If you love dogs or write about them, you will often see behaviors that seem surprising, puzzling, or just plain disgusting.

The definition of a good dog is often a dog that doesn’t behave like a dog but like a human. A bad dog is a dog who acts like a dog, who eats gross things, has sex, picks fights, eats garden bulbs,  digs holes on the lawn, chews on sofa legs.

Whenever I have been tempted to think of dogs as being human-like, I am brought quickly to reality. For anyone who wants to understand dogs, perhaps the most important lesson is to resist the temptation to think of them as being like us.

When people tell me their dogs are jealous because they petted another dog, or that their dogs are depressed because they go to work, or that they were almost certainly abused because they are fearful or disobedient, I get twitchy.

I know I am almost certainly talking with a person who doesn’t know much about dogs and doesn’t want to train them.

Envy, to take one example, is a very human trait, dogs are way above it and do not need it or know what it is.

They can mimic us, they can manipulate us, but they are not us.

Many dogs, for example, eat the feces of other dogs. Most of us find eating poop unbearable, but it is a natural food source for dogs, especially those in the wild, and in most cases, is perfectly healthy for them.

Bud is a systematic butt sniffer.

He not only sniffs the butts of Red and Fate, but he also sniffs the butts of the donkeys and the sheep as well. I fear this will one day result in his getting kicked over the pasture fence, but the other animals sniff butts as well and seem to accept this curious habit.

My instinct was to stop a dog from doing this when I first saw it, but I stopped doing that a long time ago. Every success I have ever had with dogs comes from my acceptance and understanding of them as being an alien species, radically different from people.

The more I get this, the better I understand them, the easier it is to love, train, and accept them.

They are nothing like us. The more I get that, the quicker I look for the reasons.

The fact that so many people assure me that their dogs will be jealous if they bring home the smell of another dog illustrates how easy it is to misunderstand dogs. Nothing except smelly food or sex makes a dog happier than smelling the scent of another dog. They smell it carefully and lovingly, absorbing every scent, forming an image of a dog they don’t know, or perhaps do know.

It’s the dog equivalent of our reading a compelling mystery, they get so much more from smell than we do.

If you want to give your dog a great treat before doing home, stop to pet a dog. For them, it’s the news of their world, a gift they will appreciate. It’s a mark of our narcissism and self-centeredness that we assume a dog would be jealous for bring such a smell home.

Rather than scold my dogs and think of them as disgusting, I decided instead to try to understand the behavior. I was always surprised by what I discovered.

Today’s donkey butt-sniffing brought back my research and my understanding of butt sniffing, an I’m happy to share it with you.

Dogs’ sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times better than ours. They have a special part of their noses called the Jacobson’s Organ that lets them ignore the smell of poop when they sniff another dog’s rear end.

Instead, the organ detects something vital to them. One either sides of a dog’s anus some glands release chemicals telling the body how to grow and work efficiently.

More than anything else, this is what draws dogs to sniff the butts of other dogs and even other animals.

They are not gross; they are gathering valuable information about themselves and other animals. These are things they need to know to live in the wild or get along. To a dog, sniffing a butt is equivalent to a human handshake.

The chemicals the dogs are sniffing them a lot about each other.

They help a dog to know if another dog is male or female, how old it is, what it eats, how healthy it is.

They can even learn if the other dog is in an aggressive or dangerous mood. While Fanny, Bud was also checking her mood and learning about how she lives and how her body works. This will make him calmer around the donkeys, it is his way of understanding them and what they are.

The chemicals also help a dog to know if other dogs are strangers or if they’ve met before. These smells even help dogs get to know one another and decide how they should behave, which makes them safer.

For me, the bottom line is that this is not a behavior that should be scolded or prevented.

I have come to understand that dogs often behave in ways that are natural and important to them. I need to respect those behaviors. We don’t need to take all of their dogness away; it can make them neurotic and disoriented.

My long-standing frustration with the emotionalizing of dogs and the tendency to think of dogs as being just like us is that it prevents us getting closer to our dogs,  training them well,  and understanding how they work and live. They are complex creatures in many ways, their biology is radically different from ours, no matter how cute and endearing they are.

Anthropomorphisizin them also makes the love of dogs both problematic and even dangerous, since we force them to act unnaturally. If a dog cannot learn what a dog needs to know about the other animal’s intentions, for example, he is at risk.

So that’s my understanding of butt-sniffing. I imagine you won’t read this anywhere else tonight, and I suppose that is my job.