Or are they affected but they have a higher tolerance before the smell overwhelms them?
In: Biology
I did a literature review in college on the science of disgust. There have been studies on very young children where the children learned disgust behavior from their mothers. They were asked to drink from a glass that had previously had a bug in it, and only did so if their mothers did it first. Revulsion, very similar to disgust, appears to be something we’re born with. If you feel a violent urge to barf when you smell or see someone else puke, or see maggots crawling on a dead animal – that is most likely evolutionary. Some ancestor WAY down your family tree was probably saved by regurgitating when it became apparent that nearby food could be spoiled, or that someone in their clan was sick from spoiled food.
Your dog, on the other hand, evolved to eat some pretty gross rotten stuff and be fine with it. His species never needed to evolve the trait of avoidance to dead or sick things the same way we do. And most smells we find disgusting have some properties in common with rotting and unsafe things.
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