THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 61 



very much like mutton and almost as good. That seal's fat does 

 taste like fresh mutton fat is the opinion of all white men I know 

 who are familiar with the taste of both. The lean, however, while 

 good in its way, has a flavor quite distinct from that of mutton. 



There may be a more fundamental reason why a man used to an 

 elaborate menu, as were all my present companions, is easier to 

 please than one who has never eaten any but a few simple things. 

 Since many of the modern theories in human dietetics are based on 

 experiments with rats or guinea pigs, analogizing from dogs to 

 men in this field should be no less interesting or instructive. I 

 should like to cite some of our experiences in feeding dogs with 

 foods that were strange to them. 



In 1908 on my way down the Mackenzie River I bought a dog 

 team which had been brought up on a diet of fresh-water fish sup- 

 plemented with moose, caribou, rabbits and possibly ptarmigan. 

 When we got to the seacoast we had trouble to get these dogs to 

 eat seal meat. I remember some sailors who told me at the time 

 that they did not blame the dogs. These were men who had been 

 in the country twenty years without ever tasting seal and who 

 naturally knew it was bad. But it was not that seal was funda- 

 mentally less agreeable to dogs; they were merely not used to it. 

 It occurred to me that the dogs were refusing to eat because of the 

 odor of the meat rather than because of the taste. For one thing, 

 they did not put it in their mouths; for another, a dog probably 

 does not have a keen sense of taste, as we may infer from his habit 

 of gulping his food, but his keenness of smell is well known. I 

 now provided seal meat that was more or less decayed, thinking 

 that while fresh caribou and fresh seal smelled different, the putre- 

 faction odor in either case would be about the same and would 

 overpower the native smell. This worked at once. And I have 

 never found a dog used to putrid meat of one kind that would not 

 eat greedily putrid meat of any other kind. By gradually giving 

 the dogs fresher and fresher seal they were easily broken to it. 



But we had more serious trouble with the same team the follow- 

 ing spring when we tried to feed them on ducks. These ducks were 

 fresh-killed, hence had their native odor. All the team refused 

 at first, and some went for more than a week without tasting. I 

 determined experimentally, however, that through hanging in the 

 sun for three or four days, or until it began to smell putrid, a duck 

 became acceptable to any of the dogs. 



