From the brains behind Braids On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Cece the dog. Let me paint you a picture. It's Tuesday. It's 82 degrees outside. The backyard is just begging for me to run around in it in circles. My human opens up the sliding door into the backyard, and I run free.
I've got a pile of leaves on my left, an abandoned fire pit to pee near, a big honkin' squirrel right above my head. Hey, Jerry! The stick I carried around for two hours straight yesterday. Hi, stick! And what's that? Is that juice dripping out of the garbage can?
stinky old juice? Oh, it smells awful. I love it. I think I can wedge my body right next to this garbage bin and just... Oh, yeah, baby. That muck is totally covering my formerly clean fur. I smell like straight-up garbage. This is the best day of my life.
My buddy Luke wanted to know why us dogs love rolling around in stinky stuff, so I found a human who knows a lot about it. Check this out. The big question is, what are they thinking? Why are they doing what they're doing? My name's Elizabeth Carranza. I work with the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona. I help run studies we are doing with the dogs.
They roll on the stinky thing because they enjoy it and it might be this instinctual thing they want to do to hide or hide from prey they maybe want to get. So as you know, dogs are descendants of wolves who are predators and dogs themselves are predator animals.
They do, some of them have this want or behavior to hunt other prey. And so if they're doing that, they don't want to be heard, seen or smelled. So the thing is, if you roll into something really stinky or smelly, your prey won't smell you before you're coming. They have amazing, amazing noses.
We have grown up and been sort of taught in culture or just society, like smelling bad is not a good thing. We have that a lot with our dogs. They do things that to us are either abnormal or gross. And so going to roll in something stinky also doesn't have a purpose for us, but also maybe have negative effects in our day-to-day lives if we were walking around smelling like we rolled in a dead fish, for example.
I think it's very much up to the owner, to the person. I don't think anybody really wants their dog smelling like a dead fish, but it's not a bad behavior in their eyes. And so I think if you couldn't have tried to avoid it, try. Maybe lead them away from the smell. If you have a treat with you as maybe you're walking around, try and distract them with that instead. But I don't think it's anything that they should be punished for.
Um, uh... Uh, thank you, Elizabeth. I love you, Elizabeth. You get me. And yeah, my doggy nose is a great and powerful tool. Did you know that my nose is so powerful that it can smell substances at concentrations of one part per trillion?
That means if you put a single drop of liquid in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools, I'd be able to sniff it out. Aren't I amazing? And yet, and yet, my humans hate it when I'm stinky in any way. And they say, oh, Cece, that's gross. And then they give me a bath. The injustice. The horror. And then I end up smelling like
Lavender and papaya? Disgusting. I'd much rather smell like the putrid drippings of a garbage can because guess what? If I'm super stinky, that squirrel from before will never see me sneaking up on him. Which reminds me. Oh, Jerry. Come here, little guy. Jerry, come back. I just want to play. I promise.
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