What animals have that humans lack

They may sense an electrical field, sniff out odours better and pin down the faintest rustle several meters away – their sensorial toolkit is way sharper than ours

We often misunderstand animals by interpreting their world through our senses instead of theirs. (Credit: Ranjit Lal)

6 min readNew DelhiOct 29, 2023 10:30 AM IST First published on: Oct 25, 2023 at 10:00 AM IST

One major reason why we get into misunderstandings with animals is that we do not take into account the way they see or interpret the world – which may be hugely different to the way that we do. How many times have you rolled your eyes and dragged your dog away from a tree or post, which he or she has insisted on sniffing – and walking around for an eternity – when patently there is nothing to be seen there? Exasperating, isn’t it?

Not for the dog. While our primary sense working is vision, for the dog it is smell – and we alas, don’t have a very good sense of smell. Oh yes, we may get a whiff of a dog’s pee from the spot and wrinkle up our noses, but for the dog it’s like surfing the net. For the dog, scent works better than sight. So, he or she, while sniffing around, is doing the equivalent of you checking your messages and e-mail and social media and surfing the net. He or she will know which other dog has been around, who is going out with whom, what they last ate, which dog is wearing which heavenly perfume, and if there’s a new pup on the block… When the dog is done with sniffing it will leave its own message on the spot, as a reply: ‘Welcome! You smell divine, when can we meet?!’ or ‘Get lost loser, this neighbourhood ain’t big enough for the two of us!’ And by pulling him or her away from the spot, you’re doing the equivalent of snatching someone’s smartphone away from them – or having your smartphone snatched away by someone, while you were in the midst of scrolling or messaging or taking a selfie or being made to shut down your laptop without having pressed Ctrl S.

We have five senses, though scientists are now saying we have more than that. There is for example proprioception – the awareness of our own body, which is not the same as the sense of touch, and equilibrioception, the sense of balance involving touch and vision. And each living creature is blessed with all or some of them – but not all of them work as efficiently as each other. In the animal kingdom, those sets of senses that are vital to the survival of the creature are the ones that develop the most – often, at the cost of others. These are the senses through which they perceive the world around them, blocking out or being unaware of the others because they are not relevant to their way of life. Sometimes, they even mix and merge with each other, so you cannot clearly say that hey, this is taste at work, or say smell or maybe an entirely different sense. A rattlesnake can sense the heat from its potential victim, but this is detected by the reptile’s visual centre, so is this a part of its sense of vision or something new? This makes it difficult to make clear-cut divisions.

There is far too much information pouring in from the outside world for any living creature to be able to process at any one time: there are photons or light, there are sound waves (basically pressure waves), there are electrical fields, there’s the earth’s magnetic field, and there are molecules of scent wafting around. Any creature can only receive and make sense of a few of them: and through these, interprets and experiences its world. In 1909, a Baltic-German zoologist called Jakob von Uexkull coined the word ‘Umwelt’ for this, which in German means ‘environment’. We have our own Umwelt, with which we perceive the world around us. Our sense of vision is excellent, hearing is good, smell, not so good, taste not bad (though some folks are pretty tasteless!) and touch, fairly sensitive.

Animals may score higher or lower than we do depending on their survival needs – their Umwelt is different to ours and in order to understand them we need to know how they perceive their world. They may even have senses that we lack entirely: like that of sensing an electrical field – something sharks have evolved to an astonishing degree. Migratory birds sense the earth’s magnetic field and use it to set course while on their journeys, we can only tell north from south by looking at a compass or the position of the sun. But then again, they need it, we do not. Dogs, as we have seen, can sniff out and follow odours much better than we can – and their noses have evolved to do so. Even while exhaling, a dog’s nose is still vacuuming in a stream of scent molecules from its corners non-stop, so that the flow of scent information it receives is never interrupted or blown away by the exhalation. Our sense of hearing is good, but not a patch on that of the barn owl’s that can pick up and pin down the faintest rustle from a scurrying rat several meters away.

In order to understand animals, we must have an idea of what their ‘Umwelt’ toolkit consists of and how sophisticated it may be and that can only happen after long periods of study and observation. Usually when we refer to ‘anthropomorphism’ we imply the transferring of human feelings and emotions to animals – and this makes scientists shudder. But what they’re now saying is that a more dangerous form of anthropomorphism is the kind where we fail to take into account the animals’ ‘Umwelt’ and use ours as a measuring stick instead. We have to see the world through their eyes, through the senses they use, through their point of view.