The importance of smell in the natural behavior of animals has long been recognized and, long before it was known what semiochemicals were, people used them to manipulate the behavior of animals. For example, traditionally farmers have encouraged a mother sheep (ewe) to adopt a strange lamb if her own died at birth, by covering the strange lamb with the skin of her dead lamb (see Chapter 9).

The clear potential for applied uses of pheromones was an early encouragement for research. At the turn of the twentieth century and in its first few decades, the potential of synthetic chemical signals to control insect pests was anticipated both in North America and in Europe (Witzgall et al. 2010). There is now increasing use of an understanding of semiochemicals to affect the behavior of domesticated animals, from bees to sheep, as well as use as “greener” alternatives to pesticides, largely for the control of insect pests but also potentially for vertebrate pests. However, no matter how elegant the science, pheromones will be exploited only if they are commercially viable, though that can be strongly influenced by government policy (Chandler et al. 2011; Winston 1997). Human odors will be discussed in the next chapter (Chapter 13).