protect them. So yeah, I mean, they're just. 01:24:18 Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, I know from a fact I've watched him do it. I can explain all the conditions if you want, but this is a fact. The short version of We're out there together mingus and I my bluetick hound dog, and he's maybe twenty yards down the hill from me, and we both kind of come up on a track at the same time, and I go, oh, I think that's a mountain lion track. Wow, before I've really looked closely, and he immediately boo starts going off. He starts going one direction and does not change directions. This track has quite a bit of fresh snow on it from the morning, but it's obviously fresh enough that he's smelling through that fresh snoe. I couldn't tell which way it was going until the track went underneath a tree where there was less snow and that could finally see the toes. Yeah, he ran that track backwards. I'm guessing seven hundred to one thousand yards the wrong direction. Eventually he turned. Yeah, so is he just. 01:25:19 Speaker 2: You know, he is he and his head up right, he's trailing. He's going for its air. You know, he knows that he sniffs the trail, he knows there's a mountain lion. Yeah, there's I mean, what was the wind that day? 01:25:32 Speaker 3: There was probably it wasn't dead calm, yeah, something. 01:25:36 Speaker 1: But this is generally, this is like a general thing that people sort of know, is it. A beagle can very quickly figure out what way a rabbit went, but a hound can't quickly figure out what way. 01:25:52 Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting. 01:25:53 Speaker 1: But here's the key difference. A beagles are is working something that happened two minutes ago. Oh okay, he's working effectively. 01:26:01 Speaker 2: What happened and nose down, nose down right the beagle. The beagle is doing nose down, so it's working on big molecules that are being left by the body, you know, whereas the but that's a very slow way to work, as opposed to the hound, which is like I'm moving after a mountain lion. That's a big animal moving very fast. I need to use air, right because I've got to go far. And so maybe occasionally that's a mountain lion. But now the wind has come in and it's shifted it over like that we've seen with our search dogs. They shift over and so it's it's picking up a molecule, you know, a volatile molecule, and the volatile molecules are this way, and then it gets to a point where it's like, you know what that's that's the wrong way, and then it's going to come back. 01:26:48 Speaker 1: No, what he means is he's following it like I missing. Like like, okay, let's say you let's say a rabbit is scared. A dog scares around. You scare a rabbit, yea, you see, rabbit takes off and then someone's like, oh, here comes the beagle. So you know what way the rabbit was, Here comes the beagle. That beagle is going to almost instantly know what direction of travel. It's not going to run it backwards. 01:27:20 Speaker 2: Right, but that's like the dog, it's going to go the way it went. 01:27:23 Speaker 1: But that's like, but that's a minute's old trail. But like, like I think what he's saying, his dog went didn't know the way the lion was going, and he went seven hundred one thousand yards in the wrong direction. 01:27:39 Speaker 2: Right, completely wrong. 01:27:41 Speaker 3: Well, he's literally following the trail backwards backwards. 01:27:45 Speaker 2: Oh, he's following it backwards. 01:27:47 Speaker 1: He's not putting together that it's getting older and older and older. 01:27:50 Speaker 2: Oh that's very cool. Okay, because number one is snow. So it's cold, it's not great conditions, and so. 01:27:57 Speaker 3: Any snow is going to be bad. 01:27:59 Speaker 2: Well harder, I think harder, definitely harder. So like, what what do beagles do in the snow? I guess that would. 01:28:07 Speaker 1: Be But they're fat, they're fine. But again, yeah, he's dealing like just the nature of hunting rabbits with a beagle, because you're dealing with things that just happened right right, right, So but with the like in that situation, you're dealing with things that are hours ago. 01:28:23 Speaker 2: Right, But but it do beagles mostly hunt nose down? Also? Okay, okay, so that's a completely different So now your dog needs to hunt. No, it's an old trail. It's gotta hunt nose down, it's got to go for the heavy things, right and hepper. You know again that that study showed that to do those heavy ones, you can do direction, but you need a certain amount of data to get the direction correct. And so you've got an old trail in the snow, so you've got two strikes against you. 01:28:55 Speaker 3: And so. 01:28:58 Speaker 2: There's probably enough odor in that trail that it knows that that's a mountain lion, but there's not enough odor. They're not getting the oh, because the volatiles are gone. It's an old trail, so you need the volatiles to knowin you know, for an old trail, like the Beagle probably is getting volatiles too, you know, because it's a brand. It's just happened. So you've got an old trail. So all it's left are the big heavy molecules, the volatiles that. 01:29:27 Speaker 3: Can you just just define and explain the volatiles little. 01:29:31 Speaker 2: Okay, just little things that that evaporate into the air, little molecules. 01:29:37 Speaker 3: You know. 01:29:37 Speaker 2: It's like if if I'm sure you know all this in perfume people talk, I'm just joking, but but if you wear perfume, they're base notes, and there's top notes. And when you put perfume on your skin, the first thing you smell is a top note, and it's the it's the small molecules that come off first, and then then an hour later, then it's a it's a different perfume. It smells on your skin smells it's a base note, because that's now you're the top notes are burnt off and now you're getting a base are gone, right, and so so you've got so perfume. People you know, and they know top notes, middle notes, based it's the same thing. And so you're basically an old trail. The top notes are gone, they've all evaporated, you know before, and so what's left is enough, you know, to know that that's a mountain lion. And this is a this is a fairly I mean, if that was a month old trail in the snow, you dog might not even I mean, the dog still might know it's a mountain lion. But it's like that trail is so old, I'm not gonna bother. Yeah, I'm never gonna some of it is a dog saying I'm gonna you know, it's not it's not worth my time. But your dog going doing a one eighty means that it's missing those little molecules that come off early that tell it. Because that's like literally think about the difference between the step one and step five. That is like you know, one second, I mean difference, and that's how old. 01:31:09 Speaker 1: So but that's helpful with a rapidly dissipating thing, right exactly so, because these same dogs, if they're chasing a raccoon, they know the way the raccoon went. But that's all new stuff right now, that's tonight. They're like they're at midnight. They're at midnight. They're talking about what happened at eleven pm exactly. His dog at eight am is maybe talking about what happened at one am. 01:31:36 Speaker 2: You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, the day before exactly, or even even you know, if it's important, I mean, if you've got a buck, you know, chasing a dough, I bet there could be you know, even longer. In fact, squirrels they know not only they smell and they smell a female at like these a ground squirrel, say, males come up and they smell a female and they know that she's like three days away from being receptive, and they come back three days later, you couldn't know. 01:32:11 Speaker 3: So certainly if a buck deer would do that with a total. 01:32:14 Speaker 2: Totally, it's like she's not ready yet. Yeah, yeah, and they that's what I can tell you where I'll be on Tuesday, Yes, exactly, exactly. 01:32:25 Speaker 3: Let's talk about time. 01:32:26 Speaker 2: Time is that's the one thing that I really think of odor as space and time, because every time you put an odor down, it starts a time, it starts to stop watch sure, and anyone smelling it knows when they were there. 01:32:40 Speaker 3: Yeah, So let's talk about that, like conditions that either preserve or degrade the sense that these dogs or whoever is trying to follow. 01:32:50 Speaker 2: Well, you know, that's why cats cover their you know, animals cover their poops and I mean cover their scats and things like that. Or why you've got you know, bears, you know, reaching really high up and and marking trees because they've got scent glands. I'm sure they've got must have scent glands in their in their paws, and so they're leaving individual signature. They're also telling another bear that I am that tall, you know, because you can't fake it. They don't have little step stools, you know why dogs pee as high up as they can into into like texture surface, so that's gonna stay longer anything, you know, textured. But animals really care about how long scent lasts. Mice males have something called a mouse urinary protein, and it's this massive protein that only males. Males produce enormous quantity and it all the only function is is to make the the volatiles not evaporate so quickly. So and they're because they're competing. I mean, it's just like coyote or wolves there, anything that's sent marking territorial. Mice are very territorial, and so they're marking their territory and they want so another male coming in. So oh that male was just there. He's you know, he's defending this space. I'll back off. 01:34:14 Speaker 1: A cat scratching if it, if it, if it that should be covering its own scat or covering its own iran is you think it's like he's trying to get it to stick around, not trying to destroy it. Yeah, he's trying to get it from dissipating. 01:34:30 Speaker 2: I think so, I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not totally sure about that. That could be. That could also be trying to you know, cats are small, reducing scent so that predators don't know you're around. Also that that's a possibility. 01:34:44 Speaker 1: Or they make marks like like yes, they they make visual marks. 01:34:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and that and that's you know, but you've got like mountain lions will you know, berry prey that's so like other animals don't find it it And hyenas cash bones in water holes so that they absolutely. 01:35:06 Speaker 1: No one can smell it. 01:35:08 Speaker 2: That's definitely trying to hide it. Yeah, but a lot of but you know, you can see scent scat piles by coyotes or wolves. I mean they're they just keep marking the same place. I mean this is like really obvious visual you know, I am here, I was just here. I mean this has been studied a lot. It's in there's studied hamsters that they also do something called countermarking, So one animal will mark, and then the other one comes and marks over it. And and they did the study where instead of having two animals mark, they painted with a paintbrush a broken line and then a and then a solid line, so from two different hamsters, and so it looked like this, the solid line had come after the broken line but they had actually been done at the same time it was, but the geometry of the mark would have suggested that one of them was later and therefore dominant. And then when they set those two males up as contestants, they treated they treated that male as dominant, even though the whole thing had been set up by the experimenters. Really yeah, yeah, So that means so when you know, when you see scat piles, they probably coyotes. And while they probably know they know who's done it, when they did it, who did it? Let you know, I mean there's just this all this thing. Yeah, I mean, there's just it's like the it's like the internet, it never goes away, it's all there. They smell it. I mean I think I think dogs probably learned to ignore something that's not going to pay off. I mean, that's you know, it's not so the question is do they they smell it or is it or is it they don't think it's worth it. And to do that you need to bring them into the you know, into like an experiment where you collect these scent samples and you say, can you tell me which one you know, is this a mountain lion or which one's older you should you know, you ask them which one's older, they should be able to, you know, tell you that, and you know, press a lever for the older one. And so I mean that's the kinds of those are kinds of experiments you could do with dogs to find out because I bet they know a lot more than we we know. 01:37:38 Speaker 3: In the case of like holding scent and these conditions that might prolong scent being there and get rid of it, like is there you said, Obviously, textures are good because it's just like little nooks and crannies. I'm guessing for these heavier molecules to sit in and get held. Is there something that wheres snow in some form because it's you know, you're was pressing it into a medium that it would hold scent molecules, or because there again, there are times where I can clearly see that it's a mountain lion track, but my dog is not interested, and it's like it's visually there, but somehow the scent has literally well it's all so disappeared from it. 01:38:16 Speaker 2: I mean it's also cold. It's wet, but it's cold, yeah, and that's the and cold is it makes it harder to the molecules. Literally, it's you know, Brownie in motion. The molecules are not moving, and so they're just like they're. 01:38:32 Speaker 3: They need molecules moving to be able. 01:38:34 Speaker 2: To because they've got to Yeah, they got to get it in their nose. And if it's all I mean, so normally, you know, if they're smelling close to the ground, the molecules are you know, they're kind of dancing above the ground and they're be able to smell them, and they sniff them and they're sucking up the air and they're sniff sniffing them in. 01:38:54 Speaker 3: So it's literally the air next to said surface, not the surface itself. 01:39:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean right, because the surface they're trying to get they can't smell the surface. They have to smell things in the air, and so they they're you know, they they're going sniff, sniff, sniff. And then of course when they're expiring, they're they're setting up these little they're agitating it so they're they're bringing up anything that's on the ground, they're bringing it up into air and then they can suck it in and find out what it is. But they I mean, so the same thing when they're there might be a you know, a hard surface or clothing or something, and to smell it, they still need those molecules to be in the air. They can't they can't stuff a piece of cloth in their nose and say that's what it is. It has to be something that's got to come off the surface into air into to get into their nose. So if it's cold, I think molecules are just not going to be moving as much. Their nose isn't probably going to be working as well. I mean, I imagine if you, if you, if you, if you took like a hand warmer and put it on the on the on the on the footprint and heated it up that way, that would be interesting. I wonder if that was I might. 01:40:19 Speaker 1: Excite some activity there for something. Let me ask you a series of quick questions, like so, just like what one's better like if as a as a surface for an animal to detect odor on. Okay, so like gym floor, gravel driveway, I'd. 01:40:38 Speaker 2: Say, well for detection, the same temperature and the same wind. And I think actually the gym floor because things are not going to stick to it, so they're gonna be more they're gonna you know, the same wind is going to pick things off the gym floor. But if you want to know, twenty four hours later where where there might be a cold trail, then I would say the gravel, because it would have gone down into the crevices and it would there would still be stuff there. I guess actually, so that would be I would say the if what are you going for? You're going for the heavy molecules or the light molecules. 01:41:17 Speaker 1: I just I didn't think it through that far. 01:41:19 Speaker 2: I didn't. I mean, I'm doing this on the fly, but I but I think, yeah, because a smooth surface, you know, it's a smooth surface. Molecules volcils are just gonna you know, blow stay stay aloft. 01:41:35 Speaker 1: But it won't have the holding power. 01:41:36 Speaker 2: Won't of the holding powers. 01:41:37 Speaker 1: I mean, I'm gonna do one more. Okay, a rock hard frozen lake, just pure flat clear ice, yeah, or a lake with an inch of snow frozen lake, inch of snow. 01:41:52 Speaker 2: I think an inch of snow. I mean one thing a frozen lake is going to have. It's going to be it's cold, it's probably gonna be windy. Everything is gonna get blown off, and whereas the snow has some texture to it, so it can hold onto stuff, and snow is actually going to keep things warmer because you know it's slightly warmer under snow. 01:42:15 Speaker 1: Maybe cutty one more, Yeah, smooth granite surface inch of snow like smooth granite, dry surface, smooth granite surface with an inch of snow. 01:42:30 Speaker 2: Yeah. I again, I think it would be if you've got an animal that's moved fast over the smooth granite and you're right on top of that animal, then there that granite is gonna lift. There's gonna be a lot of voltiles in the air, and so that that dog with his nose up in the air is going to do. Would It's gonna have a lot of information. But if it's a little older than the snow is, maybe's going to hold some of those large molecules. And I'm not a hunter, and I'm completely completely wrong about all this, but. 01:43:09 Speaker 1: That's my This isn't hunt questions, this is smelling question. 01:43:12 Speaker 3: But I think what Steve is getting out a little bit, and I think it must have been in here somewhere, is that the dry ground versus a wet ground or what would be called like a snow type hunt. 01:43:26 Speaker 1: There's a debate here that you'll think is interesting. 01:43:30 Speaker 3: In Arizona and the Southwest, the hounds are constantly having to work in drag conditions, right, no, snow right right right, the northern tier of the Rockies, we're always running tracks in the snow. I think it's a common belief that the dry ground hounds have it harder. 01:43:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because it's I mean, when all else fails, humidity, you know, I mean, so you've got it hot and dry. That's that's what our dogs they were the worst hot and dry, and they're better when it's cold and humid. No, we weren't working in snow, but maybe that's the same thing. 01:44:11 Speaker 1: Well you're talking, but you're talking about the snow's ability because this is cold, this old stuff, old information, right, the snow's ability to hang on to some old information. 01:44:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And and and snow does I mean that's why animals burrow in snow. I mean it's warmer. You're warmer in the snow than you are exposed. 01:44:32 Speaker 3: So yeah, no, this has been really interesting because I think you're you are you know, you're clearing it up. But I think for reasons that maybe a lot of hound hunters hadn't thought about, right, that it's really about what's going on above the surface, not so much. 01:44:49 Speaker 1: That's right, that's interesting smelling just like definitionally has to be something that is in the. 01:45:01 Speaker 2: Air right right right, unless using the over a nasal system, unless they're tasting this, they're tasting it, which which is when licking it right exactly. 01:45:10 Speaker 3: Yeah, do you feel like when they're panting, so when they're working real hard, what's that what's that affecting that. 01:45:17 Speaker 2: That blocks their smell? They can't sniff and pant at the same time. Really, Yes, that definitely, there's yes, no, because you know you've you can't bring you bring air into that's just going straight into your lungs. You've got to bring it, you know, past the old factory epithelium. You're not You're not panting through your nose, You're panting through your your you know, your mouth. 01:45:41 Speaker 1: Yeah, Oh, I got to hit you with one about this whole dry ground humidity deal. So my buddy Kevin Murphy, he's a he's he likes to run rabbits with his beagles. He lives in Kentucky. He runs rabbits all over hell all the time. We took his beagles out to New Mexico in the flat out desert. Yeah, and put them on jack rabbits. Yeah, and also contil so same rats. 01:46:05 Speaker 2: Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. 01:46:07 Speaker 1: They couldn't do it. 01:46:08 Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe that. 01:46:09 Speaker 1: Oh that's and in his mind he's like, they're not used to hot and dry. 01:46:14 Speaker 2: Well no, I mean the hot and dry is harder period. And plus though these I mean, I mean, if we're thinking beagles are nosed down heavy molecule trackers, but still it's just not gonna. Yeah, they're gonna they they're using brand new and so they're they're gonna lost all their volatiles they're used to. I mean, they're you know, they're spoiled. They're in Kentucky. It's incredibly hot and human. They've got it's like a perfect old factory, you know, situation. And then it's just like I mean probably if you if you've kept those beagles in Arizona for a year, and they would learn. But but you just bring them out there and they're what, there's no information here. This is I can't do this. 01:47:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, there's people trying to figure out deer, you know, and they make synthetic sense o huh that are meant to you know, be like, not only is it a scent coming off the face of a deer, but it's this is specifically mimics the forehead gland or specifically mimic the the orbital or glands that are you know where they peon them on their right right right. So again just in your experience and messing around with sense, like, is it possible for us to just to make a synthetic scent that could that could fool a deer's nose? 01:47:39 Speaker 2: And so no, because hamsters have like the same thing. They've got like four different scent glands and they and so the lab work and this is I'm sure Drew for deer that they recognize individuals by all these different you know, but they know that that's the anal gland, and that's the chest land and that, but they also know it's that individual. So it's a really complicated signal. And you know, you've got a deer with five different scent glands. Everyone smells different, not you know, they're all different, they're different. For that they identify that individual. And now you're bringing something some generic thing you know that is generic hoc odor that or maybe you know it was it was synthesized for a deer in Wisconsin, but you're actually hunting in a completely completely different population. Probably they smell differently, like they're going like, who the hell is that? I don't know who that is? I mean, I've never or that's not even my neighborhood, that's not even my state, you know. I mean, sure if they came to Wisconsin and they synthesized you know, your five glands for each one of your dear even so, I think it'd be very confusing for the deer to know, like who the he? Who is that? I mean, that's a weird robot deer, you know, I mean, that doesn't make any sense. It's like if you showed up wearing a Halloween mask. You know, it's it's equivalent of you, of you wearing of doing something very weird. They recognize that it's deer, and they recognize that it's a scent, but they don't understand what it means. 01:49:30 Speaker 1: You know, like a stranger walking into your house and your kids like, oh, it's just a. 01:49:33 Speaker 2: Person, yeah, exactly, exactly. Sure. You know, if you're have dinner with us, you know, it's like no, no, no, that's exactly that's exactly right. Yeah, so I think that they're underestimating the deer's intelligence. And and also the other thing is that it might be that you know, I mean, in some populations, how do how are deers using these plans? You know, is that something that they're marking out territories or is it aggressive or you know, it's just it's it's kind of like it's a deer language and you're coming in with a big sign that says, you know, one thing, and the deer is going, what are you saying? I don't you know, They're just it's. 01:50:21 Speaker 3: So manufacturers will claim that, hey, you don't use this one during these dates. This one is specifically meant from October fifteenth and November one, when the when the box are going to be specifically going to the scrapes marking them in a very territorial fashion, right, right, And you want to basically introduce a stranger so that that box like, man, I don't know who's been hitting my scrape, but I need to come back here and keep putting my sense. 01:50:47 Speaker 2: That's right now, that's that's that that makes complete sense. You could they're marking and then then they're countermarking. That's right, so that's exactly what they happen. 01:50:55 Speaker 3: Do you feel like we could fool that bock enough to make him think that someone else is countermarking, so I need to come back and counter mark. 01:51:02 Speaker 2: I mean, the thing is if you if you give them an animal, something that's really really important, like and to a buck, whether I'm gonna reproduce that is everything, Like it doesn't I could. You know, it doesn't matter if I live or die. If I don't reproduce, who cares? So so that's life or death for a buck. So that would be this is weird, but I'm going to do it. It's kind of like when I was trapping squirrels and you know, for behavior, and you know when in the middle of the summer, you can trap any squirrel as much as you want, but as soon as the you know, the oaks start ripening again, the squirrels are going, I'm not going in that trap. I know it's a trap, it's a trade off. I'm like, I know it's a trap. I know it's you know, it's it could be bad, but I'm really hungry and I'm going to go for it. And and two weeks later it's like the same squirrel and. 01:51:54 Speaker 3: Then because because they know at that point they have enough to risk exactly. 01:52:00 Speaker 1: Know what's crazy about to ask. So we got a buddy, and we got a buddy in Arkansas, and they'll put out bait piles for bears, and in the summer, you might have seventeen eighteen bears on a bait pile. The minute the acorns hit, Yes, they're gone. 01:52:14 Speaker 2: Exactly. 01:52:15 Speaker 1: It's like, what can't be easier than a bait pile. No, No, But in their head, it's like, no, it's not easier to bait piles. It's less risky than a bay pile. 01:52:22 Speaker 2: It's well, I'm well, it's also you know, it's also not it's not as good. I mean, acorns are really highly nutritious, and I think I think that's actually because the same thing with squirrels, you know, they, I mean they evolve to eat acorns, and acorns are full of kinds of micronutrients that bait that there's no way I can't, I can't, you know, walnuts and peanuts. 01:52:45 Speaker 1: He's slumming it when he's on bait. 01:52:47 Speaker 2: Exactly, I mean hungry and slumming it. I think that's right. Yeah, yeah, I got one for. 01:52:52 Speaker 1: You about canines. And this is so like in the in the outdoors, in the world. Okay, there's this long running debate. If you went back, if you went back to nineteen eighty, right in nineteen eighty, there was an idea that you could that a fox trapper or a kyout trapper could wear rubber boots and slash wear rubber boots, slash around in the butt puddle, wear rubber gloves and wash them. Okay, that you could go and like set a trap and have it be that the fox or the kyout would never would not know that a human was there. You could make it that he was never there. Since nineteen eighty, the understanding has evolved to now where there's guys that don't even wear rubber gloves because in their mind they're like, there's nothing you can do. 01:53:50 Speaker 2: I think that's right. 01:53:51 Speaker 1: They always know you're there. You can play games. It knows you're there. Yeah, I mean you're tricking yourself to think that it doesn't. It's like it knows you're there. 01:54:00 Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, because you know, are we are dropping dead skin cells like thousands all day long, you know, and our you know, you've got these skin cells that are covered with bacteria, and the bacteria decomposing, and that makes your own your own particular odor. I mean, you're just leaving a stream of heavy, you know, pieces of tissue around you. So you're walking through the woods, you're just dropping trails. So it's not just your feet, it's like you're just dropping inform, you know that information. And again, if you're a it's you know, dinner or my life, and so so an animal who thinks you're you know, you're a predator, they just need one little whiff of that. 01:54:45 Speaker 1: And you think the idea that you would hide like and this is like not old, this is like yesterday, you think I'm saying. When I mean that, I mean that you think the idea that that twenty four hours later, that you could hang out in a place for a minute, hovering around place for a minute, that twenty four hours later, in your mind, it doesn't matter what you got on your hands. 01:55:05 Speaker 2: I think I think it's like there was a dude here. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think you know, unless you did all this masking and all this kind of but just your yourself with with gloves, without gloves, I think they was still no. 01:55:18 Speaker 3: Yeah, but this masking that you speak of, that's what we're interested in. 01:55:22 Speaker 2: I know, I know, I know, well so then but I don't know. I mean again, you know, animals, It's like, actually, I've got you know, mice in my car, and so what really works are these these rodent you know, smelly packets. You know, you get these herbal packets. Yeah, and they you know, you put them and and and I thought that I was just realizing I was putting them in yesterday. 01:55:45 Speaker 1: Because you have mice vandalizing your car. 01:55:47 Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yeah, I just and yesterday, like before I flew out here, I turned on the you know, the air vents, and all this mouse beddings blowing out. It's like I got mice back around. You live on a farm, yeah, yeah, and we get the mice, you know, deer mice all over the place. And I realized, no, no, no, it isn't that they don't like the smell of this fragrant thing. It's not. It's that it masks their own odor that they can't It confuses them if they're We're moving around this dark car using a lot of odor. And I've got all these big stinky packets that people buy for their cars and their trucks and everything is like it's just it's disorienting. It's like having wind, so I think, and. 01:56:34 Speaker 3: Again it's like a blind spot, like you said before, it's like that odor blind spot. And they don't like that. 01:56:38 Speaker 1: But that's what you're saying. Is an interesting point about this issue is like in our minds. Okay, when I say artists mean collectively, like people that are trying to trick animals in your mind, you're creating an atmosphere that he'll be comfortable being in but just won't be able to tell what's going on. And you're saying you might be creating an atmosphere with the they don't want. 01:57:00 Speaker 2: To be in it, right, right, right, because you know. 01:57:03 Speaker 1: It's like you're creating a confusing. 01:57:04 Speaker 2: Information is safety? Right? I mean you wouldn't want to be in a space that you didn't know where anything was. I mean that's very dangerous. I mean animals number one, where am I that they they use visional faction. I mean they use everything they can. And and then there's home court advantage. You know, animals are safer in spaces where they know they have escape routes. You know, they know where the predators are. They know who the predators are. All that stuff is very important. So you come in and you do make it chaos. I don't you know. 01:57:40 Speaker 1: I want to tell you a story though. It's kind of what you're talking about in the way with humans. So my buddy, my buddy. I have a buddy in Hawaii, Danny Bolton, and they have a they have a coffee plantation, like a family property, and he's got all these bananas banana trees. I think at once upon time they were like cultivated intentionally, but now it's just like scattered banana trees. I was out there with my kids and they're trying to find a like a bundle of like ripe bananas, which you can't find because everybody's always in there getting the bananas. He says, Though, if you really want to find right bananas, you gotta go. They have this pile where they make their own fish based fertilizer, So they have a place where they're really like they're rotting down fish carcasses. He says, I guarantee you'll find right bananas there because no one wants to go there. Oh, so you go down to the rotten fish pot and it's right, bananas all over the place, because it's like he just finds over the years that people are like they hit that wall of stench and they and they go look for bananas somewhere. I tell you that's and it worked. There's like right bananas. 01:58:53 Speaker 2: You know, that's animal behavior. That's perfect animal behavior. That's exactly how that's exactly how you should think about deer here in the woods. 01:59:00 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:59:01 Speaker 3: I think we'll be remiss if we have a gray squirrel expert here and we don't hit on like you got to tell us like what's cool about gray squirrels and their noses? And I don't know if we want to talk about caching. 01:59:16 Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I mean so my PHG thesis they remember where they bury their nuts, And recent work we did in California was that squirrels, when they bury nuts, we gave them a random series of nuts of different species. They organize them by species so that they would move so that the walnuts are here, almonds are there, hazel nuts are there, Like. 01:59:46 Speaker 3: You give them a pile and there'd be three of each. 01:59:48 Speaker 2: No, no, we give them one at a time so that they didn't know what was coming next, so they all of a sudden, we give them a walnut, and they carry the walnut that far. We've actually also showed an earlier study that they measure the weight of the nut by shaking it. So if you watch it, squirrel, give a scroll a nut, put it in the nut in the mouth. They go like that. And that's just like if you had something really light and you wonder how heavy is that you do that and so it's four sequels and masstimes acceleration. It's Isaac Newton. I got to you know, I get to say that it's true. But they measure it, and then depending on how heavy the nut is, they carry it farther away from the source tree where all the other squirrels are. You don't you want to get it far away and cash it so that other squirrels don't find your cash. So the bigger the nut, the farther they cash. 02:00:44 Speaker 3: It, and it's more valuable. 02:00:46 Speaker 2: It's more valuable. And they not only that, but then if it's really valuable nut, they cash them further apart, so that really if one squirrel finds it, then they start looking like this, they don't find the next one. So if you give them polio completely, that's exactly the same thing, you know. And so you've got the density of a hazel nut is like this, an almond is like this, and a walnut is like that, you know. And so if you give these squirrel a random series of nuts, you give them a nut they make, they weigh it, then they go out and cash it, and they're cashing it in the walnut area, and then they come back and say, almond. Now they've got to go cash in the almond area. And then they come back and they cash, you know, and every time they go out they have to remember where the other one was, so they have to keep the the density right, yeah, and they do that because we're marketing it. 02:01:47 Speaker 1: Like can you can he keep how many walnuts? Can he keep tracking? 02:01:51 Speaker 2: We don't, we don't. We don't know. They cashed the houses probably three thousand a year of gray squirrel and and we know that in the lab they can remember, you know, they can accurately remember like seven of ten. But I you know, we no one's figured out yet how to measure how much they remember in the in the field. The thing is the squirrels are actually they cash in you know, August September, and then they're they're cashing in their area, in their home area, and so they are out they're active all winter. And if you look at a squirrel November December, I mean all winter, they're out there sniffing the ground and you'll see them sniff the ground even through snow and sniff and then they'll but if there's like just leaves and they're like checking cashes, and then they they and then they'll put the leaves back on it and they'll go the next one. And then sometimes they'll dig them up and move them. So they're constantly managing them, you know, all all winter. So it's I don't think they actually have to remember them for nine months. I mean they eat them, they cash them in August, they finish them, you know, April something like that, and so but not I mean there are birds that cash them, Clark's nutcrackers, you know, cashs pinion seeds in August September, and then they may not retrieve them until March. And so those really under deep snow. So those animals, they really are remembering exactly where they are. 02:03:16 Speaker 1: But a squirrel's constantly fiddling with them and passing over them and re smelling them. 02:03:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they can remember, but they don't have to. I mean some mammals are I mean, squirrels are interesting because they've got really good memory. But they they can also smell, whereas most birds. There's actually I just saw magpies, yester. I love magpies. Magpies actually have a good sense of smell, and they can if you coat a raisin in cod liver oil and bury it, a magpie can find it. That was the study showing that because they they're carrying eaters, they're probably you know, like ravens and magpies, they're probably attracted to smells. But squirrels, squirrels can do both. They can smell or they Yeah, you get starting squirrels. You know, it would be another three hours. 02:04:04 Speaker 1: So I remember. But we had a squirrel expert on one time years ago. 02:04:09 Speaker 2: John was John Brows. 02:04:11 Speaker 3: Yeah, pulled it out. 02:04:13 Speaker 1: Yeah he's doing this up. See. I remember he's an expert on this. I remember reading in headlines. I remember at one point in time reading in the headline that someone's like, squirrels can't that they they don't get their own cash nuts any more reliably than somebody else's. That's not I mean, that's not true. 02:04:34 Speaker 2: Not true. I mean that that's what you know. I mean I've been literally studying this since nineteen eighty one. 02:04:39 Speaker 1: So they're more likely to go find their own than they are to find somebody else. 02:04:43 Speaker 2: Yes, And what I saw in I just like like ten yard by five yard arena where I had hand raised squirrels that were you know, and what would I put in decoys? Their own cashes and then decoys. And if a squirrel came up and there were like two nuts right next to each other, one was his and one was a decoy, if he'd hit the decoy first, he'd keep going. So I think his memory was like, there's one there, but if I find one, so he's not using smell because he was, then he would go to the one that was like two inches away, but he wasn't. He would just go on to the next one, so like a little name going boom boom, boom boom. And I studied the same thing in kangaroo rats and Miriam's kangaro rats, which are they hoard like squirrels? And I found sex differences there that was interesting. The males were more likely to use odors. They are more likely to find cases that still had seeds in them, and females. We had a bunch of landmarks around, and females as long as the landmarks were there, females were super good at that. And males didn't use the landmarks as much and they were more likely to use their nose. But that's a whole other area of research I've I've studied for a lot is sex differences in landmark use in kangaroo rats and and and humans. And you know, male refrigerator blindness. I'm sure you've heard of that. No, this is where you know the a man goes to refrigerator and says, where's the butter? Oh yeah, and opens up and says, I don't see it. I don't see it, and then you know it's actually right right there. So I mean, it's just. 02:06:28 Speaker 1: I call that all three of my kids refrigerator blindness. Oh yeah, yeah, terrible. 02:06:34 Speaker 2: Anyway, shut out. Do you see similar things in kangaroo rats? That's all I'm saying. 02:06:38 Speaker 1: You know, So you're when we're your when we're your book on squirrels be ready. 02:06:42 Speaker 2: So probably I'm hoping it'll be come out like fall of twenty seven, and what will be called it's called The Wealth of Squirrels, and it's it's it's really about you know, the economics of of hoarding in squirrels and and all everything I've just been talking about. 02:07:02 Speaker 1: It'll be like is it intended as a popular book. 02:07:04 Speaker 2: It's going to be a popular book. 02:07:06 Speaker 1: For Joe Blow not not like not like an academic. 02:07:09 Speaker 2: Okay, and can I I mean, you know, I've never done this before, so I'm a little cautious saying this, but but that's what. I've got a contract for this book from Harvard University Press, and they've agreed to let me write it as as a story actually, so it's really going to be a kind of a fictional story that is. So it's it really should be a fun, fun read. But it's going to be very you know, dense science. It'll all be based on science. No, no humans, just just squirrels. So experiment. We'll see. It's gonna John, I mean, people like, it's going to get peer reviewed too, so it's gonna the biology is going to be they won't accept it if the biology isn't absolutely right. The Wealth of Squirrels, The Wealth of squirrels. 02:07:58 Speaker 1: Okay, So stay listeners, stay too, And for doctor Lucia F. Jacobs The Wealth of Squirrels, and thank you for coming on today and explaining everything about how animals experience their world through smell. 02:08:12 Speaker 2: Thank you. This has been I have learned about and I've really enjoyed this. It's been great. 02:08:18 Speaker 3: Thank you very much. 02:08:19 Speaker 1: Thank you,