Another Thanksgiving dog story

It was too late when I found Fred completing the ancient dog rite of self-anointment.

He had found something that smelled like a pig sty, and his white throat and orange collar were reeking with a repulsive brown residue.

I've never smelled anything quite that poor in the woods, and the only solution was canine scent exorcism.  

"You're getting a bath". 

Happy-dog turned to hang-dog. He knew what was coming.  

I drove home with the windows open and thought about my options. 

A fecal-scented dog goes over like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl, but when your wife is baking pies the day before Thanksgiving it's far worse than that.  

Full disclosure of Fred's condition clearly was not in the interest of smooth domestic relations, but I had a plan.

The simple act of bathing him for the holiday -- without reference to the real reason, would be a thoughtful consideration.  

I tethered Fred on the deck, drew two buckets of warm water from the mud room without alerting the redhead, donned my rubber boots, and thoroughly lathered the dog twice with a commercial "oatmeal doggie shampoo".

When I toweled him off he was ready to play.

I poked my head in the door to the warm balm of pumpkin pie. 

"Hi Sweetie, I gave Fred a bath so he'll smell good for his birthday".

He rolled on the carpet --  a regular post-bath ritual --  and fetched a toy from his toy box.

I felt the burden ease up, but a little later my wife observed that Fred smelled "a little strange", and asked what shampoo I used?

"He smells like a bowl of hot oatmeal, doesn't he?"

I gave him the sniff test and found that the shampoo had removed 95% of the strange scent.

A faint but distinctive sickly sweet residue remained.

I decided to come clean, and all was well.

I was the only one with the memory of that fetid-scent, and I couldn't get it out of my nose.

We gave Fred his usual dinner of kibble before Thanksgiving dinner, but garnished it for the occasion with pulled turkey neck meat.

Then we gave him his birthday gift -- a new "stumpy toy" (read fuzzy hollow stump with holes and squeaky owl toys inside).

He obsessed with it until dinner was served. 

He sat through the meal with his head near my lap. I was the only one who could smell his scent residue.

The story could have ended there, but there was more.

After dinner Fred amused us with his toys, but when the ladies were washing dishes, he stole the remains of the turkey neck from the kitchen garbage. He wolfed most of it down before I could react to the protests in the kitchen. 

This was definitely out of character, but he seemed to sense that the occasion was his.

The next morning we found that he barfed up the turkey meat next to our bed.

But party dog was back to normal.

Does this give me second thoughts about having a dog? Hell no!  

Fred's an endless source of entertainment, and what's more, he just discovered a new species. 

Big bear sniffs, Little bear rubs

With all the warm dry weather the bears have been more active than in past years.

It's much easier for codgers to get around in the woods in beautiful dry weather, but it's ominous when the insects are prematurely abundant and trees are blossoming early.

I dread thinking about wildfire this year.

But life goes on in the barranca.

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Taking the dive

"Whatever this is, it smells veeery interesting."



"And I think I want to blend with its essence. Here it goes."



"I'm taking the dive. Aaaahhhh. . . . jitterbug perfume."

[My apologies, faithful viewers, for the same old same old. You've seen it here before, I know. It's just that smelly substances have this magical effect on foxes and carnivores in general. They simply must 'take the dive'. I'm as much to blame as Br'er fox.]

Scent Patch update

The gray fox visited the patch twice before Thanksgiving. (I discovered that the camera at the other patch is broken.) On both occasions it did its usual neck rubbing thing. I guess I expected it to rub against the patch like a cat, but this didn't happen. It did the usual canid neck sliding behavior with the hindquarters up. We've seen this before.



I suppose it's possible that the scent anointing behavior of the gray fox is less flexible than that of cats, and this raises questions of classical ethology that still fascinate me.

Is the gray fox unable to anoint itself with smelly scents if they are not on the ground?

Obviously this fox took the time to sniff and probably lick the scent patch, but there was no picture of it rubbing against the patch. Instead, it rubbed its neck on the ground where there was no scent.

This is a good example of a fixed action pattern elicited by an appropriate stimulus. Here though, the action is not oriented to the appropriate stimulus because the scent is not in the right place--on the ground.

It reminds me of the textbook example of the greylag goose rolling the displaced egg into its nest. If you remove the egg while the broody goose is retrieving it, she continues the action to completion and to no avail.

I'll have to get more pictures to make sure the fox can't rub against the scent patch. That will convince me that gray foxes are wired to self anoint in a stereotyped fashion only on the ground.

If a bobcat catches wind of the patch, we'll see another and more versatile example of self anointing behavior.

Feline sensuality on a mossy rock

And this is how she appeared, panting softly in the wake of her sensual interlude . . . It was all over at 19:12:50 hr . . . on 24 May 2007 -- three days ago (last Friday).

It started about 15 minutes earlier as she padded up the creek bed -- a few molecules of the magical substance impinged her olfactory epithelium. She followed her nose, moving up the gradient of scent. She found it on the mossy rock -- a redolent smudge of beaver castoreum. She engaged it with a passionate grip. It was wonderful. She sniffed, licked, and drooled uncontrollably.



But that wasn't enough. The substance summoned a languorous need for a whole-body experience.



Another taste activated Jacobsen's organ in the roof of her mouth. She grimaced uncontrollably.



Finally, the buzz started to dissipate, and she felt a strong urge to pee.



The party was over. It was time to look for rabbits and deer again.

The incredible rightness of stinking

Three nights before the puma heeded the call of the canned rabbit, a gray fox visited the mossy rock. The initial temptation was probably the distressed voice in the tree, but fox found something on the rock far more alluring -- a brown smudge of goo -- commercial beaver scent. It's made from the beaver's castor glands and their contents. Four weeks earlier I had dabbed the moss with a half-teaspoon of the stuff.

Beavers scent-mark their mud mounds with castoreum. It's strange sweet smell is due to large amounts of phenolic compounds. Like other animal musks, it is also used as a fixative for perfumes. A manufacturer of tincture of castoreum advises men to use it when they want "to regain sexual vitality" or "to face the social context with the wild energy of the trapper". Sounds versatile.

Back to the fox…it arrived at 8:32 PM , and its tryst with the goo lasted five minutes. The camera photographed the episode about every 18 seconds.



When fox wasn't sliding its neck over the scent it sniffed with the rapt concentration dogs devote to stinky things ("Don’t bug me right now. Can't you see I'm busy?").



But something out there in the dark was distracting fox from the intimate ritual.



Fox's parting act was to leave a deposit…a fecal deposit. "I've been here. I 've absorbed the smell. Now I leave my smell." He had been eating manzanita berries (rather dry and mealy at this time of year).



I don’t believe the critical experiment has yet been performed on what advantage members of the dog family gain from anointing themselves with smelly things. One theory is that the foreign scent makes the animal smell interesting to its peers.

Whatever the function, when fox left it probably felt the incredible rightness of stinking.