We love our kids unconditionally, and we would love to love our dogs just as unconditionally, except for one nagging asterisk, the dog-eat-poop thing. “Why does he do it? How do I get her to stop?” It’s so gross that it’s tough to watch, tough to stomach, and even tougher to get over when it’s over, and we smell it on his breath. We’ve tried shaming them, using our words and those tones, and we’ve even reached the last resort of inflicting pain as punishment. No one I know wants to strike their pet, but it’s so gross that we’re desperate. Two minutes after we do that, we know that wasn’t the solution, but what is? The answers for why they do it are so wide-ranging that it’s safe to say no expert has a definitive answer, nor is there a definitive answer on how we can stop it. The best answer I’ve heard for why they do it is that their wild ancestors ate their puppy’s poo to prevent predators from knowing where they were, and if that’s the answer then the answer to the second question is that it’s almost impossible to get them to stop. It’s bred into them by their ancestors to protect their young. 

Even if we had one definitive answer everyone agreed on, and we knew how to train them to stop doing it, it wouldn’t change the fact that it’s just gross. When long-time dog handlers are asked what’s the one drawback to their job, they’ll almost immediately go to the dog-eat-poop thing. They might go on to list other matters that are just as difficult and more challenging, but most of them will say that the poop-eating thing is still, after decades of working with dogs, something they cannot get passed. 

“The grosser the better,” does seem to be the answer for the general practice of dogs sniffing material on the ground. If they spot an old, white and mostly crumbly piece of excrement in the grass, they might give it a whiff and move on, but a fresh, steaming pile flips some sort of an ignition switch in the need-to-know aisle of their brain. Their desire to learn every little nugget of information possible about that turd can require a muscular tug on the leash to get them away from it. Depending on the size of our dog, it might alter our preferred ninety-degree angle with the earth when they find a rotting, maggot-infested opossum corpse nearby. Our beloved little beasts can’t help it, it’s the way they were wired, but our hard wiring leads us to find the act of sniffing, sometimes licking, and even eating excrement so repulsive that it can temporarily alter our perception of them.

The Scene of a Car Accident

Most of us won’t sniff, lick, or eat the steaming carcass of a car accident victim, but we will slow our roll by the scene of the most horrific car accidents to satisfy our sense of sight and curiosity. Coming to a complete stop is beyond the pale for most of us, but how slow do we roll by, hoping to catch a little glimpse of something awful? The grosser the better.

To curb our enthusiasm, first responders assign some of their personnel to traffic control. They have to to prevent oblivious drivers from hitting the personnel on the scene, of course, but they also know that our desire to see something awful will cause traffic jams and accidents.

“I could put together a book of some of the things I’ve seen drivers do, some of the dumbest things, to see the horrors of a car accident,” a friend of mine, often assigned to traffic control, said. “I’m not talking about a top ten list either. I’m talking about a multi-layered, illustrative, instructional, and sad-but-true comprehensive book on the things I’ve seen.”

I realize that 20-30 minutes is a relatively minor traffic jam, compared to most cities, but the reason some of us live in big towns and small cities is to avoid the perils of over population. So, when we incrementally creep up on the scene of an accident, and we see no other obstructions in our lane, or the other three to our right, we realize that the sole reason we’re going to be twenty-to-thirty minutes late is that every other driver ahead of us had to slow roll their way by the scene to see if they could see something awful.

We get so frustrated with all the drivers driving so slow that it’s obvious that they hope we misconstrue their slow roll with a respectfully cautious approach to an accident. They just want to see something, and they hope they time it just right to see the first responders pull the bloody and screaming from the wreckage. 

As with the quick sniff in passing that dogs give a hard, mostly white and crumbly piece of excrement in the grass, we might give a “Nothing to see here folks, everyone’s fine” fender bender a glance, but we won’t even slow to survey for carnage. We won’t, because in our drive up to the accident, we saw no evidence of twisted metal, plastic shrapnel on the street, and no spider glass. We pass by without slowing, knowing that it’s not worth our time.  

When we see evidence of a catastrophic accident, we become what my great-aunt used to call lookie-loos. Lookie-loos feed this morbid curiosity so often, that we’ve developed a term for it, rubbernecking. Rubbernecking, the term, was developed in America, and the strictest definition of the term involves the straining of the neck to feed a compulsive need to see more of the aftermath of an incident.

A 2003 study in the U.S., suggested that lookie-loos rubbernecking was the cause of 16% of distraction-related traffic accidents. If you’ve ever been involved in a major accident, you know the scene attracts a wide variety of lookie-loos. Some of them do everything they can to assist, but most pull to the side of the road just to look, just to see. They, in their own strange way, want to be a part of the worst day of somebody else’s life. If you’ve ever witnessed this, you’ve seen some similarities between them and the information-gathering dog sniffing poo on a neighbor’s lawn.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say almost no one wakes up in the morning, hoping to see something awful, and we don’t purposely put ourselves in position to block emergency vehicles, or get so close to an incident that we run the risk of being a part of the carnage if the fire hits a gas line. We just sort of drift into a position for the best view of something tragic. These moments help us feel fortunate, because it isn’t happening to us, and how often do we have the opportunity to feel grateful and fortunate? 

Intra-Office Drama

On a much lower scale is the “Did you hear what Jane did to Jim last night?” intra-office drama. Until I saw the damage this gratuitous grapevine could cause, I must confess that I was a conduit of such salacious information. I heard it, I lifted an eyebrow, and some element of my storytelling nature couldn’t wait to pass it along. It’s embarrassing to admit now, but we’re all tempted by the siren of salacious information that someone doesn’t know, and we strive to have others view us as as a font of fun and interesting info. We have all heard people say, “I’m not one for the drama.” Yet, they’re often the first ones to pass these stories on. I love it, you do, and we all love a little drama in our lives. It’s sort of like our own little reality show in which we intimately know all of the players involved.

Then it hits us. We have to work with these people. We have to see, hear, and feel the aftermath of spreading this information, and the drama we so enjoyed yesterday can make the next forty hour work week so uncomfortable it’s almost painful. They can’t look us in the eye, and we have to live with the fact that we played a role in damaging their reputation. We realize that we inadvertently diminished our work space to feed into this need to know too much information about our peers.      

The Need to See

We also “need to see” videos of others doing awful things to others. As with the dog that is innately attracted to the steaming pile, we want grosser-the-better videos. Even our most respected journalists, in major and minor broadcast fields, feed the need, and they know they have to, but they dress it up with “a need to see it.” Why do we need to see it? “We’ve deemed it important to keep you informed,” they say. I read the article, I got the gist of it, someone did something awful to someone. I get it. “But it’s news, and it’s important.” This is a complete crock, I say as a person who has never worked in a news room. My guess is that they go behind closed doors to discuss the video of an atrocity. They weigh the business need to feed our desire to sniff the steaming pile of humanity against the journalistic code to not stoop so low as to air something just to get clicks or ratings, and the compromise they reach is to dress it up with a “need to see” tagline. Nobody is saying we should try to put the genie back in the bottle on this unfortunate side of humanity, but how about the broadcasters and podcasters be a little more honest. “Tonight, in our Feed the Need segment, we have the latest stranger doing awful things to other strangers video.”

Those of us who enjoy being happy, content, and feeling some semblance of safety don’t understand the “need” we all have to sniff the steaming pile of humanity. We understand that some of the times ignorance is bliss, but most of the time we don’t need to whiff of the worst of humanity to know it exists. Yet, I will concede that there are some who need to see it because they say, “It didn’t happen the way. Not the way they say it did.”

The dog can be a surprisingly complex animal, both intellectually and emotionally, we’ve all witnessed some inspiring feats in both regards, but they still have that primal wiring and structuring that define their needs. The human might be the most complex and intelligent animal in the animal kingdom, but we’re still animals. We have complex needs, desires, and thoughts, but no matter how much we’ve evolved, modernized, and advanced, we still have some primal needs and wants that we’ll never be able to rid ourselves of no matter how advanced we become. Some humans have achieved some incredible things over the course of human history, but one has to imagine that if a genius the likes of Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, he would be a lookie-loo if he saw a horrific, yet visually appealing car accident, and he would probably rubberneck the scene to the point that he delayed all of the drivers behind him. We can be the greatest species ever created, but in other ways, we’re no better than the chimpanzee, the dolphin, or the dog.