There’s a lot going on in the world. In addition to riots and shootings, the continued threat of the Cronizzle, and most of California being on fire, we lost a great woman – the Notorious RBG – recently. All in all, not a great year. While it would be easy to get down about all these problems, we still have one very important thing going for us: There are still dogs and they’re still happy to see us.
It’s been known for a while that petting a dog (or a cat) for 10 minutes can reduce your stress. All they ask for in return is food, water, and the entire damned couch. Or maybe that’s just my dogs. We also know that their sense of smell is on the order of 10,000 times more sensitive than ours. Or, to put that in different terms, that means a dog could sniff out a single drop of something in two Olympic-sized pools.
In addition to reducing our stress and taking up all the space on the couch, dogs have been trained to use those keen sniffers to detect cancer, malaria, and other maladies. Now, researchers in Finland have trained dogs to sniff out the Cronizzle – that’s Covid-19 for those of you who aren’t hip and with it.
A couple of the major problems in dealing with Covid-19 are the potentially long burn time of two weeks before someone even knows they have it and asymptomatic carriers who will never know they have it. Pair those things up with an airborn, highly virulent bug, and you’ve got a recipe for a pandemic. While various tests have been kajiggered up in labs around the world, they still take time and money to produce results. A dog can be trained to react to the smell of the virus as it comes out in our sweat and can produce results nearly instantaneously. All they ask in return is that you get off the damned couch so they can really stretch out and would it kill you to get them a blanket and pillow?
You can read the original article here. While you’re out perusing the Internet for more dog-related activities, be sure to check out No Dog Left Behind, the wonderful folks who helped rescue dogs who were left homeless in the wake of Hurricane Laura and Bob The Dog, who’s just too damned cute for words.
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And now your moment of Zen.
Eric Lahti 