Ugh…

Normally, I’m of the “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back” school. Very rarely have I regretted learning something new about the world, even if that involved tasting fermented fish. Today, though, I’m regretting my curiosity.

You can buy all kinds of crazy shit on the Internet. Real dinosaur fossils. Uranium ore. People’s bathwater. Politician-shaped inflatable dolls. Truck Nutz. Just the other day, I saw an apothecary bottle on eBay which was supposedly full of horrendously toxic mercury bromide.

Now, usually, I’m pretty restrained about buying horrible stuff. Not this time, though. Not this time…

I am now the (proud?) owner of twelve fluid ounces of wolf piss. According to PredatorPee.com, they get their wolf piss from the drains under captive wolves’ enclosures. So that’s one burning question answered. Another question: why would anybody sell wolf piss? Well, supposedly, since it smells like an apex predator, wolf pee scares away most other animals, like cats, dogs, foxes, and coyotes. But another burning question still remains: what the hell is wrong with me? I’m gonna file that one under “beyond the scope of this article.”

Smells are pretty hard to describe in text, and my nose doesn’t work that well anyway, but to save you guys from your own morbid curiosity, I’m going to try to convey to you just what wolf pee smells like.

Horrible is what it smells like. It’s absolutely rank. For some reason, I had it in my head that wolf pee would smell like a very sweaty lumberjack. Musky and animalistic, maybe, but not horrible. I was incorrect. Wolf urine is one of the worst things I’ve ever smelled.

The first scent that hits the nose is the rancid stink of a stagnant, rotting mud puddle. If you played in mud as much as I did as a kid, you know what I’m talking about. A boggy, anaerobic smell. The smell of the liquid that seeps out of a pile of rabbit droppings that’s just starting to decompose, or a chicken coop that badly needs shoveling out.

The second impression I get is just how pungent the smell is. It’s a penetrating, shocking smell. The kind of smell usually associated with “What the hell did I just step in?” or “God, something died in here.” The second it hits the nose, it takes a fast-track right to the brain and bashes you over the head. It’s the kind of smell that would be absolutely impossible to ignore.

(I would like to take a moment to point out that, for each of these descriptions, I’m taking a fresh sniff, which I’m really, really, really starting to regret.)

There’s another component to the smell that I’m finding it difficult to describe. If you, like me, went to a public high school, you will have encountered the intense, skunky, musty, musky, herbal smell of cannabis. There are other plants that smell kinda like that. Tomato leaves. Some strains of hops. Skunk cabbage. Some kinds of grass clippings. That’s the tail-end smell.

So, in all, I’d say wolf pee smells like someone made a mud-pie out of rotting mud, with cannabis, tomato leaves, and grass clippings as a binder, burnt the edges of that mud-pie, and then let it soak in scummy pondwater for a couple days.

I’ve smelled some very nasty things in my time. Dead chickens in the heat of a Carolina summer. Wet, rotting soy protein. Roadkill. Improperly-disposed-of diapers. Dead fish. Surströmming. Mam ca loc. Axe body spray. Wolf piss is now a solid contender for the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. Perhaps it’s some sort of instinctive, primeval thing—a human who smells wolf and thinks “Gah! I’m outta here!” has a distinct survival advantage. Or perhaps I’m being trolled. I can’t say I’ve ever sniffed a wolf’s undercarriage (nor do I intend to start), so for all I know, I just bought a bottle of government-issue stink-bomb liquid.

But the longer I think about it, the more I’m sure: wolf urine is the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. I get genuinely queasy just remembering the odor. And I’m slightly worried that someone’s gonna smell what smells like rotting cannabis coming from my place and call the police. And I’m going to have to explain to a very confused officer that they’re just smelling my bottle of wolf piss, which is going to lead to some conversations I’m not looking forward to.

Did I say do not try this at home? ‘Cause you really, really shouldn’t. I wish I hadn’t.