interesting
I did not know humans had anything close to the same level of sense of smell as a dog
but then they don't do they
thus, what you smell is nothing like what a dog smells
tsk tsk
...
That doesn't make any sense, now, does it tor.
We're talking about scent camouflage. Who would you camo your scent for? Other dogs? So other dogs can't smell you? No, we're talking about prey animals.
So you should criticize me about not having the nose of a hare or a caribou.
But I'll assume you're actually following the discourse, and can comprehend what I type.
Let's say prey have really great noses. Scent as good as a dog's.
Now. The caribou is out there, grazing. According to the camo theory, the entire world smells like rot, death, shit and despair. And by rolling in shit or dead animals, a dog can smell like everything else in a caribou's habitat.
Because caribou just love to hang out in filthy wallows, brimming with shit and decaying caribou.
Actually, they don't. They don't at all. But let's pretend they do, since this is the only way the argument makes sense.
Unless of course we accept that caribou have no sense of smell. That is, they can't distinguish between a carcass ten feet away and background levels of stink.
But neither arguments make any sense. In fact, we know them to both be wrong.
The only way smelling like a corpse is going to mask your scent is if a) the whole world smells like death or b) the prey lives in places that smell like death.
Let's assume that we can smell smells
similar to that of a prey, but not as well. So if we got a whiff of a dead animal in another room, we'd give it a stink of 3, while a caribou gives it a stink of 6.
Now we move two rooms away from the death smell, and can't smell anything. Stink of 0 for humans, stink of 3 for caribou.
A dog rolls in the death animal, to 'mask' his smell, and sneaks into the room we and the caribou are in. At first, us humans can't smell anything, then the dog is one room away, and the stink of shit goes from 0 to 3. That's fishy, isn't it? Why is the death smell creeping closer? For the caribou, the death stink goes from 3 to 6.
Then the dog stealthily creeps into the room. Now we smell 6 stink, and bou is smelling 12.
The dog attacks you and the caribou. I, realizing that the stench of a carnivore was creeping up on us, left. But you, Tor, and the caribou, are too stupid to realize that, and both are mauled. To death.
And your children, having inherited bad genes that don't connect the smell of crawling death stench with that of a predator, also get eaten.
Oops, looks like your genes are out of the gene pool.
Guess who's left? Me. The one with the smart genes. The one that figured out that the smell of carcass is associated with predators.