Radical nasal excision for advanced squamous cell carcinoma was not an uncommon procedure in Brisbane in the 1960's.
Old farmers would appear from the outback with "rodent ulcers" of the nose, caused by a lifetime of exposure to the Queensland sun.
Egregiously fake plastic noses (the prosthesetists evidently didn't put a lot of time into colour-matching for public patients in those days) were not infrequently observed.
Psychiatry was one of the subjects we studied in our fifth year at Medical School. Our lecturer, the Professor of Psychiatry, was discussing the interesting fact that this group of patients not infrequently developed an acute psychiatric reaction post-operatively.
He proposed that, for men, the nose was symbolically phallic and that its removal could be psychologically analogous to emasculation.
He also suggested that this psychiatric response was more severe in men with big noses, implying that there was a relationship between big noses and big penises.
(My friend and fellow medical student, Dave, whose nickname was "Cyro", enthusiastically agreed. "It's true! It's true!" he cried proudly.)
It is now a monochromal phylogenetic memory of a technicolour olfactory past - pretty much a decorative facial accessory.
Not so with canines.
The olfactory organ of the average canine is about the length of the human penis. (For the sake of simplicity and modesty, I am excluding Clibrig males from this cohort.)
For your average Fido, his bladder is the equivalent of a Twitter account.
So when Jack the Foster Dog and I go for a walk, our progress is interrupted frequently while Jack reads the morning mail on each lamp post (no pun intended) and tree.
On a long walk, his replies get shorter as his bladder empties.
Toward the end of each walk his replies are, by necessity, mostly monosyllabic - yes or no - which must be a bit frustrating when he wants to say "No, fuck off" with an empty bladder. (Jack swears a lot. He get that from my wife.)
Unfortunately for dogs, the utility of pissing a message is not all-encompassing. Consider the verbal imperative phrase "Look out, there's a car coming!" for example.
Recently Jack and I were waiting outside a dress shop (don't ask) in the town where we do our weekly grocery shopping.
Jack spent some time sniffing the No Parking sign outside the shop, then looked off into the middle distance before leaving a reply.
He looked a bit upset and seemed reluctant to answer when I asked him what it was all about.
Eventually he sighed and indicated that it was "just a bit of sexist graffiti."
Curious, I asked him what it said.
"Fifi is a bitch" he eventually replied.
I asked "What was your reply?"
"Fucking troll!" he muttered.
Jack died of right heart failure on 14 December, 2020, aged 15.