Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. If you've ever had a dog,
Speaker 1: or walked a dog, or watched as many videos of
Speaker 1: dogs on the Internet as I have, you've probably witnessed
Speaker 1: one adorably infuriating canine behavior. Their ability to find the
Speaker 1: spot with the most decaying, stinky, vile, rotting awfulness and
Speaker 1: roll around right in it, coating themselves in the muck.
Speaker 1: But why spoiler alert? This is one of those questions
Speaker 1: that science does not have a direct answer to, but
Speaker 1: the theories are fascinating. Some researchers suspect it's a holdover
Speaker 1: from evolution. Perhaps dogs are trying to mask their own
Speaker 1: scent to hide from potential predators, even though they're generally
Speaker 1: unlikely to encounter any in our human environments. Another theory
Speaker 1: suggests that dogs, like wolves, roll because they smell something
Speaker 1: that to them is sweet. Wolves exhibit this behavior so
Speaker 1: that everyone else in the pack knows what it just found.
Speaker 1: A well will PLoP down in a decaying carcass, get
Speaker 1: all good and mucked up, and return as if to say,
Speaker 1: come on, guys, you're not going to believe what I found. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: Canadian researchers in six studied descent rubbing into groups of
Speaker 1: captive wolves. The researchers cooked up a range of different smells,
Speaker 1: somewhere from herbivores others from carnivores. The dogs could also
Speaker 1: smell 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 foxes
Speaker 1: rubbed their jowls on puma scrapes, a form of scent
Speaker 1: marking that the big cats used to communicate with other pumas.
Speaker 1: The upshot was that the foxes were perhaps covering themselves
Speaker 1: in puma scent in order to keep predators away. We
Speaker 1: spoke via email with Simon gadbois an expert in canid
Speaker 1: behavior and scent processing at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Speaker 1: He said, there are many hypotheses out there, from environmental
Speaker 1: camouflage to seeking a group odor. Often all members of
Speaker 1: the family unit will roll in the scent too exploratory behavior.
Speaker 1: Yet at the end of the day, he added, no
Speaker 1: one really knows it could be and this is my
Speaker 1: pet theory. Pun retroactively intended that they're just having fun
Speaker 1: with a new and exciting scent experience like terrible perfume,
Speaker 1: which is a possibility. Ged Ba said, if you watch wolves,
Speaker 1: coyotes or dogs doing it, it seems pretty obvious to
Speaker 1: me that they love it. Try to stop them. Sometimes
Speaker 1: animals do things for no other reasons than it's fun.
Speaker 1: We just have to be open to that idea. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by John Partano and produced by Tyler Clang.
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Speaker 1: more on this and lots of other dog On topics,
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