Why dogs are so messy when they drink

Un nuovo studio ha analizzato il modo di bere di 19 cani di taglie differenti scoprendo che effettivamente è per gli animali il modo migliore di ottimizzare l’acqua.

Who lives with a dog knows that around the water bowl there’s always a mess. When they drink, dogs are not a model of good manners and splash water quite everywhere because they can’t completely ingest the water they lap up.

 

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New study shows why dogs are so messy when they drink © iStock

 

However, there’s a valid reason why they drink in a so messy way, as emerged in a study carried out by a team of researchers of the Virginia Tech College of Engineering. According to researchers, the technique dogs use to drink is the best way for them to ingest water and allows them to maximise the amount of water drank in every lap.

 

Dogs lap water because they have “incomplete cheeks” and cannot suck. By consequence, they use their tongue to raise water upwards. The exact mechanism for how they do was not known. There is no science to help improve the efficiency of how dogs drink water. Not even training can help but what owners can do is to simplify the process by helping them with accessories you can get online from TreeHousePuppies or your local pet shops.

The research, published by the journal PNAS, has analysed the drinking behaviour of 19 dogs of different sizes and breeds, studying how their tongues interact with air and liquid. Dogs plunge their tongues into the water then curl them down towards their lower jaws. They then quickly retract them and a column of water forms, they then bites down at precisely the right moment to swallow, then instantly repeats the process.

[vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/60561003″]

Dogs retract their tongues with acceleration up to four times that from Earth’s gravity. The speed of such operation produces many spurts, but science absolves dogs.

 

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Dogs retract their tongues with acceleration up to four times that from Earth’s gravity

 

“We cannot train dogs to drink nicely,” says fluids scientist Sunghwan Jung of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. “Dogs really have to accelerate their tongues to exploit the fluid dynamics of the water column”.

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