No Stupid Questions

i believe to check out scent, hormones, health statuses,,,etc. cats and dogs have anal glands, so they must be smelling that.

That's like asking a Sommelier why they drink wine since it all just tastes like vinegar.

If your nose was as refined as a dog, you'd appreciate the musk of a good asshole.

Believe it or not, a properly functioning anus and a healthy digestive tract don't usually have a fecal smell at the anus, even in humans with our giant glutes. It can, but as long as the above caveats are in place, and the human in question is paying attention to their cleanup post dookie, it isn't poop that you'll smell if you have to get close. You'll smell ass but that isn't the same as poo.

And that's from someone that did twenty years wiping asses for a living, including having to get very close to said asses on occasion.

A dog? No big glutes. So, unless they have some issue making their poo messy, there won't be enough clinging onto the anus itself for the smell of poo to be dominant. You can test it. Dogs have no shame most of the time, and will sit on your face with zero warning. Won't smell of poo as the primary scent. A human nose likely won't smell it at all.

What you would smell is the musk from their anal glands, plus their own base smell.

A dog would indeed smell some lingering poo smell, if any poo lingered. But it wouldn't be fresh, steaming poo smell. It would be dry poo smell, which lacks the volatile components that make shit stink as opposed to just smelling strongly the way some things do. It's like the difference between a compost heap when you just turn it, vs the smell when it's turned into soil.

Human poo, if dried long enough, just smells like a slightly musky, slightly earthy chunk of something organic. It loses the scatole and indole that make poop smell like shit. And, yes I actually ran into a couple of instances where poop had dried like that on a person. I was fucking furious. But I've also done laundry where someone missed a sizable piece and it got dried out in the hamper, and it really isn't bad smelling. It isn't even particularly strong, and when I wasn't smoking, my nose could pick up smells most of my coworkers couldn't.

Butt! Dogs have different brains than us. Poop smells aren't inherently bad to them. Ever seen a dog sniffing, and then rolling in, poop? Squirrel, deer, cat, whatever. It's just an intense thing for them, not one that repulses them.

Dogs have a much different idea of what a good smell is. We have caught our dog trying to eat cat poop straight from the litter box. My husband had a dog who would roll in poop. They apparently think shit a delightful and delicious smell.

Good nose, much info. Poop smell bad only for human, dog not care.

Anal glands

Whether it smells "good" or not, it's probably very dense in information.

They smell their asses then they know where they've been, what they eat, who their family is.

It probably doesn't smell good but it's not like they can ask each other questions like "Hey are you a prey animal? Do you eat dogs? Are you one of ours?"

They know their shit and ain’t afraid to show it!

You'd also think they would not eat random literal shit, but here we are.

Good or bad it's our perception. For them it's not good or bad, it's reading a family three and lots of other stuff

They have a lot of brain and nose real estate dedicated to processing such smells for useful information and also stronger stomach acid and enzymes in the digestive system to make ingesting poop much less threatening for a typical dog vs. the average person. So they typically benefit from such investigations whereas people would get not much info from such behaviors but would be way more likely to get some awful disease. Better for us to have a body that says “uhhh don’t do that” whereas they have instincts that tell them to go right on ahead.