Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogel bomb here with a classic
Speaker 1: episode from the vault. This fun delves into a curious
Speaker 1: bit of animal behavior. Why dogs love rolling around in
Speaker 1: seemingly anything that really reeks? Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel
Speaker 1: bam here. If you've ever had a dog, or walked
Speaker 1: a dog, or watched as many videos of dogs on
Speaker 1: the internet as I have, you've probably witnessed one adorably
Speaker 1: infuriating canine behavior. Their ability to find the spot with
Speaker 1: the most decaying, stinky, vile, rotting awfulness and roll around
Speaker 1: right in it, coating themselves in the muck. But why
Speaker 1: spoiler alert? This is one of those questions that science
Speaker 1: does not have a direct answer to, but the theories
Speaker 1: are fascinating. Some researchers suspect it's a holdover from evolution.
Speaker 1: Perhaps dogs are trying to mask their own scent to
Speaker 1: hide from potential predators, even though they're generally unlikely to
Speaker 1: encounter any in our human environments. Another theory suggests that dogs,
Speaker 1: like wolves, roll because they smell something that to them
Speaker 1: is sweet. Wolves exhibit this behavior so that everyone else
Speaker 1: in the pack knows what it just found. A wolf
Speaker 1: will PLoP down in a decaying carcass, get all good
Speaker 1: and mucked up, and return as if to say, come on, guys,
Speaker 1: you're not going to believe what I found. Interestingly, Canadian
Speaker 1: researchers in six study descent rubbing into groups of captive wolves.
Speaker 1: The researchers cooked up a range of different smells, somewhere
Speaker 1: from herbivores others from carnivores. The dogs could also smell
Speaker 1: food and some manufactured aromas, including perfume and motor oil.
Speaker 1: The researchers observed that the wolves liked the manufactured sense
Speaker 1: better than any of the others. A few liked the
Speaker 1: scent of cougar and bear feces, while only one wolf
Speaker 1: picked the salted pork. None liked the tuna oil. Other
Speaker 1: scientists suggest that center rolling and yes that is the
Speaker 1: scientific term, is a defensive trait. The January seventeen issue
Speaker 1: of the Journal of Ethology, researchers at the University of
Speaker 1: Wisconsin at Madison wrote about how they observed some gray
Speaker 1: foxes with remote cameras in Santa Cruz, California for four years.
Speaker 1: The cameras clicked on and off. They found that gray
Speaker 1: foxes rubbed their jowls on puma scrapes, a form of
Speaker 1: scent marking that the big cats used to communicate with
Speaker 1: other pumas. The upshot was that the foxes were perhaps
Speaker 1: covering themselves in puma scent in order to keep predators away.
Speaker 1: We spoke by email with Simon Gadbois, an expert in
Speaker 1: canaid behavior and scent processing at Dalhousie University in Halifax,
Speaker 1: Nova Scotia. He said, there are many hypotheses out there,
Speaker 1: from environmental camouflage to seeking a group odor. Often all
Speaker 1: members of the family unit will roll in the scent
Speaker 1: to exploratory behavior. Yet at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: he added, no one really knows it could be and
Speaker 1: this is my pet theory. Pun retroactively intended that they're
Speaker 1: just having fun with a new and exciting scent experience
Speaker 1: like terrible perfume, which is a possibility. Ged was said.
Speaker 1: If you watch wolves, coyotes or dogs doing it, it
Speaker 1: seems pretty obvious to me that they love it. Try
Speaker 1: to stop them. Sometimes animals do things for no other
Speaker 1: reasons than it's fun. We just have to be open
Speaker 1: to that idea. Today's episode is based on the article
Speaker 1: dogs Love rolling in Stinky Stuff on how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot Com, written by John Paritano. Brain Stuff is production
Speaker 1: of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang. For more
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