Why Dogs Smell Each Other's Butts

Original Source from Jaeger, Lowell. "Why Dogs Smell Each Other's Butts." Coyote's Journal. Berkeley: Wingbow Press, 1982.

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WHY DOGS SMELL EACH OTHER'S BUTTS by Lowell Jaeger

When he asked, the dogs refused him. You are unclean, they told Coyote, you are not a dog. So the dogs undressed for their sweatbath and entered the sweatlodge without him.

Coyote envied the glossy fur coats the dogs had hung outside the lodge. He thought of stealing them, but he decided not to.

Instead he threw the long coats in a great pile, and wiped his muddy feet across them. Then he set fire to the sweatlodge roof and said in a loud voice: Oh what will the dogs do now, Coyote has taken their fur!

From behind a rock, Coyote sat laughing as the naked dogs rushed into the cold out-of-doors, grabbing for a coat, afraid there might be too few to cover everyone.

Years later, as the story goes, with every dog zipped in someone else's fur, dogs smell each other's butts, looking for their own.

Meanwhile Coyote is still grinning, off in the hills somewhere, rolling in red dirt, thinking how crude to be a dog,

how much more clean, how much more fun to be Coyote.