Sugreb

Here is, at first glance, a very strange Serbian superstition about dogs: A place where a dog has scratched the ground is in Serbian called "sugreb". It is believed that stepping on this place can cause person to get sick "and even to go mad"!

This is why when you see that the dog has scratched the soil, you should spit on that spot, and that would "cure it"...

This is very interesting. Why would people believe this?

Well Serbs also believed that "dogs are unclean" and that "god's breath can reach 100 cubits into the earth"...What does this mean? Why did people believe this?

Maybe this is the clue: "The first puppies are thrown into a river because they can get rabies"...Now this is very interesting...

"Furious rabies occurs when the rabid dog becomes aggressive, highly excitable, and displays evidence of a depraved appetite, eating and chewing stones, earth..."

 I presume after furiously scratching the earth...

This is why "you can get mad" if you step on the place scratched by the dog" and why "dog's breath is so poisonous"  and why "spitting on the place scratched by the dog cures the place of the disease"...

A lot of Serbian wolf folklore is also directly linked to rabies...I talked about this in my post "Goropad"...

People were so afraid of wolves and the "great disease that they carry" that Serbs believed that even other diseases are scared of wolves too. And so wolves feature prominently in spells used for protection of diseases...

Like this: Serbian ritual practice recorded in Serbia, Montenegro, and East Bosnia, performed to ensure lasting health and strength of children, involved pulling the newborn baby through "vučiji zev" (wolf's yawn), the skin cut from around a wolf’s jaws...

I talked about this in my post "Enemy of demons"

Source of this Serbian superstition about dogs: "Srpski Mitoloski Recnik, grupa autora" (Serbian mythological dictionary)