Quote:
ubs wrote
I'm guessing the same way you keep your retriever from eating your duck. You teach them that they get a treat for dropping it when they're still small and you can wrestle it away.
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Not quite. The pigs are usually muzzled, and in any case they are used mostly for tourists or media events (and almost entirely in Europe).
Dogs are more widely used to find truffles, as they can be trained to find the buried treasure without eating it, whereas pigs go for the scent naturally: truffles contain steroids that are identical to steroids found in the saliva of boars -- which is why sows are used to find truffles. The lady pigs are attracted to the pheromone (boy howdy, are they), and when in estrus they go mental for them. They actually go into "present" mode when they find the truffle, put their ham hocks in the air in the hope of get their caves spelunked.
Those same steroids -- in both truffles and boar saliva -- is also a close match for one that is secreted in the human male underarm! I shit you not.
As you pointed out, truffles are redolent of sexy time. More than that, they come close to being actually aphrodisiac. An experiment at Buckingham U. showed that people who were exposed to the steroid had more positive responses to photographs of members of the opposite sex than those who breathed mere air. (I don't know how they controlled for teh gay.)
Ref:
Jacobson's Organ by Lyall Watson