Wet Dog smell: bad?
or THE WORST SMELL YOU’VE EVER SMELLED, EVER?
OH GOD, ITS IN MY CAR UPHOLSTERY WHY WONT IT STOP?
Hello Everyone, welcome to DNews.
I don’t have a dog, Im actually a “cat person”, but even I am familiar with the
stench of a wet canine.
What is it about water that makes man’s best friend so … odiferous?
The answer lies a little bit with the yeast and bacteria living in your dog’s ratty
mange, I mean silky coat, and a little bit with the way we perceive smells in general.
It can’t be helped, even the most pampered pooch is a breeding ground for yeast and bacteria.
Your dog’s skin and fur is a hospitable home for microorganisms because it offers
the warmth and humidity they need to really thrive.
Growing happily on their doggy host these microbes absorb nutrients from their environment
and excrete waste in the form of smelly gases and other molecules.
Now some colonies of microorganisms smell delightful (bread!
beer!) others (B.O.!
moldy leftovers!
cheese!) really reek.
So what is it about a WET dog that’s so special?
Well my favorite hypothesis is that the aromatic compounds released by those microbes become
dissolved in the water.
As your dog dries and the water evaporates, those compounds become airborne.
This raises the concentration of those smells in the air around your dog and you start to
smell something … rank.
The human nose perceives smells when individual molecules bind and activate receptors in our
nose called olfactory receptors.
Activation of these receptors leads to pattern recognition in our brains and we perceive
that as a specific smell.
A molecule that can’t activate our receptors is perceived as having no smell, also, the
higher a local concentration of scent molecules, the more receptors are activated and the stronger
we perceive a smell.
So what can you do about the “local concentration” of smelly bacterial excrement that is making
your dog unpleasant to be around?
Well, getting him or her wet again to give them a bath may be counterintuitive in the
short term, but killing off some of those microbes and then giving your furry friend
a good blow dry is really the only way.
So tell us, dog lovers - have you gotten used to wet dog smell or do you have tricks to
get rid of it?
Let us know in the comments below and hit that subscribe button for more DNews every
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