Why Dogs Kick Dirt In The Air After Pooping
I have a dog and he does this weird thing. He takes a dump and then scrapes the ground with his hind legs, throwing dirt in my face. If I was a farmer, I might appreciate this behavior. I could plant some of the smaller root vegetables in the furrowed ground and would even have a steaming pile of manure right at hand.
But since I don’t grow potatoes, I don’t appreciate the dirt in my mouth. It’s a nuisance and I don’t see any purpose behind it. And yet, there must be one. He can’t be flinging clods of dirt into the air and leaving behind huge scratch marks just for the heck of it.
So why? Why is my dog scratching the ground?
Well, it turns out it has to do with his smelly feet.
Dogs have smelly feet
The scientists who study animal behavior are called ethologists and besides sitting in a mosquito-infested jungle observing the grooming and copulation habits of chimpanzees à la Jane Goodall, ethologists also study dogs.
Since dogs are even worse at filling out questionnaires than chimpanzees, these studies are observational. In practice, this means that to uncover the mystery of ground scratching, an ethologist had to follow dogs around and record the frequency, time, and surrounding circumstances of the curious behavior.
Image for post
Image by the author (CC BY-SA 4.0)
From records like these, the ethologist then spins a hypothesis — an explanation that makes sense and matches the observed data. One such brave ethologist who presumably got his face repeatedly sandblasted is Marc Bekoff, Ph.D., professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He studied ground scratching by male domestic dogs back in the 1970s and years later, in an article for Psychology Today, summarized his findings like this:
Dogs have scent glands in their paws, and when they scratch, they might be trying to send an olfactory message to other dogs by spreading the scent from their paws or by sharing the odor of the pee or poop they deposited.
So yes, dogs’ feet have a scent — they smell. They don’t smell like cheese since they don’t wear moist socks, but they do smell — at least according to Bekoff, who I presume must have buried his nose in dog paws to check (what a brave man). The source of the odor, as Bekoff’s nose certainly uncovered, are so-called interdigital glands, tiny organs between a dog’s toes that produce pheromone-infused secretions.
Sidenote: many hoofed animals have such glands in their feet as well, but I pity the ethologist who verified this by sniffing the hoofs of a kicking donkey.
So, when my dog is scratching the ground, some of the interdigital secretions ooze into the soil and are subsequently propelled into the air for better dispersal.
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Image by the author. Based on a photo by Srecko Skrobic on Unsplash.
Moreover, if I understood Bekoff correctly, the dust in the air also helps spread the poop’s smell, which reminds me, I should really dust off my bathroom…
As to the scratch marks, this is what Bekoff has to say:
Scratching also leaves a visual mark on the ground. Ground scratching could be yet another form of social communication, and taken together, peeing, pooping, and ground scratching are a good example of how dogs may use what ethologists call composite signals to enhance their messages to other dogs, by using both olfactory and visual components.
Now, of course I don’t communicate through smells just as my dog doesn’t communicate in English. And I can’t decipher the scratch marks my dog leaves on the ground just as I can’t decipher the chicken scratches my doctor leaves on medical prescriptions. But I guess as long as I keep speaking English with my dog, it’s only fair that he keeps speaking dog with me.
Wrapping up
As Bekoff writes, ground scratching by dogs serves different functions “depending on who is doing the ground scratching, who else is around, and what they’re trying to communicate.” I suspect my dog is just sharing memes. Either way, they’re a form of composite signals that involve visual, olfactory, and possibly auditory components. In other words, they’re multimedia messages.
Now, not all dogs throw dirt in your face. Only about 9% of dogs do. But I’m in the dirt-eating position of having one who does. But now that I understand why he does it — that it’s simply a way for him to send messages to other canines in the neighborhood — I’m more tolerant of it. After all, what right do I have to spend all day firing off emails, tweets, blog posts, and other messages and then deny my dog to do the equivalent. And on the bright side, the regular sandblasting keeps my teeth shiny white.
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