In summary: There appears to be many cases of people's domestic dogs showing anxious and aversive behavior around cooked lamb. Some dogs are afraid of the spices that are often used with cooked lamb, while others are not. In one of the linked threads, a family had several dogs and one of the dogs was adapted from an animal shelter. The dog from the shelter never had a chance to get used to spices and was afraid of lamb. The dogs that were raised with the family got used to the spices used with meat and the dog from the shelter never had a chance to get used to spices. Lamb is a very common ingredient in most high end dog foods, so it could very well be strong spices that the dog is object
#36
Superposed_Cat
388
5
Perhaps it's breed dependent? Not very helpful but I don't know if anyone has considered this.
I have a 10 year old chocolate lab that is totally normal and have never noticed strange behavior (except for a thunderstorm...) tonight we browned ground lamb in a frying pan and she completely wigged out. When we let her in inside and she smelled it, she quickly ran to the back of the house and hid under a table. She got up a few times and went to the doorway of the room to sniff. She then returned to under the table. The reason I searched this topic was because the last time we cooked lamb she did the same thing but we could not figure out why...It is totally the smell of cooked lamb. Crazy...
#38
Michael Towne
1
0
It definitely has something to do with the chemical reactions in cooking gamey meat. my dog has almost violently scared reactions if we cook lamb...Spice or no spice
if we cook particularly gamey meats of other kind she gets mildly anxious. But with lamb she out of her mind. It's like thunder times ten.