Thursday, July 9, 2009

Necessary?


The English have a long and honorable tradition of tolerating eccentrics, but the Baltesz family of Bristol is really pushing the envelope. Together with their teenage children, Mr. and Mrs. Baltesz are peeing into bottles and spritzing the neighborhood with their urine. Why, you ask? To help their lost dog Simon find his way home, of course. They hope he’ll follow the scent trail.

Unlike their less fastidious contemporaries, however, members of the Baltesz family dilute their urine before leaving it in public places. Why, you ask? (What, are you dense?)

Because Jane Hayes, their finder-of-lost-dogs consultant, says that
A dog’s sense of smell is 3,000 times more potent than ours . . .
Three thousand times more potent? Ms. Hayes clearly hasn’t read What the Nose Knows, or she'd know that controlled studies find the human and canine nose are close to parity. In fact, I’ll bet her a warm bottle of recycled Sierra Nevada Pale Ale that she can’t come up with scientific evidence to support her claim.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Along these same lines, I thought you'd get a kick out of this: http://www.design.philips.com/philips/sites/philipsdesign/probes/projects/smell/index.page

You have to look at the downloads too.
-Lucinda

Nick said...

Oh gosh - I'm surprised I never read this in the Bristol Evening Post! Clifton is the affluent (and I would therefore assume "more intelligent") part of the city as well.
Why does the dog know what the families urine smells like anyway?

Avery Gilbert said...

Lucinda:

Yikes! A crotch-to-pits-to-nose BO vapor recycling outfit. Maybe it works like an olfactory isolation chamber, complete with induced hallucinations . . . Reminds me for some reason of the "Smug" episode of South Park.

Nick:

Heh. Good question.