Spiderman? So what? Superman? Ditto. The Lone Ranger? Well, he had a
nice horse.
But as we learned in this newspaper last week, the Prairies have heroes
of another sort – real heroes who face elements that make strong men
and children pale.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of hog manure lagoons?
The Nose knows. And the noses are otherwise known as the Nasal Rangers.
These are the people trained to quantify and qualify odours, like those
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sometimes emitted by livestock operations.
In so doing, Nasal Rangers determine stink from stench from
gut-wrenching putrefaction; nasty from nauseating from noxious; crummy
from cloying from – well, you get the picture.
And once the Rangers know that, science can figure out baselines for
reasonable ILO setback distances, emission rates and ways to make
stinky things less so.
Just as the Lone Ranger had his trusty sidekick Tonto, the Nasal Ranger
relies on a trusty sidekick called FIDO. It’s a handy acronym for
frequency, intensity, duration and offensiveness – the determining
factors when Nasal Rangers are figuring out just how bad things smell.
Right about now you’re probably wondering how you, a person with a
nose, can get into this line of work. Or not.
Certainly Nasal Ranger isn’t the only job that calls for superior
olfactory prowess. Chefs, sommeliers and perfume makers have highly
sophisticated snoots. So do mothers with toddlers still in diapers.
We even have reliable anecdotal evidence that some automotive mechanics
can sniff the dipstick from a transmission and tell whether the gears
are shot.
The few pictures available of these Nasal Ranger smell sleuths reveal
snouts of no stupendous size. No Jimmy Durantes, Carl Maldens or even
Barbra Streisands. As we are told in so many applications, it appears
size doesn’t matter when it comes to rhinogenous zones.
Scientists have determined that more than 168 compounds are found in
odours from animal production systems, and certain combinations are
more odiferous than others.
With time and technique, the highly trained Nasal Ranger, with
sidekick, will theoretically be able to snout out the sites that reek
the most.
A word of caution to novice Rangers: until hardened by experience,
steer clear of the prime minister’s office. Stick to hog barn lagoons
until the gag reflex is fully under control.
