You walk with your dog. The weather is nice, the sun is shining and your pooch is frolicking happily when suddenly, he freezes, his nose at ground level. In less time than it takes to tell, he rubs his lips on the floor followed by his neck and then ends up rolling enthusiastically on his back. Immediately, you understand that it is too late! Your dog has found a nice smelling poop and is rolling around in it, to the point of spreading it all over his coat. Any dog handler knows that the same scenario can happen again with a decomposing carcass or anything else smelly! Why do dogs, whose sense of smell we know is much more sensitive than ours, do this? Well, we don't know for sure because the world of smells is a world that escapes us, for lack of being able to perceive and interpret them in the same way as our dog friends.On this subject, we only have, for the moment, the following hypotheses to explain this behavior
So a dog would roll around in feces
to mask your own smell?
Rolling in poop, or more generally in anything that smells bad, would - for some - be the expression of an ancestral dog instinct, inherited from the time when they were still dogs. wild predators.
Some authors suggest that this behavior was then used by dogs to hide their scent from the prey they were stalking in order to make them "olfactory" undetectable. However, studies conducted on wolves do not fully support this hypothesis because these animals do not roll exclusively in the excrement of the herbivores they hunt.
Others believe that canines could have adopted this behavior for a completely different purpose. In the days of wild dogs and wolves, the strong smells in which they rolled around might well have helped them camouflage the young from the litter to other predators.This hypothesis was notably supported by research published in September 2016 by Max Allen, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The ecologist observed gray foxes rubbing their cheeks on ground freshly marked with cougar urine. According to Max Allen, gray foxes use the scent left behind by these large predators as a form of olfactory camouflage, to hide them from other large predators like coyotes. But again, that doesn't explain why large predators like wolves sometimes roll in the droppings of other large predators!
to deposit its scent?
By rolling in substances with strong odors, some authors believe that canines only deposit their own odor there.
Stephen Harris from the University of Bristol in the UK, who studied the red fox said about it in a BBC Earth article:
" Foxes have glands in the lip area, the circumoral glands ( ). We don&39;t know the precise function of these scent glands, but foxes have been observed rubbing the sides of their mouths and necks on all sorts of objects. They often seem to do this in response to strong smells. Unusual smells seem to stimulate them."
However, when a dog rolls around, he too often begins by rubbing his lips and his neck before rolling around in the foul substance. Should we see there a way to deposit its smell? It is in any case one of the hypotheses to consider.
to communicate and belong to a group?
Some authors think this behavior is a way to pass information about where they've been (and rolled up) to the rest of their pack when others think it's more about increase the feeling of unity within a group of canines by sharing a common scent.Because, indeed, in a group of canines, when an animal begins to roll in a foul odor, the other members of the group tend to do the same.
for fun?
And why don't dogs roll in poop just for fun? To see the enthusiasm they put into it, you have to seriously ask yourself! After all, the border between what smells good and what smells bad is very variable from one individual to another within the same species so imagine what the difference in perception could be from one species to another. ! It could quite simply be that dogs find that poop "smells good" and take pleasure in scenting themselves by rolling in it.
Muriel Brasseur of the Oxford Animal Behavior Center also gives credit to this last hypothesis by declaring in the columns of BBC Earth:
" I suspect they are getting a high amount of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in reward and pleasure. If it&39;s a behavior from their evolutionary past that was tied to their survival, it could be reinforced by being extremely fun."