I’m a dog lover of course. If you can call Harvey a dog. He’s more of a hairy son.

Anyway, I’m a dog lover and I saw this article from, you guessed it Boing Boing (why do I even bother having a blog, when all of the good stuff I post is just a rehash of their site? That’s a good question. I may have to ask somebody about that. Maybe Boing Boing will have something on it tomorrow.). So anyway, back to the dogs.

Here’s a direct quote:

Scientists report that dogs can smell disease in the urine of bladder cancer patients. In the study, published in this week’s British Medical Journal, the canines successfully identified a cancer patient’s urine sample placed among six control samples 41 percent of the time, far better than the 14 percent expected by chance. From an Associated Press article on the research:

“Perhaps the most intriguing finding, though, was in a comparison patient whose urine was used during the training phase. All the dogs unequivocally identified that urine as a cancer case, even though screening tests before the experiment had shown no cancer. Doctors conducted more detailed tests on the patient and found a life-threatening tumor in the right kidney.”

Way cool stuff. It makes you wonder what else dogs can smell, doesn’t it? Maybe they can tell when you are going to bang your head on a cupboard by your smell. Or maybe they can tell when you are going to accidentally bounce a cheque to Hydro. That would be very handy to be able to do: “Honey, do I smell NSF to you?”. Of course this makes me want to treat Harvey much better from now on, cause you don’t want to tick him off and have him ignore something important. Yep, it’s all ground beef and steaks for him from now on.