Its easier to successfully mask odors if the sense of smell involved is diminished. So saying that there is a discrepancy based on heightened smell makes no sense (and a source of bad puns).

 

Rotting flesh has a vile putrid odor. The scene of living flesh is completely different. This is extremely common knowledge. How is this a difficult concept?

 

Smell isn't the only sense that attract zombies on the show.

 

rotting smell is obvious to human's nose or animal's nose for that matter.. But What exactly is living fresh smell? hmm? Have you ever noticed that some humans are near you because you smell their living fresh smell? I guess not.. you had to use other senses such as listening and seeing. Now, Are you saying zombies (rotten body.. rotten nose.. functioning worse than when they were alive) somehow came to better sense of smell than fully functioning noses?
If your answer is 'yes', Please enlighten me! :zombies_rolleyes:

 

She's also quite used to walking among the dead with her now gone pets, you'll notice she doesn't walk like most live humans but rather she takes it nice and slow, the fact she was shot in the hip might have a bit to do with it as well.

 

She dragged around a couple zombies behind her for over seven months to mask the senses of other zombies. She would have encountered walkers when she was hoofing it all the way to the and found out if the gut smearing worked. Plus we saw the walkers walk right by her when the guys spilled all over her.

I think she figured it out.

 

Again, smell isn't the only sense we see the zombies react to and a heightened sense of smell isn't needed to detect the huge difference between rotting flesh and non rotted flesh. A weak sense of smell could easily detect that. The walkers go after living humans and animals that don't smell like rotting zombies. They don't go after humans that smell and act like walkers. Its pretty simple to figure out the camouflaging effect.

 

the sense of smell is the most primative and brain stem driven of all our senses. Remember when the scientist at the CDC showed the brain scan of his wife turning? only the brainstem "lit up" Makes sense that the walkers use smell more.

 

Michonne is a boss, Walkers don't wanna mess with her.

 

It's a bad scene. When Rick and Glenn did it the zombie noticed them when it started to rain a bit. Michonne was govered by guts a little bit and they didn't see her as a human.. doesn't make any sense

 

The amount of scent that a living creature puts out varies a lot. When someone is scared and running, they're emitting lots of pheromones and other scents that anything with a nose (including a walker) can pick up. Back in "Guts," Rick and Glenn were scared as hell. That plus a warm Georgia rain brought their scent up.

Michonne seems to have much better control of her body. I can see her bringing herself to attention, controlling her breathing, etc. when the situation demands. With that and the fact that she's female and it's a cool spring morning instead of a hot summer afternoon, she's going to emit a lot less scent. With that wild strike against the walker's belly, she also spilled a whole lot of biter gore on herself (and, sorry about the grossness - right on her crotch, where a lot of a human's smell comes from, not to mention her thigh wound).

She is also a master of walking like an Egyptian (sorry, a walker) and is less likely to cue the biters that way.

Big thumbs up to the folks who pointed out that the smell of rotting carcasses is one of the strongest scents out there. The chemical is called putrescine and is used in chemical warfare (check out "Whale Wars" - the Sea Shepherd folks lob canisters of it onto the Japanese whaling ships).