Canines prefer frequent, small drinks of water

When my 14-year- old son, Lex, asked me, the 25-year veteran veterinarian, how dogs drink, I stumbled through a half-baked answer.

Not wanting to be stumped by my own son, I went on a quest to find a better answer to this imponderable.

We all know a dog laps water with its tongue, but how?

I first consulted American Veterinary Medical Association President Dr. Bonnie Beaver, who says in her book “Canine Behavior”: “The tongue is curled backward and serves as a ladle to lift the water into the mouth. Because the curl is almost flat across instead of cup-shaped, much of the water spills out from the sides before the dog can get it into the mouth. About half is lost.”

“A dog’s tongue curls down and back in a sort of fishhook shape, and he literally pulls the water up, and it falls into the floor of his mouth,” explains Stan Coren, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and author of “How Dogs Think.”

“How quickly a dog can drink depends upon the size of its tongue,” Coren continued. “A medium size dog (20 inches at the shoulder) can drink a cup of water in about 15 seconds.”

How often dogs drink depends on its activity level and the availability of water. Given a choice, they prefer to drink small amounts frequently rather than large amounts all at once.

On average, a dog drinks approximately nine times a day, according to Beaver in “Canine Behavior.”

How much a dog drinks depends on the size of the pet, the ambient temperature and their activity level. The average water intake is 40 ml/kg/day (about 3 ounces for every 5 pounds of body weight), so a 25-pound dog would drink about a pint of water per day under average conditions. Depending on whether a pet eats canned or dry food, up to half of the pet’s daily water consumption can come from its food, according to Dr. Rolan Tripp of www.AnimalBehavior.net.

Dogs drink a lot of water, not only because they need it for normal bodily functioning but because they need it to create the moist nasal mucous that is so important for their sense of smell.

While drinking from toilets disgusts or grosses people out, pets have a different perspective. After all, champagne connoisseurs don’t drink the bubbly from foam coffee cups, and draft beer lovers think beer from an aluminum can is second rate.

It shouldn’t be much of a shock for us to discover the dog drinking out of an incredible, spring-fed porcelain fountain cleverly disguised as the family toilet.

“Dogs like to drink out of toilets,” Coren explains, “because the water is fresher and cooler than water that has been standing for several hours in their bowls.”

Tripp expands on the “fresh” and “cool” theory”:

“Toilets may satisfy some instinct to choose moving (or recently moved) water because of increased taste (oxygenation), and moving water in nature breaks up yeast and molds that collect in stagnant water, resulting in a “fresh stream” taste of moving water.

Also, the larger surface area may cause more cooling due to evaporation.

Humans don’t like water that’s warm, stale and in a dirty container. Neither do pets.

“The bathroom is probably the coolest room in the house, the water in the toilet probably gets changed more often than the water in their bowls, and porcelain makes a nice goblet that doesn’t alter the taste of water like metal or old plastic bowls may,” according to “The Secret Lives of Dogs” by Jana Murphy.

Experts still recommend that pets become “toilet teetotalers,” since toilets can contain harmful chemicals and other unmentionables – and instead utilize a pet drinking fountain (I like the Petmate FreshFlow fountain at www.petmate.com). Pet fountains meet the pet-potty-drinker’s goals of cool, fresh, tasty water but have filters that remove the hair and dust that collects on water in a bowl left on the floor all day, and the movement aerates the water and increases evaporation that cools the water.

And even vertically-challenged breeds like Chihuahuas, dachshunds and Maltese can reach a bubbly water fountain.

“When outdoors, you don’t want a dog drinking from puddles in the street,” says Coren, “because some cars leak radiator fluid or dribble oil, and both antifreeze and petroleum products are bad for pooches.

In the end, water from the worst toilet is probably cleaner and safer than water from a stagnant puddle, pond or lake where dozens of dogs have eliminated and bacteria and algae are like noxious synchronized swimmers.

In my quest I found that dog tongues are more multifunctional than a deluxe Swiss Army knife.

Besides lapping up water, they are lolling regulators that showcase the pace of the lungs. And they cool down a hot dog by evaporating half the water the dog drinks, according to Dr. Nicholas Dodman of Tufts University and the author of “If Only They Could Speak.”

The tongue is also a food conveyor, taste tester, wound licker, soreness salve, slobber disperser and dispenser of French kisses. Tripp notes that dogs also “wag their tongue” in communication, as in, “Do you want to play?”

“Most of a dog’s taste comes from the nose, not the tongue,” says Dodman.

As many humans know who’ve witnessed their dog’s propensity to eat things that are disgusting, dogs have a poor sense of taste as compared to humans, with only one-sixth the number of taste buds we have, that are, no pun intended, located on the tip of their tongue.

“The dog tongue can only pick up really basic elements of taste like salt versus sweet,” Dodman says. In a doggone good analogy, Dodman explains that every pet’s meal tastes like what cold food tastes like to humans: low or no flavor.

Our golden retriever, Shakira, wolfs down her food in just seconds.

Does she even taste the kibble as it rockets down her tongue conveyor belt toward her gullet? Another imponderable.