EYES AND NOSES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 765, 19 March 1954, Page 9

EYES AND NOSES

by

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 24

O dog that I have owned has been more eager for my favour than Tip is, or less successful in winning it. I have never found it easy to ‘like him, and now that he is old, losing his coat, and ,becoming odorous, I have to force. myself to pat him. But he makes coldness as difficult as warmth. I find it unpleasant to touch him, but impossible to prevent him from touching me when

I emerge in the morning a n d his

Sys MU VRS? AS i~ tify me with sufficient certainty. It is cruelty to order him off before he has touched my hand or my leg with his wet nose, and I often prove cruel; but until he has done that he is uneasy. Even though his nose is not what it used to be, it remains his sure defence against doubt. Human noses perhaps served the Same purpose once, but not, I think, since we walked upright. I can remember being told as a student about a boy born blind, deaf, and dumb whose nose told him when there was a stranger in the room and what kind of person it was. If the story was true the boy’s nose must somehow or other have taken over the functions of his eyes and ears. But I have never been able to accept smell as an explanation of the skill of savages in following other men and animals hours, and even days, after they have passed out of hearing and sight. I think eyes are the agents in those cases, eyes that are sharper than ours and infinitely better trained. But I have seen a pointer dog released an hour after its owner had moved through a crowded city to address a public meeting, and it went faster. than I could follow, its nose in the air all the way, losing the scent and finding it again, but never stopping

until it was right inside the hall. I have never owned a pointer; but I had a spaniel-collie cross for many years who would stop suddenly in a gully, sniff the air for a second or two, then set off at high speed over the ridge and bail up a pig in a gully half a mile away. If it is true that scent-bearing substances have to be vaporised before they can be smelt, I can’t understand how odours which are not continually renewed linger so long in space. But it is apparently not true with animals as it is with most men that the nose (or is it the brain?) ceases to register odours which remain indefinitely. Chemists, I am told, smell nothing in their dispensaries but can still depend on their noses to identify difterent drugs. I have also been told, and I hope it is true, that a special providence broods over manure works. But I remember what Montaigne said about his moustache.

FEBRUARY 25

Ld ad bo AM reminded by Montaigne’s moustache that a correspondent who could (and probably did) read Montaigne before I was born, was a little dubious some months ago when I credited Montaigne with the remark that an ache in the belly usually moved to the mind. I was sure I was right in naming Montaigne until my correspondent, whose

memory at 59 1S better than mine at 70, started me on a

search for the passage; and then, after an hour, I was sure I must be wrong. But I was not wrong. Té make certain that it was Montaigne’s and not some other philanderer’s mousteche that. "betrayed the place he came from," I have just hunted up that reference, and on the way I found this: I fear my mind is a traitor. He has formed so close a tie with the body that

he forsakes me at every turn, and leaves me to follow him in his need. I take him aside to coax him, I make up to him, but to no purpose. In vain do I try to wean him from this intimacy, offer him Senneca and Catullus, the ladies and royal dancers. If his comrade has the colic he seems to have it, too. Even the activities which are peculiarly and essentially his own cannot then be stirred; they smack so evidently of a cold in the head. There is no joy in his productions if it is not. shared by the body. | Readers of Montaigne will realise why I looked in the wrong place for tue betraying moustache-Book III, Chapter 5, and not where it has always been in Book I, Chapter 55. They may also think of a reason why my correspondent had forgotten the chapter: in which I thought it was and I had remembered more about it than Montaigne had ever written. « ‘ a ts

FEBRUARY 27

WILL have to wait till spring comes before I can know what the drought has done to my ewes. I know already that they have had no green féed for more than a month, and not enough feed of any kind for more than two months. Though I have done no weighing I am sure that they have fost 10 to 15 pounds in weight, and in some

cases more than that. But I dont know what this will

mean in my lambing. If the | popular opinion is right, I will have fewer lambs and later than I could have expected if the season had been normal. But I am not sure in this case that popular and scientific opinions coincide. Experiments carried out at Ruakura strongly suggest, if they don’t finally prove, that flushing ewes--feeding them well for a week or two before the rams join them-though it has a marked effect on the numher of lambs born, has very little influence on the time of birth, but is more likely to delay it than to bring it forward. I can’t provide the extra feed just now, or buy it, and I must expect, therefore, that the effect of this wil! be cumulative. But the most marked effect, the Ruakura experiments seem to indicate, will be a drop in the number of lambs, born as twins. The number of sheep likely to have lambs

should, in fact, be slightly greater than it would have been if they had all been adequately and conventionally fed, and the losses after birth, on a percentage test, should be appreciably smaller. Iam not foolish enough to think that it will all end like that, or that starving. animals ever pays. But there is a kind of childish comfort in the thought, foo!ish though I know it to be, that the things I have not done which I should have done (though they will. not) work together for my good. (To be continued)