Animals: Fright & Bite

"When you are frightened," wrote doggy Albert Payson Terhune in Reader's Digest last summer (TIME, Aug. 17), "nature pumps an undue amount of adrenalin through your system. This throws off an odor . . . which human nostrils fail to detect. Dogs, however, hate it. It rouses some of them to rage; in others it inspires only contempt. Many an otherwise inoffensive dog will attack when that odor reaches him."

Most readers had heard of "fear-smell" before, accepted Author Terhune's dictum without question. But Dr. A. J. Reich of Manhattan wrote to the...

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