Land Mines and Scent Marks

For primates such as humans, vision is our primary sense. For the majority of mammal species, however, the most important sense is probably that of smell. In addition to using this sense to scope out the natural environment around them, many mammals leave scent marks as messages to one another, marking out a territory, advertising their willingness to mate, or whatever else they wish to convey.

Much research on the nature of scent marking focuses on how and where the animal leaves these messages, or how they may differ based on sex, maturity, and so on. This is obviously important if we want to understand why they're doing it, and what it is that they're trying to 'say'. But, naturally, it's also useful to understand how other animals of the same species respond to those marks - there's no point leaving a message if everyone else is just going to ignore it.