504. Introducing “Off Leash”

In this new podcast from the Freakonomics Radio Network, dog-cognition expert and bestselling author Alexandra Horowitz (Inside of a Dog) takes us inside the scruffy, curious, joyful world of dogs. This is the first episode of Off Leash; you can find more episodes in your podcast app now.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:07Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alexandra Horowitz.

• 2:46Alexandra Horowitz?

  Hi, Stephen. It's nice to talk to you.

• 2:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's nice to talk to you, too. Did you take your interesting vitamins this morning?

• 2:53Alexandra Horowitz?

  Yes, I'm ready.

• 2:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alexandra Horowitz is a writer and a cognitive scientist at Barnard College in New York, where she runs a dog cognition lab. She's also the host of a new podcast. It's called Off Leash, and it's part of the Freakonomics Radio Network.

• 3:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, I need you to fill in a couple blanks for me. Dogs are, to Alexandra Horowitz, as blank are to blank.

• 3:22Alexandra Horowitz?

  What they are to me is like ares to mammals. They're part of my existence.

• 3:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow.

• 3:30Alexandra Horowitz?

  And intrinsic to it and necessary for it.

• 3:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Without which you would die?

• 3:34Alexandra Horowitz?

  I don't mean to be dramatic about it, but they're, they're part of me, period.

• 3:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, it can't be just a coincidence that dog is God spelled backwards, can it?

• 3:46Alexandra Horowitz?

  I think you've got it mixed up. God is dog spelled backwards, obviously.

• 3:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That makes, that makes a lot more sense.

• 3:52Alexandra Horowitz?

  I know you'd get it.

• 3:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  So here's the story, the way I remember it. Maybe a year and a half ago, we had you on Freakonomics Radio in an episode of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club. And we talked about your first book, Inside of a Dog, which I had read years ago and loved and then reread it and loved it even more by that time I'd gotten a dog. People loved that episode. And then we decided, hey, maybe we should make a whole show. I'm curious if that gibes much at all, zero, with the way you remember it?

• 4:27Alexandra Horowitz?

  I think that is how I remember it. And, you know, I had thought of doing podcasts before, but it was only when you asked that I thought, OK, maybe this is a possibility. It reminds me of another thing I was just thinking about, which is sort of like, why would Freakonomics want to have Off Leash as a podcast, right? In my mind, the kind of hidden side of everything could also be a catchphrase for how I look at dogs, right?

• 4:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Alexandra Horowitz?

  There are these ubiquitous phenomena, these familiar creatures all around us. And there's just so much more to them if we just bother to look.

• 4:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me put you in the perhaps uncomfortable position of trying to persuade someone who doesn't have a dog and thinks they couldn't care less about dogs, why they still might want to listen to Off Leash.

• 5:11Alexandra Horowitz?

  That's not uncomfortable for me. I mean, I'm interested in dogs for the dog's sake. And I think there's lots to be learned about them. But they're also non-human animals. And as such, they serve as a way to reflect upon us human animals, to notice ourselves and others and how we think about or treat others. The people I'm speaking to in Off Leash aren't all dog experts. But we use dogs as a way to reflect on the experience of being human.

• 5:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  We are about to play, for Freakonomics Radio listeners, the first episode of your new show, Off Leash. This one is called Smell. Why is smell the first topic? What's so central about that?

• 5:57Alexandra Horowitz?

  It's the perfect first topic because I'm really interested in how the world looks to dogs, what it's like to be a dog. And that's going to start with their sense of smell, with how they perceive the world, which is nose first.

• 6:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  After people hear this episode on smell and they fall in love with your show, they'll go to their favorite podcast app and they will follow Off Leash. The third episode in the season is called Property.

• 6:21Alexandra Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 6:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tell us a little bit about that.

• 6:23Alexandra Horowitz?

  You know, most dogs are considered to be family members, but the law considers dogs to be things, property. And so in this episode, we really dive into that and talk about what it would mean for that status to change.

• 6:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. The fifth episode is called Strays.

• 6:42Alexandra Horowitz?

  I love this episode. I think this is one which has changed my thinking about dogs more than any other episode. This is about what researchers call free-ranging dogs, or we sometimes know as stray dogs, just all those other dogs, 70% of the dogs in the world who do not live inside human homes.

• 7:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow. 70%.

• 7:03Alexandra Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  And when you say this episode changed your thinking about dogs, how so?

• 7:08Alexandra Horowitz?

  We always assume, those of us who live with dogs, that dogs have a terrific life. But if 70% of dogs are stray, if we start to look at their lives, are their lives really so bad? I mean, they have a lot of freedoms that our dogs don't have. And so it just is another way to reflect on the nature of what the best thing is for dogs.

• 7:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I have to say, I've learned so much about dogs, especially my dog, from just hanging out with you and talking with you. So, you know, thanks for that.

• 7:43Alexandra Horowitz?

  You're welcome.

• 7:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  And congratulations on Off Leash. Personally, I think it's turned out amazingly well. I hope people not only do love it, but I really hope they'll tell their friends and family to listen to it. This episode you're about to hear is called Smell. Its host is Alexandra Horowitz, who I've been speaking with. And it sounds like this.

• 8:10Alexandra Horowitz?

  Imagine your first cup of coffee of the day. It smells terrific. You bring it up to your lips and you notice something. It's sweeter. Maybe someone has put a teaspoon of sugar in your black coffee by mistake. We might notice it by taste, not by smell. But a dog, a dog's nose would notice it. In fact, a dog's nose could detect that teaspoon of sugar if it had been added to a million gallons of water. That's two Olympic-sized swimming pools full. Dogs are creatures of the nose. In their noses, they have hundreds of millions more olfactory cells than we do in ours.

• 8:55Alexandra Horowitz?

  And those are the cells that translate a molecule into the experience of a smell. Welcome to Off Leash. I'm Alexandra Horowitz. This is the podcast where we explore the relationship between humans and dogs. I'll invite an interesting person and their dog to join me for a walk, and then we'll see where the walk takes us. OK, we've somehow ended up at a dumpster in a parking lot. As a researcher of dog cognition, I've studied what dogs can perceive with their noses. As a writer and person who lives with dogs, I'm always thinking about how dogs smell their way through their world.

• 9:39Alexandra Horowitz?

  Today, we'll talk to a detection dog handler about what her dogs are trained to sniff out for her. Our freezer is just a beautiful library of scat. But first, I take a walk with a restaurant critic and her dog, Lulu, and discuss the role smell plays in both their daily lives. She'll never forget that she smelled a rotisserie chicken there once. And we'll put our own noses to the test.

• 10:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whoa, I think I know what motor oil smells like now.

• 10:09Alexandra Horowitz?

  Ready to go for a walk?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Here, Lu, have a drink, have a drink.

• 10:20Alexandra Horowitz?

  That's Teijel Rao with her two-year-old pit bull mix, Lulu. Teijel is the California restaurant critic for The New York Times. She and Lulu are walking down a busy street in Los Angeles.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  I'm on Figueroa Street in Highland Park in northeast Los Angeles. There's a mix of barber shops, guys selling cold coconuts on the street and cut fruit, fancy grocery stores selling natural wine, chain bakeries. It's just a, it's a big mix.

• 10:53Alexandra Horowitz?

  What does it smell like?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Right now, I smell gasoline, yeast, roasted coffee, trash. What about you? Where are you?

• 11:04Alexandra Horowitz?

  I am in Riverside Park in New York City, where the sun is just setting and the purples and oranges are bleeding into each other. But there's a highway proximate to me, you might hear that, and there is a little bit of petroleum in the air and the overarching scent of New York dust.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  So we're passing an open pizza box with a slice of pepperoni on it in a parking lot, but I guess she doesn't have a taste for pepperoni pizza. It's funny because the things I see that I think are going to attract her don't, and then she's drawn to an invisible world that I can't access.

• 11:43Alexandra Horowitz?

  I wanted to walk with Teijel because she's a writer on food and a restaurant critic, so she's especially attuned, in a way many of us are not, to her sense of smell. Of course, the same could be said of her dog, Lulu, or her other dog, Kimchi.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  You know, I thought about bringing her along today, but she's 12 and she likes her afternoon naps, so I left her at home. But yeah, she's always had this really amazing ability. If we're at a park and a tennis ball has gotten hidden under a bench, or even a single piece of miniature kibble, she will find it. And there have been times where she's digging at the rug or trying to get under the couch, and I'm insisting there's nothing there. I've gotten on my hands and knees and I've checked, and there is definitely nothing there. And then I get really frustrated and move the couch. And she is completely right. There is a single piece of kibble wedged between the rug and the wall. And she absolutely knew it.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  I think she would have made a wonderful police dog in another life.

• 12:47Alexandra Horowitz?

  As someone who thinks about food professionally, Tejel was already keen on noticing smells. Back in October 2020, she published a piece in the New York Times called, "Building a Personal Smell Museum of Los Angeles", in which she collected smells meaningful to her in her neighborhood. Her neighbor frying onions, smoke from wildfires, and the tarry scent of roadwork. But shortly after the piece ran, everything changed.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  So a few months after I put together that museum of smells, I got COVID and lost my sense of smell. I realized when I didn't have my sense of smell, how much I needed it for just the most basic things, like frying garlic. There are all these little different moments before it's burnt, where you can stop it for different flavors. And I would miss them all, you know? At the same time, because I didn't have my sense of smell when I was eating for those couple of months, I didn't really know exactly what I'd gotten wrong, except for extremes. Like, I maybe knew if I'd burnt something, but all the sort of subtleties, everything in between was lost.

• 13:53Alexandra Horowitz?

  I sometimes feel like that is a way to describe the difference between the humans and the dog's sense of smell, like that we notice the real extremes.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:02Alexandra Horowitz?

  But not the middle. And maybe dogs are noticing the range of the middle.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  And that range is so wide. Yeah, that range is enormous.

• 14:12Alexandra Horowitz?

  Losing one's sense of smell, even if you're not working with food in your profession, can be depressing and disorienting. It's when we notice how much we rely on ordinary smells in daily life. The regular smell of your house or car. The familiar smells of people you know or places you go. And because so much of taste is based on smell, foods are reduced to sweet, salty, sour, and just some texture in the mouth. For a person who writes about food, that is devastating. So like many people who lose their sense of smell, Tejel tried something called smell training to try to reawaken her nose. It's a practice of daily repetitive sniffing of a few distinct odors. And after three weeks, her sense of smell returned.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  The very first thing I smelled again was horrible. The smell of soured milk in the fridge. I opened a liter of milk and it just rushed out. And it was like a reminder that my sense of smell is, in addition to being about pleasure and joy, kind of warning me all the time about things that are dangerous, right?

• 15:18Alexandra Horowitz?

  Did having that experience of the simultaneous feeling of disgust of the smell, but also the pleasure that's realizing that your smell had returned, has that changed how you feel about some of those disgusting smells?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just so grateful for all of it. When I was in the process of getting my sense of smell back, I would go outside when the garbage truck came down the street. I would just try and get as much information as I possibly could. I would drive with the windows open, and each dog would be at one of the open windows, and I would sort of be trying to do that too, you know? Trying to see what little fragments I could pick up in the air.

• 15:59Alexandra Horowitz?

  In some way, having your sense of smell leave and return might have made you closer to your dogs, or made you maybe appreciate their ability a little bit more?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. The other day, we were walking in the park and Lulu found a whole rotisserie chicken under a bush, like a jackpot. And every single day since then, she remembers. It's like the chicken is long gone, but it's like she has this map of smells.

• 16:29Alexandra Horowitz?

  Right.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  She knows our space so well by all the smells. She'll never forget that she smelled a rotisserie chicken there once.

• 16:38Alexandra Horowitz?

  Like, your smell museum idea is kind of like her making a smell map of the street, of knowing that's where the chicken was, this is where the bagel rolled under the bench or something. And maybe there is a little rotisserie smell remnant in the air.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  I always think about how she likes to stick her head out the window and just let the breeze hit her and her ears are flapping in the wind and her tongue is hanging out. And you can see that she's reading things so quickly, like she's getting so much information in just a second or two. And I wonder what it is that she's catching. But I don't know. And when I have been at a friend's house and come home, I know that she understands. I was just with two different cats and three different humans and we ate a lasagna.

• 17:34Alexandra Horowitz?

  In my own research on dogs' perception, I've confirmed that they do recognize their people by smell. And they can smell where you've been and who you've been with. Dogs know their own smell and their friends' smell. And they notice if the smell has changed, like looking in the mirror and noticing a new gray hair. And dogs do have a kind of smell map, so they're able to navigate by smell. As a result, their noses are brilliant at helping us humans locate things that we can't find on our own. You may have heard of drug or explosive detection dogs, bed bug detection dogs, search and rescue dogs. But did you know that there are dogs who can detect when a cow is in heat? Who can

• 18:16Alexandra Horowitz?

  sniff out counterfeit goods? Researchers are training dogs to detect cancer. And of course, recently, lots of programs are training dogs to smell COVID. But the happiest detection dogs might be the ones who work with Julianne Ubigo.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  I am a researcher at the University of Washington's Conservation Canine Program.

• 18:40Alexandra Horowitz?

  This canine program uses their noses to do a kind of wildlife forensics, finding traces of wild animal populations that researchers want to study but are too elusive or just too hard to locate. The traces that they're trained to sniff out? Wildlife scat.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  It's wildlife poop. It's the waste products of animals that...

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Actually has a lot of value. The center specializes in extracting DNA and hormone information from organic materials in order to learn more about endangered wildlife.

• 19:15Alexandra Horowitz?

  I'm imagining people listening to this and thinking, okay, so these dogs are sent out to find poop, basically. I have a dog who is always finding and consuming poop. And they might be thinking, wow, this is the life, right? This must be the most fun thing ever. And maybe my dog could be a detection dog.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  I used to say that most dogs can't do this work because you have to have a dog that, if given the opportunity to go get a ball that's laying on the floor or grab a piece of steak, we want the dog that goes for the ball and ignores the steak.

• 19:51Alexandra Horowitz?

  One thing I love about conservation canines is that they're all rescue dogs. And I've heard you say that you work with dogs who are called unadoptable. Can you explain what you mean?

• 20:03Speaker 03

  While many working dogs are bred to be a working dog, we're looking for dogs that have the right personality. And when visiting shelters, you see what dogs do not get adopted out and they're the ones that are, you know, quote unquote, crazy or too much energy, just not suitable for the home. That works really well for us because we want a dog that has lots of energy.

• 20:30Alexandra Horowitz?

  From the scat the dogs locate, the researchers back in the lab can figure out who the animals are, where they are, and what kind of shape they're in.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  We can get hormone measurements, which helps us determine how stressed or healthy or pregnant an animal is. We can also get a lot of DNA information that gives us population estimates on a species in the area. We can also get the DNA of the prey that the animal ate. And here, the animal doesn't even know that we were out there most of the time. We can find scat that was pooped five minutes earlier, but we can also find scat that's been there for more than a year.

• 21:07Alexandra Horowitz?

  I have a long list of animals. That the dogs have been trained on. And I want you to fill in any who I've missed. I have short-tailed weasels, cougars, saw-whet owls, tigers, lynx, wild boar, European badgers, pine martens, grizzly bear, wolf, coyote, lion, cheetah, wild dog, hyena, bats, pocket mice, salamander, fisher, wolverine, mink, the silver-spot caterpillar, whose scat is called frass.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:39Alexandra Horowitz?

  Did I miss any?

• 21:40Speaker 03

  Oh, swift fox, the feathers of goshawk and the pellets of a goshawk, and then the egg masses of the American bullfrog. We have quite the freezer. Our freezer is just a beautiful library of scat from studies going back 20 years now.

• 22:04Alexandra Horowitz?

  It also has whale scat. Julianne's first job as a handler was working with Tucker, an orca scat detection dog.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Orca-detection-dog Tucker, yes.

• 22:16Alexandra Horowitz?

  Tell us a little bit about how orca scat works. I mean, you've got these killer whales pooping in the sea.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:24Alexandra Horowitz?

  How is a dog supposed to detect that?

• 22:26Speaker 03

  The scat of this whale, it looks like snot, smells like salmon, and it has enough fat content that it floats on the water for a short period of time.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  So the fact it floats is our window of opportunity as scientists to get in there and get a scat sample. So Tucker is our secret weapon. He helped us figure out that we could collect scat samples from these whales at a safe distance, meaning we're not trying to interfere with the feeding habits of the whales. We're not driving our boat right into the pod. So it's a really great, non-invasive way of collecting information on these whales.

• 23:04Alexandra Horowitz?

  He could detect scat a nautical mile away, which seemed extraordinarily impressive for something that was just momentarily on the surface of the sea.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  It didn't make sense to us because it seemed like, oh, he must have been alerting to something else. But no, it was just that he was alerting to it much further away than we thought possible.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Tucker rides on the bow of a small boat and he looks very stoic. It's the handler's job and the boat driver's job to just watch. His little nostrils would be twitching from side to side. And when the wind blew and carried the odor of the scat on it, he would just snap into action. So watching Tucker work on the boat, he can't run. And we actually selected him as a really great whale dog because he is a lab that doesn't like to swim.

• 24:01Alexandra Horowitz?

  So he won't jump in?

• 24:03Speaker 03

  So he won't jump in. So Tucker stays on the boat and it's Tucker's job to go from one side of the boat to the other. And he's basically telling everyone, like, the odor is upwind now. And then, once he would move his head the other direction, the boat driver would know that we've passed the scent cone, we need to go back. It's amazing because if he had a voice, he'd be going, "Go right, go left, go right." He doesn't. He's just turning his head. And the dog handler is then communicating, "Go right, go left, go right, go straight." So the boat is doing this zigzaggy pattern. And when the boat is going right into the source of that target odor, Tucker's right on the bow of the boat.

• 24:47Alexandra Horowitz?

  That's great.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  It's beautiful.

• 24:52Alexandra Horowitz?

  The more people hear about it, the more they're convinced that dogs' ability is sui generis, completely unlike what we can smell. That may be true, but our noses are perfectly good instruments themselves if we just bother to sniff. After the break, we'll hear more from Julianne about what the conservation canine dogs have found for her. And I'll do some smelling of my own with a few friends.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  "Read these instructions carefully before beginning," it says. I'm not going to read the instructions carefully, but I get the gist.

• 25:24Alexandra Horowitz?

  So stay with us. Stay.

• 25:36Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 26:17Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 26:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 27:32Alexandra Horowitz?

  Welcome back to Off Leash. I'm Alexandra Horowitz. And today, we're following dogs into the world of smell. We've been speaking with Julianne Ubigo, who works alongside detection dogs who wield their noses in search of endangered wildlife scat. Julianne has worked with these dogs for the last 16 years. After all this time, I wondered what she thought the world looked like to them with smell as their dominant sense.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  That is a really beautiful question. You know the bioluminescence that if you stir up the water, you can see? That's the vision I get in my head.

• 28:11Alexandra Horowitz?

  Right. If anyone's ever been out when the bioluminescence in the sea, on the waves, especially when they're crashing, are just entirely lit up with all these little creatures.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  It's magical.

• 28:24Alexandra Horowitz?

  Yeah, it is magical, right? And I wonder if dogs view that as magical, if that is in fact how they see it, or if it's just the way the world is, right? It's just the way the visual world is laid out in front of us.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  They are so patient with me. Like, I'm so dumb when it comes to this.

• 28:43Alexandra Horowitz?

  We're all dumb when it comes to smell.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  It's like, there is this electromagnetic spectrum where we can see just this tiny, tiny sliver as visible color and light.

• 28:53Alexandra Horowitz?

  At the same time, if we follow the dog, sometimes we can see what they can smell.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Just the other day, we had finished a carnivore research project, and we're walking on the road, and I'm always just kind of watching. When he's going down a road, and he stops, and he sniffs something, and I can tell, I'm like, oh, he's canining. He's sniffing something that marked the side of the road. I'm not looking to collect that information. But it is interesting to me, because it's like I get to see the activity that's happened in this area through his senses. If I'm willing and patient enough to slow down and watch that, it's like I'm piggybacking on his superpower. I can kind of imagine that a coyote just walked down this road. In this particular case, the next morning, there was a light dusting of snow, and...

• 29:43Speaker 03

  What I had watched him do the day before, I could now see the evidence, the tracks. He didn't need that light dusting of snow to see that there were three coyotes that just went through this area. He sees that all the time. But I, because of the snow, was able to get a glimpse of what he was smelling.

• 30:02Alexandra Horowitz?

  I love the idea of snow as a kind of filter that lets us see a little bit more of what they're seeing all the time.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:11Alexandra Horowitz?

  Someone who's been here, someone who's left that and is no longer there, which feels miraculous to me, smelling through time.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  It's like you get to see the ghosts of everything that happened here.

• 30:31Alexandra Horowitz?

  In recent years, the Conservation Canine Program has also started doing detection work separate from animal scat. Julianne and her partner Jasper, a big jovial black lab, work to find PCBs. That's a shorthand for the harmful chemicals polychlorinated by phenols. One thing about PCBs, they've always been known to be odorless, but Jasper has proven he can smell it. And what's incredible is that by following Jasper as he showed her where the PCBs were, Julianne found that she too, suddenly, could smell this odorless substance.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  What we're learning as humans, as we watch the dog detecting this windowsill or this building or this paint, is while their sense of smell is way better, many times we can actually smell PCBs.

• 31:20Alexandra Horowitz?

  What does it smell like?

• 31:22Speaker 03

  It smells like sweet chlorine. Sometimes it is so strong that I feel like I get a headache. Most people don't even notice that it exists, but once you notice, then you're like, whoa. So the dog is helping us learn that we can smell something that we thought was undetectable. It's pretty neat.

• 31:47Alexandra Horowitz?

  Another way we might appreciate dog sense of smell is to bother to notice what we humans know or don't know about the way the world smells. So I recruited my fellow Freakonomics Radio Network hosts Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner to do a little smelling experiment with me. They co-host the podcast No Stupid Questions. We sat down with three copies of the University of Pennsylvania smell identification test, which is a scratch and sniff test of olfactory function. It's typically used by researchers to determine whether someone has anosmia, that's a loss of a sense of smell. But for our purposes, I wanted to see how dog-like we were. Could we identify these odors out of context?

• 32:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  "Read these instructions carefully before beginning," it says.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  I'm not going to read the instructions carefully, but I get the gist.

• 32:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, page one. "This odor smells most like A, gasoline, B, pizza, C, peanuts, or D, lilac."

• 32:49Alexandra Horowitz?

  That makes it so much easier having options.

• 32:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's not gasoline, not pizza, not peanuts. It doesn't smell like lilac either, but I'll say lilac because it definitely smells more like something that grows out of the ground than gasoline or pizza.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Since I didn't like the way it smelled, I'm just going to say gasoline.

• 33:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  I wish my dog was here. I think she could sort it out.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  I have a confidence of nine out of 10 that it's gasoline.

• 33:19Alexandra Horowitz?

  It's definitely pizza. What? No. Here's what I think. It's a bad, sort of a day-old pizza. And it's not the whole pizza. It's the crust, the seasonings, and a little bit of that deep tomato pasty smell.

• 33:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I just say, I'm really glad your profession is cognitive scientist who specializes in dogs and not pizzeria owner, because if your pizza smelled like this, I don't think you'd be doing that well.

• 33:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Number five. "This odor smells most like grass, pizza, motor oil." I didn't know motor oil smelled like anything or pineapple.

• 33:54Alexandra Horowitz?

  Oh, this one's actually confusing.

• 33:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whoa, I think I know what motor oil smells like now.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  There is something so horrible about this smell.

• 34:05Alexandra Horowitz?

  It's like a childhood smell.

• 34:09Alexandra Horowitz?

  But I can't place it. Can you picture something?

• 34:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  I did have a sort of Proustian rush where I couldn't identify it for a while. And then I got a sort of image of some man that I couldn't identify that was maybe a friend's father in a garage.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Working on a car?

• 34:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that you, Uncle Pete?

• 34:32Speaker 04

  I was gonna say Pep Boys, Manny, Mo and Jack.

• 34:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  There you go.

• 34:35Speaker 04

  I'm 11 out of 10 on confidence on this one.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  Seriously, I'm gonna redeem myself from the pizza one.

• 34:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alex, what'd you write, Dan? I wrote motor oil. So we all wrote motor oil.

• 34:49Alexandra Horowitz?

  More than seeing who's the best smeller among us, what I love about smell guessing games like this is hearing everyone's process of searching for smells in their minds. It gives us a little access to the experience of olfactory perception that we don't have a window to with dogs. What does this odor smell like, or remind us of, or make us feel like? Every time I talk to people about smell, I hear the same refrain, "I'm not good at smelling." But then, if I ask them to think back to a memory from childhood involving smell...

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Easily, so many. My mom making sesame noodles with sesame oil. The Pep Boys, like, hanging around with my dad on Saturdays while he looked at tires. You know, that smell of rubber. And also the motor oil and gasoline.

• 35:37Alexandra Horowitz?

  Steven?

• 35:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, yeah, my childhood was very smelly. We were kind of a farm family, so there were animal smells. The chicken shit was really pungent. We had a lot of dogs and cats, and each of them had their own smells. And I used to burrow my face in the dogs' coats all the time. So, yeah, I knew all their smells very closely. And then we had these neighbors, this elderly couple who lived up the hill. They had an orchard, and their kitchen smelled like...

• 36:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  All the best fruits in the world. I would say that probably five times a day today, still, I smell something that makes me think of my youth. It's a very strong connection, I guess, but almost an emotion, because it triggers memory in a very, very deep, in instant way.

• 36:24Alexandra Horowitz?

  It's definitely the case that it's the quickest route to the brain. The olfactory bulb is right behind the nose. And it might be a little bit unmediated by language, right? So it gets processed more quickly. And I think these types of reports that we're talking about are sort of a testament to the fact that most of our smell memories are positive emotional smell memories, right? Rarely does somebody tell me, if I ask them about an early smell memory, some horrible smell memory where something devastating happened. Many of them have this positive valence, even if the smell was chicken.

• 37:01Alexandra Horowitz?

  So I wonder, for dogs, I think that their perceptual and therefore cognitive life is probably not full of these same kind of deeply emotive recollections, because I think for them, smell is just the way the world looks.

• 37:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really?

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Maybe it's like vision. I feel like when I see dogs and they're like sniffing everywhere, it's like they're feeling around, trying to figure out what's going on in the world.

• 37:27Alexandra Horowitz?

  To dogs, odors are neither good nor bad. They're just information about what and who are present, about who's been here before, and even about who's coming around the corner. For us, for the most part, smells are much less a part of our sense of the present moment. But they do bring us sometimes back to past moments vividly. I asked Tejo Rao, the restaurant critic who we spoke to earlier, about her earliest scent memories. Raised by a mother from Uganda and a father from India, she spent her childhood in Kuwait, Sudan, rural France, and Atlanta, Georgia, influences which came up while walking with her dog Lulu.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Oh, there's so many. The first thing that just came to mind was the smell of my grandmother's closet when I was growing up. She had this amazing collection of saris, you know, the several feet long pieces of silk and cotton, and they were all ironed. And folded, so the closet always smelled like those materials, not musty exactly, but with a mix of her perfumes and like the clean laundry smell. That's a very comforting smell to me that I haven't smelled in, you know, 20 years or something, but I can call it back.

• 38:41Alexandra Horowitz?

  You can imagine the smell?

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 38:45Alexandra Horowitz?

  Oh, I think that's a little bit of a superpower yourself.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  When I was getting back my sense of smell, it's true that I was accessing memories that I didn't have access to when I didn't have my sense of smell. I started smelling certain spices every day and when I was chewing on some cardamom and trying to kind of inhale the aroma, I was reminded of my grandfather because he used to always smell like cardamom because he would chew on it.

• 39:12Alexandra Horowitz?

  Hmm.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  But I wasn't just reminded of him, it was like little tiny memories opened up that I'd forgotten, very vivid images. And I wonder if I hadn't got my sense of smell back, if those images would have just been lost.

• 39:26Alexandra Horowitz?

  Were there certain smells you were longing to experience?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Oh gosh, the thing I miss the most is so gross that I'm a little embarrassed to share it, but I actually really missed the smell of my other dog's fishy breath, which smells like anchovies or something really awful. She would yawn and there would be nothing and I would feel really sad.

• 39:49Alexandra Horowitz?

  Right.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  You know, even though it wasn't a particularly pleasant smell, there was something about its absence that made me feel isolated from her. I should add that I also missed the smell of my husband's hair and skin. It wasn't just my dog's nasty breath. I'm not a monster.

• 40:16Alexandra Horowitz?

  Thank you, dogs, for showing us this world that humans have stood up from and forgotten. Thanks to Julianne Ubigo, Tejo Rao, her dog Lulu, my friends Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth, and to you for coming on this walk with us.

• 40:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner again. That was Alexandra Horowitz and the first episode of Off Leash, the newest show in the Freakonomics Radio network. Please go to your podcast app right now and get more episodes of Off Leash. We are really excited about this first season of the show. We had a great time making it, and we would love to make more. To that end, why don't you help us spread the word. Tell your friends and family and fellow dog people to follow Off Leash wherever they listen to podcasts. Also, you can leave a rating or review on the podcast app. It really helps listeners find a new show. Coming up next week, right here on Freakonomics Radio, during the pandemic

• 41:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  shutdown, we heard that domestic violence was on the rise. Was it?

• 41:25Speaker 05

  What we find is that crimes are actually lower during shutdowns.

• 41:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  If domestic violence wasn't rising, what does that say about the other media narratives we've been hearing so much about?

• 41:37Speaker 05

  There has not been a neighborhood impacted by violent crime that has ever asked me for less police officers.

• 41:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  The difference between headlines and data. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This special episode of Off Leash was produced by Molly Getman and Lyric Bowditch, with help from Jared Holt, Gabriel Roth, and Alison Craiglow. It was mixed by Greg Rippon and Jeremy Johnston. Our staff also includes Neil Carruth, Zach Lipinski, Ryan Kelly, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Morgan Levy, Julie Canfor, Eleanor Osborne, Jasmine Klinger, Emma Terrell, Jacob Clemente, and Alina Culman. Our music was composed by Luis Guerra. To see behind-the-mic pictures

• 42:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  of all the dogs you met in this episode, or to share your thoughts about the show, you can follow Off Leash on Instagram and Twitter, @offleashshow. You can also send an email to [email protected]. To find a transcript, links to research, and a newsletter signup, go to freakonomics.com. As always, thanks for listening.

• 42:54Alexandra Horowitz?

  Do you know what you smell like?

• 42:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  I smell like ginger snaps and a beautiful ripe lemon.

• 43:02Alexandra Horowitz?

  Well, now we all smell like artificial pizza.

• 43:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  And motor oil.

• 43:11Speaker 06

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

• 43:19Speaker 07

  Stitcher.

• 43:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 43:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 44:28Speaker 07

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• 44:42Speaker 08

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