Hi ,
Can anyone explain to me why dogs find stuff like fox poo irresistable.Quite often when on our daily walk my 14 months old border collie bitch will find something that she obviously thinks is wonderful, and before I can stop her dives on it and smears herself as much as she can,resulting in cutting the walk short and a good scrub for her when we get home. On our walk a few days ago I met a man with a lovely (previously) white Westie that was more or less covered in the stuff,(the dog that is),we got chatting about this and couldn't come up with a reason for it.
Cheers
Graham.
I remember reading that its instinctual, when we go for daily walks what we in fact are doing is going on the hunting trip. To be able to approach prey, a pack of dogs will roll in the poo of a less threating animal to disguise their scent and then will be able to get closer, not sure if thats true but it makes sense? Our pup loves to roll in sheep and horses poo and will often eat it (yuk!) when he thinks I'm not watching. Apart from worms etc, it can cause tummy upsets so he has to have prebiotic from time to time. I am trying to train him out of it but as you say they find it irresistable.
Isn't it to mask their own scent? So that when they hunt their own smell can't be detected? In Australia there are a lot more dead things in suburbia - bigger gardens, more parks, more open spaces, more wildlife, and more dogs/cats hit by cars because they aren't indoors as much as they are in the UK - hence more dead things hanging about before the council is notified and clears them away. I know that you are fighting a losing battle if you are on a walk with an unleashed dog and there's a dead animal somewhere. They don't seem to roll in poo so much in Australia, and I'm thinking it's because there are lots of dead animals, instead? So, I'm extrapolating that dead-animal-rolling ranks higher than poo-rolling - thus coming back to masking their scent with that of a dead animal.
[Measuring dead animal against poo I don't know whether it's better to be a dog-owner here, or Australia!]
Ava x
Sunbird, you might be interested to read this thread, originally started a couple of years ago and then continued earlier this year, on the very same topic:
<a class="go2wpf-bbcode" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href=" https://www.healthypages.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=58314 "> https://www.healthypages.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=58314
it seems that tomato ketchup is highly recommended as a clean-up/de-stink method, though I've never tried it and always managed quite well with dilute Dettol when I had dogs! 😀
Holistic
When I had my dogs, 2 German Shepherds, took them for a walk by the river...first they found a dead salmon......not too bad apart from the fish scales, but then, horrors, a dead sheep......can you imagine as 2 healthy dogs shoulder charged the rather bloated carcass.....which exploded over all 3 of us? It took 5 weeks to get the smell out of the car......uurrgghhh!!!! Worse than milk!!!!