THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 63 



Dogs more than a year old brought up on a diet restricted to 

 two or three articles always refuse at first when an entirely new 

 food is offered. They base this refusal on the sense of smell, and if 

 the meat is putrid enough so that the putrefaction smell completely 

 hides the native smell then the dog. has no objection. In other 

 words, all rotten meats smell substantially alike and are therefore 

 recognized as a familiar diet, while any new kind of fresh meat 

 offends through its strange smell. 



Hunters and natives who have noticed that dogs will not eat 

 wolf or fox meat commonly remark that dogs object to cannibal- 

 ism. I find that the objection of a dog to wolf meat is no stronger 

 than his objection to duck meat or caribou meat, provided the duck 

 or caribou is an absolutely new meat in the experience of the dog. 

 Once induced to eat wolf, a dog soon becomes as fond of it as 

 of any other meat. 



We have found that the food prejudice is stronger the older the 

 dog, and we believe that with dogs of the same age the prejudice 

 of the female against new food is stronger than that of the male. 

 This seems to extend the commonly believed-in principle of the 

 greater conservatism of human females down into the lower 

 animals. 



It would be exceedingly interesting, it seems to me, to make 

 further experiments in the food tastes of dogs along the following 

 lines: 



Pups of the same litter should be selected, one to be fed for 

 two years on mutton and water, another on fish and water, a third 

 on beef, and a fourth perhaps on a vegetarian diet. It would 

 make the experiment more interesting if a male and a female 

 could be used for each sort of diet. Judging from our experiments, 

 it seems probable that at the end of two years the mutton-fed 

 dog would refuse both beef and fish, and the fish-fed dog would 

 refuse both mutton and beef. I believe it would also be found that 

 the abhorrence for the new diet would be stronger with the female in 

 each pair than with the male. 



It is well known that some Eskimo groups eat either no vege- 

 table food at all or practically none. But in all parts where we 

 have been, except in Coronation Gulf, they are fond of the berry 

 known in Alaska as the "salmon berry" and elsewhere as the cloud- 

 berry (Rubus chamaemorus Linn.) . We were astonished, especially 

 my Alaska Eskimo companions, when we found that some of the 

 Coronation Gulf Eskimos lived among an abundance of these berries 

 and had never thought of tasting them. Since no taboo existed my 



