Golden Retriever

　　Owners all know, every time after giving a dog a bath, the first action is shaking off water, then rolling on the ground everywhere, rubbing back and forth. The freshly bathed dog then gets covered with dust again, which troubles the owners very much. Why do dogs roll on the ground so much?

　　Everyone knows a dog’s sense of smell can be a million times stronger than that of humans. Compared to our dull human noses, the concepts of pleasant and foul smells may be very naive and simple to dogs.

　　For example, perfume; we smell it as a certain fragrance, but for dogs, they can detect the scent of the fragrance ingredients, added alcohol content, the container holding the perfume, the chemical substances used during processing, and many other smells picked up during production that we can't even imagine. For them, any kind of smell is extremely complex, whether it seems fragrant or stinky to us, it's just a scent to dogs. Of course, they also have preferences for certain smells, such as meaty odors.

　　We are accustomed to bathing dogs to remove dirt and odors from their bodies, using various shampoos or conditioners to make the dog's coat meet our standards: shiny, smelling pleasant, and smooth. All of these are to satisfy our aesthetic. Of course, the dog is also happy when praised for looking beautiful, but bathing and making themselves smell nice is definitely not the dog's original intention. When strange smells cling to them, they feel uncomfortable and instinctively try to restore their original scent as much as possible.

　　The fact that dogs roll on dirty things is an issue almost every dog owner encounters. We can only speculate: for example, the scent on dirty things is stronger, making dogs feel it can cover the bath scent; or dirty things contain more types of odor molecules, or some are closer to the smells they like… Whatever the case, by nature they love to roll on dirty and stinky things to cover the new bath smell, and this is absolutely true. Because after some time of bathing, dogs rolling on dirty things decreases significantly.