Lately he’s been lying on the floor, flat out like a lizard, just to watch me drink.
He insists he is investigating what he calls “my drinking problem.”
This happened after he discovered a physicist explaining in The Wall Street Journal how we dogs miraculously put it all together, in terms of quenching our thirst – something to which he had never given any thought.
What he has finally comprehended is my mastery of complex fluid dynamics.
The drinking problem I have – along with my canine colleagues – is that my mouth goes all around my face: we have a jawbone set well back, to allow easy chomping and devouring.
Whereas you upright folk can use your cheeks to purse your lips and form a small hole you can suck water through, I have far too much mouth to seal off, despite my handsome jowl flaps.
This makes it challenging, if not traumatic, for a noble hound like myself to take a drink.
If you watch a dog drinking, you will see its tongue extend into the water, then retract up, before its jaws snap shut - and the dog will lap like this again and again, just to drink an amount that takes you two or three seconds..
But if you look more closely, you’ll see the dog’s tongue moves down with the lip curled, close to a right angle – and it faces not forwards but backwards, towards the dog’s tail. This is what has got The Boss so amused lately.
You see, I’m not using my tongue as a scoop, am I? No, I’m using it as a piston, so I need to flatten it out in the water, then rip it upwards at full speed, creating a vacuum. The flatter and wider I can make my tongue on the water, the more water I pull up and the faster I can drink.
What this does – now pay attention here – is highly sophisticated, albeit spilling a bit. Or even a lot.
Water gets sucked into the space my tongue leaves behind and the vacuum force of the moving water drags a loose column of water up behind my retracting tongue, whereupon I snap my jaws shut to stop the water falling back into the bowl. Then I swallow it.
What do you think of that? You uprights can suck it up (that’s most likely where the saying came from.) But I have to pump it up.
Now, I don’t get much water out of each column but it’s the best we dogs can do, so we just keep repeating it. And all that tongue-slapping into the water splashes plenty around but hey, what do you expect if you’re defying gravity to get a drink?
There’s also a little water sitting on top of the curl of my tongue and half of that gets thrown aside as I rip it into my throat.
The Boss reckons there is more water on the floor than inside me but it’s the price he has to pay for failing to provide a more efficient way for me to slake my thirst. I have to rely on my own ingenuity.
The physicist in question, Helen Czerski, bless her, points out that all dogs are messy drinkers - but the physics of what we are doing is pretty impressive. So there you go. Woof!
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