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Dog Behavior: When Dogs Lick & Sniff “Private” Places
People have lots of ways of greeting each other: nods, kisses, handshakes, waves, and high fives. Dogs keep it simple. They just sniff each other's bottoms. Dogs do a lot of things differently from people, and for the most part people are tolerant of these differences, figuring to each species, its own. Not so with rude sniffing. It's obnoxious when dogs do it to people, and it's not much better to stand around while they take their time doing it to each other.
Every dog carries an ID in his back pocket, so to speak. On each side of the rectum is an anal sac, which contains a strong-smelling fluid. This fluid is the equivalent of a dog's thumb-print.
With a quick sniff, dogs can tell more about each other than we could determine by rifling through one another's wallets. Dogs can tell the sex, age, health, reproductive status, diet, and mood from those smells. They get all the information they need to decide whether they want to associate with that dog and what kind of relationship they ought to have.
When dogs meet people, they use the same tried-and-true method that works so well with their peers. It may be uncomfortable and embarrassing for us, but dogs know what they're
doing. Private places offer dogs a lot of information because the scents are more intense than those from other parts of the body.
Dogs can pick up as much information about health, hormones, and tension levels from sniffing people as from sniffing other dogs. Research has shown, in fact, that dogs sniff with such accuracy that they may be able to detect some types of cancer or the onset of seizures before people have a clue about the problem.
A dog who greets people by shoving her nose into their bottoms needs to be taught to stand
back and use another, more polite kind of greeting. But you don't want to interrupt dogs when they're doing their usual meet-and-greet with each other. People who tug their dogs away from each other before they've finished their traditional introductions are inadvertently creating social tension.
The sniffing ritual is designed in part to help dogs establish who has the more forceful personality and deserves extra respect. This is an essential component of all their introductions as well as of the interactions that follow. Interrupting this step by tugging dogs away from each other leaves them uncertain about their respective roles. They may solve this uncertainty by getting physical. So instead of watching a leisurely sniff, you may find yourself in the middle of a fight.
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