Here’s a fun people & pet social networking site you should check out. Lots of cute photos of pets, and they have a photo contest running right now.

Here’s the picture of Callie and Okie-Dokie I submitted for this week’s contest.

While you’re visiting the site, be sure to vote for this photo to win the contest!

Dogs have an amazing sense of smell. In some cases, they can detect odors something like 1000 or times as well as humans. On the “My Doggie Says…” show, we’ve heard Dave Reaver, who trains dogs for K-9 service, talk about dogs’ ability to detect drugs and explosives. And Karen Klingberg, of the Search Dog Foundation, described dogs’ ability to detect the odors of humans in disaster recovery situations.

Here’s a fun article with some doggie smell facts.

I’ve heard all these doggie smell facts and figures, but I’ve never seen them work firsthand. But last night I got my first taste — I mean “smell.”

Callie, Barbara and I are spending the Thanksgiving weekend with our daughter Karen, and her husband Chris, at our Lake Arrowhead home. Last night, the five of us drove to Lake Arrowhead Village to witness the arrival of Santa Clause. The weather is kind of brisk, so we all bundled up with jackets and hats, Karen with her Russian-looking black cap — which makes her look like she should be Olga in a James Bond movie.

We returned home from the celebration and settled into our house with a toasty oak fire in the fireplace.

Just before bedtime, I took Callie outdoors for a little walk, so she could pee and sniff around — “read the papers,” as Ted Kerasote says. She peed and sniffed for a while. Then, as we headed home, Callie started some very serious sniffing at the left rear tire of our car. As usual, in these situations, I let her take charge, and she sniffed all the way to the front of the car and, then, clear across the front. I couldn’t imagine what was so enticing, but Callie was really sniffing hard.

Then, as we worked our way from the right front toward the right rear of the car — near the right passenger door — Callie leaned over and picked something up. In the dark, i couldn’t tell what it was, and I was concerned that it could be a dead animal — or something worse. So I reached out to see what she had, and, to my surprise, it was Karen’s black Russian hat!

Wow. That was some pretty impressive sniffing. Now I’m a true believer in dogs’ sense of smell. Needless to say, Callie was the hero of the evening for saving Karen’s hat.

Sometimes you get a great reward for letting your dog have its way!

I have enjoyed all of my interviews with dog experts on the “My Doggie Say…” Radio Show. I’m learning a lot about dogs, and I hope my listeners are, too. This week’s interview with Carla Genender, author of “DogSense,” was especially pleasant, because Carla truly understands how we can learn lessons from our pets. That’s really the point of “DogSense.” It’s filled with lovely little stories about how we humans can get better at human relationships by observing our furry friends.

In the last few months, I’ve had a similar experience with Callie, who keeps reminding me that it’s important to take pleasure from simple things.

Callie is a died-in-the-wool “ball dog.” She loves any kind of ball — beach, soccer, tennis, golf, you name it. But she has an especially rapidly-growing collection of tennis balls. Barbara plays tennis once a week, and she sometimes brings a ball home.Also, our golf club is also bordered by a tennis club, and Callie’s friend Jeff, assistant greens keeper at the golf club, captures a tennis ball for her once in a while.

When Jeff gives Callie a tennis ball, it becomes her favorite possession for a few days. She keeps it separate from the other tennis balls, or, at least, she can tell which is the new one. She keeps it close, wherever she goes. And she will grab the newest ball and bring it to me for some “toss and fetch” play time.

Callie obviously loves her entire tennis ball collection — which is up to fourteen, now — but it’s easy to see how much pleasure she gets from the most recent addition.

We saw this again yesterday. We’re at Lake Arrowhead for the weekend, and as we walked along the shoreline toward our boat (which is about to come out of the water for the winter), I spotted a tennis ball floating in the “surf” (all three inches of it). I pointed Callie toward it, and she gleefully retrieved it and carried it around for the rest of the afternoon.

You can always tell when Callie has a new ball; she holds her head a little higher, and she hangs on a little tighter. If she needs to stop and rest for a minute, she puts it down (most of the time) in a place where it won’t roll away — which is not always easy to find in the mountains.

When we got back to our house, Callie dropped the ball at the front door entrance, only to watch it roll off the deck and fall into black oblivion. But, with a little detective work, we were able to find it, and I retrieved it and gave it back to her. Which led to more proud, head-held-high carrying of the new ball.

Having a new tennis ball is a little thing, but when you’re a “ball dog,” it can mean a lot. We should all take such pleasure from little things.

One of my pet peeves is that scientists keep publishing papers that say either “dogs aren’t very smart” or “maybe dogs are a little smarter than we thought.” They obviously aren’t smart in the same ways that humans are smart, but they do some pretty amazing things. Scientists may not be using the right criteria. They usually evaluate dogs for their “problem solving” skills. So if a dog can’t work a Rubik’s Cube, does that mean it isn’t smart?

Here’s what I mean.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that our morning jog at Lake Arrowhead takes us past some tennis courts at the UCLA Conference Center. The courts are buffered from the street, where we run, by some bushes that are as high as the screen around the tennis courts. One morning, Callie noticed a tennis ball under the bushes. She stopped dead in her tracks, asking, “could we please retrieve this tennis ball?”

Unfortunately, the ball was on the other side of the wire screen, so we couldn’t get at it.

Just last weekend, we did the same jog, and as we approached the tennis courts, Callie went on “ready alert.” She absolutely remembered that she had found a tennis ball in this place before; she fixed her gaze on the base of the bushes as we jogged by. Then, she spotted a tennis ball and froze in place. “Hey, Fred, can you reach this one?” Luckily, this time the ball was on our side of the fence, so I was able to crawl under the bushes and retrieve it for the salivating Callie.

So what was that all about? Callie obviously remembered that she had seen a ball by the tennis courts. She knew to look for one. She knew that she is, in fact, a “ball dog.” (Not all dogs are “ball dogs.”) So tell me that’s not some kind of smart.

This won’t be real scientific, although I do have some background in using computers to do things that people usually do — a field dubbed “artificial intelligence.” And I can see sort of a parallel between dogs’ intelligence and the intelligence of computers. Computers have two kinds of intelligence: 1) “processing power,” or the ability to crunch numbers & logic and 2) memory, the ability to recall enormous amounts of data — sometimes in an “associative” manner. Some computer memories are “associative,” which means that they are good at remembering relationships between different things.

Maybe dogs don’t have Intel chips to do their processing. Maybe they aren’t great “problem solvers,” in the sense of the scientists. But they do seem to have rich “associative” memories. They remember places. They remember routes. They remember how to get back home. They remember where they put their toys. They remember their favorite places. Jamie, the heroine of “My Doggie Says… Messages from Jamie.” remembered where her Floppy Disc was.

And best of all, they remember when it’s time to eat.

How smart is your dog? How do you know?

I got back Sunday evening from nine days with my family on Santa Catalina Island, CA. We had a wonderful, sunshine-filled family vacation at the Hamilton Cove condo complex in Avalon. During that time, Barbara and I missed Callie very much, but we knew she was in the good hands of Carter Patrick Carrigan, professional pet sitter. Carter comes to our house three times a day to walk Callie, which is great, but it’s not as much exercise as she’s used to getting.

Clearly suffering from some separation anxiety, Callie went nuts when Barbara and I walked into the house and let Callie out of her crate. First she ran and jumped back and forth between us as fast as she could. It was as if she couldn’t decide which of us to greet first, so she tried to greet us both, individually, at the same time. Which is pretty hard to do.

Next, she ran back to her crate to retrieve (after all, she is a Golden Retriever) her “Stinky,” which is her soft and fluffy now half-puppy security object, so named because “stinky” is what our granddaughters call their security blankets. She presented Stinky to me, and we played a short game of “let’s both hold this for a while.” Which is a game Callie invented.

When my family goes to Catalina, son Brad and I go across the Catalina Channel (about 30 miles) in his fishing boat. Somewhere along the line, on the return trip, I got a small scratch on my leg — probably from unloading fishing rods or other gear. Of course, as soon as Callie settled down, she spotted my scratch and gave it a few “wound healing” licks.

Then, predictably, Callie ran to the back door to invite me to play soccer in the back yard. How could I pass up such a wonderful invitation? So we went into the back yard and played soccer for about ten minutes. Which is about my attention span. Callie would play for hours.

I’m sure Man’s Best Friend was pretty lonely for nine days, but she made up for it in the first thirty minutes after our return. And from then on, things were pretty routine — perhaps with Callie staying a little closer than normal to Barbara and me.

What better welcome?