Ah the joy of the great outdoors! Waking along with your faithful companion at your heels, breathing in the heady scent of the English countryside. Until that is, an unusual odour starts to creep up on you, “What on earth is that awful smell!” you cry. Man’s best friend has rolled in something potent...again. Sometimes it’s her own poop, sometimes somebody else’s, sometimes it’s something that has died and is long past its best before date. Either way the common denominator is a face wrinkling bad odour.
We love ‘em, but why do they do it? There seems to be no real hard and fast answer to that right now. Some animal behaviourists think it’s an evolutionary adaptation to disguise their scent when stalking their prey, in my dog’s case that’ll be a bowl of dry biscuits not known for their olfactory prowess, but you get the picture. Others think it’s to place their scent on whatever nastiness is flavour d’jour to warn off other packs. The other explanation is that it’s to carry back the scent to the rest of the pack, in order that they may better get acquainted with whatever rotting beastie has been found.
Either way, i’d just rather it didn’t happen because i’m getting near to buying shares in a well known brand of dog shampoo!
