How can dogs eat rotten meat like road kill without suffering any ill effects?

Answer 1

Dogs rarely if ever get sick from eating food which would be rotten to us. They have stomach-acid levels some tens times the level of ours, which allows them to digest things like raw meat, bones, spoiled food etc, which could be dangerous or toxic to humans. They also have a much shorter intestinal system than we do, which means spoilt food doesn't sit in the bowel or intestines for very long, meaning much less time to contaminate the blood and get, for example, food poisoning. Domesticated dogs have evolved over thousands of years eating human scraps and protecting us from predators, and have probably protected us from all sorts of contamination situations by devouring "rotten" stuff which might have bred disease or other contaminants which those without dogs might have succumbed to. Just don't let them eat rotten socks, as they can clog them up, eventually.