The dog’s nose is a sky-tongue with which it senses and tastes things distant and recently passing. It is a hand which follows the streams of data in the air. It can manipulate them. It trains the dog’s brain throughout their development, essentially creating a lexicon of scent-meanings and relationships between them which, while not exactly linguistic, share certain features with language. From what I can ascertain, smelling and thinking are deeply related in dogs, and scent drives their cognitive development in ways not dissimilar to how having and developing complex manual skills drives our own.