Discovering YOU Magazine January 2018 New Year Issue Special Edition | Page 44

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5. Sniffing butts!

Dogs are notorious for smelling each others’ behinds, but there’s more to it than canines just being really into butts. Dogs have extremely sensitive noses, and they’re designed to communicate with each other via chemicals. Dogs have anal sacs near their bums that hold their apocrine and sebaceous glands — glands that secrete chemicals that can tell one dog a lot about another, including information about a dog’s diet and gender. In fact, dogs have a secondary olfactory system called the “Jacobson’s organ” whose whole purpose is to help them glean information from scents.

6.. Eating feces

I’ve just realized that many of dogs’ weird behaviors involve pooping, rolling in poop, or eating poop. Remind me why we keep these disgusting creatures around again? Oh, yes, thanks. Anyway, some dogs have the extremely unfortunate habit of eating other animals' feces. This behavior is called “coprophagia,” and its super gross, especially when your dog tries to lick your face directly afterward. We don’t know why, exactly, dogs do this (or why some dogs do it and others don’t), but Steve Duno discusses a few theories in Modern Dog: When a female dog has puppies, she’ll sometimes eat their feces. This is a hold over from the days when dogs were having litters in the wild; eating the feces was a way of removing the puppies’ scent and hiding them from predators. Other dogs may eat poop due to vitamin deficiencies in their diets or simple hunger.