Why do our dogs love to play with smelly trash?

It seems gross to us, but to our faithful friends our bins are a cornucopia of good scents and tasty treats - though some of it can cause harm.

- By Nancy Dreschel

When I think about why dogs do something, I try to imagine what motivates them. What does a dog get out of playing with trash? As a veterinarian and a professor who teaches college students about companion animals, I believe there’s an easy answer: garbage smells delicious and tastes good to dogs.

Dogs have an amazing sense of smell. They have 300 million receptors for smell in their noses, whereas humans have only six million. People can make use of this sniffing ability to train dogs to detect illegal drugs, explosives and endangered species, and to help locate people lost in the woods.

Although you might not like how your trash smells, to your dog it is an appealing buffet brimming with apple cores, banana peels, meat scraps and stale bread. Even used napkins and paper towels are tempting to dogs when they are smeared with and carry the smell of yesterday's lunch.

Because dogs can find miniscule trace amounts of explosives or a person buried under 1.8m of snow after an avalanche, they are certainly capable of locating last night’s pizza crust and chicken bones in the kitchen rubbish bin.

Sometimes it’s hard to see what the attraction is. My Australian cattle dog mix, Sparky, loves to eat used tissues ~ gross, right?