Old habits die hard

This blog may initially tickle, but later you may realize it was all the way worth. Staring at gods creations realized the behavior of dogs with lot of aah moment to myself. Where dangling from one thought to another was left with gamut of knowledge on the same.

First of all, dogs urinate far beyond the boundaries or limits of their so-called territory. Secondly, males aren't the only ones who lift their legs; some females (usually the anxious type) do this as well. Thirdly, dogs don't just urinate on large objects, but on vertical objects (trees, posts), unfamiliar or inorganic objects (tires, plastic bags, fire hydrants), and on anything carrying a scent that the dog wants to cover (such as another animal's urine).

Of course if a biologist who witnessed the African wild dogs madly scrabbling up the tree trunks did so with the belief that dogs urinate to send a message to other dogs, their behavior would, no doubt, confirm this hypothesis.  But if we approach this behavior with a clearer mind we might ask, how could these dogs possibly know the "nose height" of another, purely hypothetical dog who might (or might not) come along at some undetermined point in the future? 

Offhand re-telling of it, as if it were a scientific certainty, merely highlights a general tendency in science: in attempting to dissect how an animal's behavior might serve an adaptive purpose -- in this case marking would be a hypothetical means of limiting competition within a niche or habitat -- most scientists blur the line between what makes sense in terms of the grand arc of evolution, and what an individual animal is capable of in terms of its cognitive abilities.

Roger Caras, whose voice used to be heard each year at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York, was fond of saying that when a dog sniffs a fire hydrant he's "reading his mail". This is highly anthropomorphic, yet it's hard to dispute that a dog does get information from the scent of other dogs this way. The only question is, did the dog who left the scent do so with the intention of "sending a message" to the one who comes along later?

Territory is defined by biologists as an area which an animal will defend against intruders of the same species. But how is such an area delineated in the animal's mind? Are its boundaries visible and concrete or imaginary and abstract? Is a dog capable of forming a mental image of where his territory begins and ends? And if animals have no sense of self and other, how could they think of a territory as "mine" or "belonging to me?"

So it seems far more likely that when one dog detects the scent of another dog, (particularly an unknown), it could cause a perhaps low-level stress reaction, which would then increase his need to urinate. As he does he would feel the pleasure of releasing some of the tension and pressure in his body? And thus, over time, his body would self-reinforce the behavior of peeing on top of another dog's scent. It would be a purely emotional and perhaps Pavlovian response, not based on intellect or other mental faculties.

This explanation is simple, whole, and complete. It requires no complicated thinking on the dog's part. It obeys the rules of parsimony and logic. And it only requires that a dog have the ability to experience tension and pleasure, and to form simple physical and emotional associations.