BrainStuff Classics: Why Do Dogs Love Rolling in Stinky Stuff?

Dogs are pretty much guaranteed to find the smelliest stuff to roll in -- but why? Learn what may be behind this gross instinct in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/pets/dogs-love-rolling-in-stinky-stuff.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogel bomb here with a classic
episode from the vault. This fun delves into a curious
bit of animal behavior. Why dogs love rolling around in
seemingly anything that really reeks? Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel

(00:23):
bam 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

(00:46):
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,

(01:06):
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 wolf
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 study descent rubbing into groups of captive wolves.

(01:30):
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

(01:54):
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 gray

(02:16):
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 by email with Simon Gadbois, an expert in
canaid behavior and scent processing at Dalhousie University in Halifax,

(02:37):
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
to 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

(02:57):
just having fun with a new and exciting scent experience
like terrible perfume, which is a possibility. Ged was 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 is based on the article

(03:23):
dogs Love rolling in Stinky Stuff on how stuff works
dot Com, written by John Paritano. Brain Stuff is production
of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works
dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.