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