If a dog with no previous experience with potentially dangerous wild animals such as bears, wolves, or coyotes encounters their scent, are they likely to recognize it as the scent of a dangerous animal and act fearful or cautious? Or will they react just as a dog who had never experienced rabbits might react to that novel smell?
That is, has natural selection hardwired certain scents into a dog’s brain as being dangerous?
I have always owned snakes as pets. One of the things I’ve noticed is that dogs always react to a snake or its scent with fear or at least caution. A dog we owned and raised from a puppy raised its hackles and backed up when it first saw my new snake. I know for sure that this was his first experience with any kind of snake.
After about five minutes, the dog kind of shrugged and figured everything must be OK if us people weren’t panicking and no one was hurt yet. After that, there was no particular fear response.
i’ve seen a pomeranian raise its hackles and back up, growling and then giving its ‘intruder alert’ series of barks when it encountered a tissue box newly fitted with a decorative dog cover like this one.
Our rather dim beagle barked at our animated 2-foot tall santa display until we shut it down. We were determined to see how long she would bark at it before she gave up but she outlasted us at almost 45 minutes.
Just to be clear, I’m focused most on first reactions to scents (not sights) of potentially dangerous animals – bears, snakes, wolves, coyotes, sabre toothed tigers and the like…
Scents are big business with hunters. They are used as both masking agents and attractors.
Predators have a different diet than prey animals and animals can tell the difference in the urine by smell. Your dog or cat certainly can identify if the newly found pee patch is a predator by smell, even if they have never encountered that smell or animal before.
If you Google predator scents you can read all day, if you Google deer scents you can probably read for two. So I won’t both with posting links .
