Invert: If anything you owe me an apology for your condescending insults and belittlement that you always seem to resort to at the end of a forum just to put other people down. Do you find enjoyment in this? It serves no useful purpose, stifles learning, and demotivates those of us who are trying to pursue scientific facts and truth. Further, I never read your's or anyone elses lengthy, taken-out-of-context, dissected cut-and-post replies where you then just go on to do nothing usefull and just continue to further cut the person down line-by-line. So what's the purpose in wasting your's and everybody else time by doing this? I have laid out all the views that I could find. Some of these are even contrary to my own, which you of course you are then so eager to jump on just to insult me further. And this is your usual inherent practice of perverted unscientific "sadism."
If you look over the first 5 or 6 pages of this forum, I think that - against all forms of criticism and some very bazaar ridiculous postings - I have authoritatively - Yes! I work in the field and consult with some highly prestigious world reknowned experts in this field, so I say "authoritatively" - established the fact that this is a:
Shared derived or shared primitive allelomimetic pack behavior (primitive means that it was present in a common ancestor: allelomimetic means that it was originally learned from watching another do it). Those that acquired this allelomimetic pack behavior were more likely to survive, breed and reproduce, hence evolution of an ancestral trait - the continuation of the trait - through a beneficial adaptation or Darwinian natural selection.
Roman's view on the middle of page six was the first post to add further substance, credence and better direction. He stated: "The caribou is out there, grazing. According to the camo theory, the entire world smells like rot, death, shit and despair. And by rolling in shit or dead animals, a dog can smell like everything else in a caribou's habitat....And the characterstic of all those places? It's not the overwhelming smell of rotting carcasses. It's the smell of shit....So I can see a dog rolling in cow dung to masquerade as a cow. Or at least blend into an environment already reeking of thousands of animals worth of shit....The only case I can see for scent camo is when hunting herd animals, which hang out around a lot of their own crap."
But he discredits the notion that Canidae (wolves) do the same thing by rolling in carcasses because this gives the smell of death: "Who's left? The one with the smart genes that figured out that the smell of carcass is associated with predators." Further, "rotting meat in the wild is rare." And so is the persistent smell of a carcass rare." I am unaware of a herd of elk or caribou staying away from a pile of bones
Do we know for a fact that wolves roll in carcasses? Or just shit?
Do we know if coyotes, foxes and jackals do this too?
This forum is now much more productive and fruitful compared to the first 5 1/2 pages because we are now all looking at this behavior as a being a beneficial "pack behavior," possibly to benefit the predator's ability to catch prey. But there are other competing views that we now need to look at:
1) A behavior to mask the Canidae's own scent from the prey.
2) Wolves do this type of behavior in order to bring information back to the pack. They roll in something so they can tell everybody what they have found. Scent-rolling is a peculiarity of canidae as a means of bringing information about the interesting scents back to conspecifics which may not have accompanied the animal to the oderiferous site. This hypothesis has merits in that it would give others in the pack information worth pursuing about a possible still existent food source, or the potential location of nearby prey.
3) Esthetics: To a wolf, a smell is a fascinating and even beautiful item; the equivalent to us of a beautiful painting or picture. The information it may contain is also important and ownership of that information confers importance upon the bearer. But the problem is that, unlike a material object such as a rotting, dead bird, they can't physically pick up a smell so how can they take it away? Simple! Roll in it. Wolves and dogs are often seen to roll specific areas of themselves in smelly stuff and it is possible that they are accentuating the scent highlights of parts of their bodies as part of their status body language - or, in this case, scent language."
4) As aa way of gaining statis in the pack to increase one's rank order by showing off and flaunting a greater variety of scents than the others. Thus proving to other pack-mates that he's the best at finding the prey?
"In the answer to the original question [Why do wolves scent roll] is to do with wolves' desire to possess things. Wolves are born to possess; quoting from our previous article on wolf aggression: "How a wolf gains and maintains its rank within the hierarchy is a whole subject on its own but one of the major factors is the extent to which a particular animal can claim and control access to resources. The more control it has and the more it can keep for itself the more important it is - and 'importance' is obviously a key concept in rank and status. Wolves are born to possess. Anything which is of use or even just of interest is a desirable item to them and they will do their best to take possession of it and keep it…. to possess something is to be important, to investigate and understand it is to be even more important".
Rank order is not always linear and may be somewhat flexible in certain circumstances. Puppies and yearlings, for example, have a rank order, but this order may change from month to month, week to week, or even from day to day in the case of young puppies. (The rank order for adult wolves is usually more stable.) "Playing" wolves, who are engaging in behaviors such as chasing and running for fun, may "switch" rank temporarily, and a lower-ranking wolf will be allowed to mock-dominate a higher-ranking one. Some rank orders may be circular, with wolf A dominating wolf B who dominates wolf C who dominates wolf A, but this is rarely permanent. Also, low-ranking wolves of one gender may be able to dominate high-ranking wolves of the other, without changing their rank in the social order of their respective sex."
"Hvis det er noen trøst, så elsker de fleste hunder å spise menneskeavføring, og nesten alle ruller seg i det. Denne rullingen kalles "scent rolling" (duft rulling) og er en av de atferder vi ikke vet noe sikkert om. Ulver gjør det, og hunder gjør det, på nesten alle sterke og uvanlige dufter, men vi har ikke klart å finne ut HVA de egentlig gjør. Hva som er hensikten med denne atferden. Ta med duften tilbake til flokken å si: "Se hva jeg fant" - kanskje? Kamuflere sin egen lukt i jaktøyemed - kanskje? Vi vet rett og slett ikke. Jeg kan få alle ulver til å utføre denne atferden ved å dryppe en dråpe parfyme eller gni litt deodorant på bakken. Det behøver altså ikke være, for oss "vond" lukt, bare sterkt eller uvanlig."
Can someone translate this last quote?
Finally, we cannot know the full spectrum of what a Canidae wolf interprets from what it smells. We know that the olfactory sense of smell in wolves and dogs is somewhere between 1000 and possible even more than 10,000 times or more better than ours and that a very large percentage of the wolf's brain is devoted to analysing the information it gets from a smell. Their scent information is processed in the rhinencephalon located at the front of the brain and is much larger and much more developed than in humans. The neural activity that goes on in this region is activated whenever the Canidae species has to solve a problem; so you could say that they reason with their noses. In fact, wolves' sense of smell should be counted as a different sense from ours. Wolves see details in scents that have no equivalent for us in any other sense than our sight. Our perception of the world is much more centered around our sense of sight. By contrast, the information and sensory experience which a wolf gets from a smell is unimaginable and is central to its perception of the world. The olfactory sense of a wolf is a world of scent landscape full of patterns, hues, shadows, impressions and tons of information - a fraction of ours. To a wolf, the scent mark of another wolf conveys details about the age, sex, hierarchy status, health and fertility of the wolf which it left there. Thus, to a wolf, smells are a source of information for the predator-prey hunt, a source of important information about its own species, and a source of pleasure and fascination.