We have to brush our teeth twice a day or they rot, shower or we smell like shit, wash our face or we get blackheads etc.
In: Biology
Teeth, because we eat refined sugars. The rest – have you ever been close to an unwashed farm animal? They also smell.
Other animals do get dirty and have these problems. We just don’t notice because they’re in the wild and we’re not. Life is nasty, brutal, and short for wild animals.
We have to brush our teeth more because we eat a ton of sugar, and we get acne/blackheads largely because of lots of oil in our diet – neither of these things were true for your average caveman.
I don’t know if it’s true that we get any stinkier than another animal if we don’t bathe. Animals *reek*. We’re just always in close proximity with lots of people, and houses don’t have as many other smells to cover it. We also have much higher standards for appearance than your average wild animal (or caveman).
We do sweat all over our bodies though, which furred animals don’t do. That can make you real stinky.
It probably depends on animal. For example birds really like washing themselves. I see birds after rain washing themselves in water everytime, all local birds do this, ravens, pigeons, tits, sparrows, magpies. Even my kramer ringed parrots get under the tap to wash themselves. Meaning they need to get clean too.
– Teeth, well you can live without brushing your teeth. It will take a long time before they rot, you might lose a couple, but you will be pretty fine for most of your life just like an animal. That’s ugly and people don’t like that, but in the past it wasn’t a big deal, people were used to it. And animal don’t care about that. It become more of a problem in the modern day because we eat a LOT of sugar, something that human in the past and animal just never did. We also extended our life quit a bit. It wasn’t a big deal to lose a lot of teeth in the past, because most people would die before that happen enough to make eating an issue, but today we life far longer.
– Animal wash themselves too. They turn in sand or go into the water and that’s enough to remove the worst, enough to keep them healthly. Sometime they smell bad, but they don’t really care. Bad smell is annoying to us because we live for decades staying away from all of it. But some people work with corpse, garbage, etc and they get used to it. And usually wild animal don’t smell as bad as that.
– Backheads don’t get you killed. Again we developped enough hygiene that having them is viewed negatively, but animal don’t care. Especially when most of them are fur on top of it.
TLDR : Human have high standard that animal don’t care about. Human could easily life that way too, we just have the mean to have better hygiene and we got used to that standard.
Humans don’t have to do that neither – if they are satisfied with a life expectancy of ~30years.
Have you ever smelled an animal that hasn’t been washed? They stink too, just like we would if we didn’t wash.
humans eat a lot of refined sugar. that’s not a problem for most other primates.
most other animals don’t sweat.
The idea of cleaning oneself is to prevent disease and parasites (and sometimes mating things or aerodynamics, but mostly for health). There are some animals that don’t have to worry as much, like a shark that has feeder fish or a land snake that sheds its skin.
But a house cat? I swear half the time they’re awake. Gorillas spend a chunk of each day eating bugs from each other. Birds preen continuously. Elephants do the hose thing with the noses, when they can. Obviously in dry times they just have to lump it. So some of it is the creatures is prevented from spending time cleaning itself.
For instance, water snakes find drifting flotsam and go ham rubbing up on it to get off parasites. Often they cannot find any and suffer from disease as a result. Once they find something to rub on, will stick around it until they absolutely have to go find food.
Personally, my keep clean routine isn’t that long. Shower for fifteen if I’m really scrubbing, and then everything else, deodorant, teeth, brushing hair, changing clothes, could boil down to a total of half an hour perhaps? That’s rounding up snd still not too bad compared to some of these animals.
People have generally covered things well, but another part to this is that many animals do wash themselves more dramatically than we realize.
Cats are probably the most famous example, but birds are perhaps even more reliant on remaining constantly clean than humans are. Their feathers not only need to be constantly cleared of dirt, but the fibrous parts need to be re-connected or the feather needs to be removed so a new one can replace it. Some birds will even bother ants on purpose so the ants will spray them with formic acid that the birds then rub around with their beak to clean their feathers. Birds will also dust bathe, not in the way a pig or elephant will roll in mud, but to use the particles as an abrasive to remove parasites and dead skin.
Lizards can develop oil buildup in their glands just like humans, and if those glands become compacted with dirt they can even become swollen or infected. I’ve seen some lizards that had to have limbs amputated because the swollen glands got so bad the buildup expanded all the way down to the bone.
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