Not just fear; dogs can smell leonine thoughts

Blue bipedal lions with Mesopotamian beards: Dogs don't like them

Anyone who, like me, makes a habit of rambling through the neighborhood somewhere around one-thirty or two a.m. in the morning, when only the goblins are out, has to deal with the occasional overly aggressive dog.

For a long time, my go-to technique for scaring off dogs was the old standby of stooping down as if I were going to pick up a stone, but a year or so ago I inadvertently discovered another method. I was writing about the World card of the Tarot at that time, which involved much brooding over the Four Living Creatures, one of which is the lion. Several pye-dogs were out and about, minding their own business. As I was walking along, I suddenly visualized myself as a lion -- specifically, as the bipedal lion depicted on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Bridges to Babylon -- and the instant I did so, all the dogs stopped, looked at me, and then turned tail and ran!

A few nights later, I was out walking again, and a big black dog came running at me full speed, teeth bared and snarling, so I tried it again. I just kept walking as before but imagined myself as a lion. Again, the reaction was instantaneous. The dog fairly skidded to a stop, scrambled a bit, and then took off whimpering back the way he had come. Since then, I've used this technique every time a dog comes looking for trouble, and it works every single time. (On dogs only. Cats and herons are unaffected.)

How does it work? I suppose that the visualization must cause some tiny, unconscious changes in my body language, and that the dogs pick up on that -- but that doesn't explain why, the first time, I somehow got the attention even of dogs that hadn't been looking at me before. Perhaps, as the headline suggests, they do literally smell our states of mind, via changes in hormones and sweat and such -- or perhaps it's something more mysterious. In any case, I offer it as a possible tool for anyone who sometimes finds it necessary to strike fear into canine hearts.