Useless Info - 'Truffles'

'Looking for truffles in open ground is almost always carried out with specially trained pigs or dogs.

Pigs were the most used in the past, but nowadays farmers prefer to use dogs, which do not eat the truffles.

Both pigs and dogs have keen senses of smell, but while dogs must be trained to the scent of truffles, female pigs, or sows, need no training whatsoever.

This is due to a compound within the truffle which has an uncanny resemblance to the sex pheromone of male pigs, or boars, to which the sow is keenly attracted.

It may have been the strange attraction that pigs have to these fungi which prompted its discovery by early human populations.'

Truffle