Pondering evocative nature of smells

One psychology experiment that has glued itself firmly in my mind, and I have no idea why, is where young men were asked to keep a handkerchief in their underpants for a period of time. It may have been for an hour or two, or perhaps it was a week – the details don’t matter.

What did matter was that when such subjects put that handkerchief into the top pocket of their jacket and went out “on the pull”, as we failed to call it in those days, they had remarkably more success with the ladies than a control group with freshly laundered hankies. The moral of the story? Firstly – a warning to women: never trust a man with a hanky in his jacket’s top pocket (but most wouldn’t anyway). Secondly – pheromones are not just for cats.

I was prompted to ponder the evocative nature of smells when I read a passage in a book that described how a man remembered his father most poignantly by his smell of pipe tobacco. It brought back a forgotten memory of how, when I used to snuggle up on my own father’s chest, I experienced the potent, but not altogether unpleasant, scent of nicotine mixed with Old Spice aftershave.

Smells seem to be able to trigger particular vivid memories and emotions from our earliest years that would otherwise have been forgotten. The smell of freshly cut grass on our school playing fields, the vanilla biscuits my mother used to bake, and a whole library of other smells far too personal to outline here.

We understand, or at least claim to understand, the importance of smell to the species that we most commonly treat.

Many a time I have explained to the owner of a dog developing the insidious blindness of progressive retinal atrophy how much more effective a dog’s sense of smell is compared to ours. Yet how well is it possible for a human to understand just how a dog may be able to “see” a landscape with its nose, or how much information it can glean about the recent history, or even emotions, of someone it sniffs?

Presumably because of the strong sexual context of much scent-related emotion, humans have done much to mask our natural odours with perfumes and deodorants, but even though our awareness of our instinctive reactions to smells may be dulled, we still greatly underestimate the influence that it can have upon our behaviour. I suspect that, despite our understanding of the physiological importance of the sense of smell, the veterinary profession still greatly underestimates the effect it has upon our customers. Therefore, I pose the question: “How often do you walk into your practice waiting room from the outside and give it a good sniff?”

Your canine patients certainly will, and if they find the result suitably stimulating, the males are likely to cock their legs against the first vertical surface they meet. Cats will have a sniff too, and although it may be less obvious, the scent can have a marked effect upon their behaviour, so why don’t we all have a waiting room scent vapouriser plugged in? And the scent of a carnivore may have devastating psychological consequences for a prey species such as a mouse or a rabbit, which will be convinced that they are about to end up as its next meal, so we should certainly keep that in mind when hospitalising them.

Heaven scent

I am sure that we are all aware of those animal-related issues, even if we sometimes neglect to consider their consequences. But how about the effect that our waiting room smells have upon our customers? Supermarkets are well aware of their influence, which is a major factor contributing to the growth of in-house bakeries, and they have found that synthetic smells can be used to positively influence their customers’ buying patterns.

Veterinary waiting rooms are potentially very smelly places, and there are a considerable variety of odours that can reach the nose, and thus the emotions, of those that dare enter. There can be no doubt that a smell of dirt or decay will be an immediate turn-off – the term “I smell a rat” presumably refers to the decomposing rather than the living variety, and is associated with untrustworthiness and underhand behaviour – so we must remember to seal up and empty those clinical waste bin liners on a daily basis because we don’t know what may be lurking in them.

Animal smells may be hard to avoid, particularly if a tomcat has just leaked urine out of his basket and on to your waiting room furnishings, but again, clients will associate such smells with a lack of hygiene.

On the other hand, strong disinfectant smells may give an unwelcoming aura to your premises, albeit a clinical one.

Many of the modern air fresheners have been designed to have subliminally appealing scents that have come a long way from the unsubtle varieties of yore. Alternatively, throw away the jar of instant coffee and keep some freshly ground coffee on the brew. But as a practice owner, I know what odour I most like to greet me when I walk into one of my practices – the sweet smell of success!