Here at Reactions, we ask the tough questions to get to the bottom of the biggest scientific quandaries. In that spirit, this week’s video explains why dogs sniff each other’s butts. It’s a somewhat silly question with a surprisingly complex answer. This behavior is just one of many interesting forms of chemical communication in the animal kingdom.
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According to this article the dogs should have a vocabulary of scents which is far greater than our vocabulary of words (nouns) for describing various kind of materials particularly chemicals and psychological effects as expressed through body chemistry.
The questions that this raises are profound. From where do the dogs learn this range of possible scents, and how do they understand the associated meanings of each of them? Have the dogs been evolving this ability? and has this process been followed by experiment? and is the evolution still going on?
Also it suggests that we should be much better at using the ability of dogs to detect odours for communication with them, and with the development of medicine and the other numerous chemicals of used to man.