Science

Problem Drinkers

44 Comments

We didn’t need a scientific study to know that dogs are sloppier drinkers than cats, but it took slow motion photography and close observation to figure out why. It all has to do with tongue motion and fluid dynamics. Cats are able to pull up a delicate, single column of fluid using their tongues, but dogs create a water bowl tsunami by smashing their tongues into the water and using it as a ladle.

Basically, the bigger the dog, the larger the mess around the water bowl. That’s a shocker, of course.

Here are some videos to prove the point.

What is proven by these films? It proves that you can completely indulge any obscure fascination on the Internet, including how cats and dogs (and humans) look when they drink. It also shows that we can use someone else’s hard work as a starting point to ask nonsensical questions like, “Why can’t dogs and cats purse their lips?” and “How would the world change if our pets could drink through a straw?”

It also confirms that slow motion re-play technology is completely wasted on live televised sporting events.

Are you a messy eater?

44 thoughts on “Problem Drinkers”

  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Test post.

    When no one else is around I am a messy eater, yes, indeedy.

    However, I am very thankful for my two sloppy dog drinkers.

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  3. I used to have a guy I would meet at the airport on a regular basis, it was back in the days of suit and ties. I used to wake up in the morning and. Iron a shirt for 15 minutes as part of my routine.
    So I go to the gate at the airport and out of the plane comes steve,
    Steve say hi tim have you eaten today? Here let me check your shirt. And he goes off into the most uproarious laughter on the planet. He obviously thought up his slam on the plane and he was delighted to find the tomato sauce from my pasta lunch on my shirt and tie, I have noticed that white clothes are not a good idea for me. I have a friend Rex who is a white pants guy. I comment to him that I don’t understand how you can go through life keeping white pants white, he comments that I am the only person that notices and I guess it’s because it’s so unfathomable to me. Now my beard and mustache add to the drama. Tomato sauce can make for a snack later in the day if I’m not careful.

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  4. Yep. Cannot deny it. Red sauce ends up down my front. Coffee gets spilled, especially on light colored pants. Frosting gets in my hair…I used to have a co-worker who threatened to bring in a bib for me to use on the days I had important meetings as those were the days I inevitably got something on my shirt. I never took her up on the bib, but I do travel with Shout wipes.

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  5. I knew a pair of identical twin pediatricians in Winnipeg who were very dapper dressers and always wore bow ties to work. Long ties were invariably “watered” by infant boys during exams.

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  6. Good morning. I do sometimes get some food on my clothes when I eat. I try to avoid sloppy eating. Food just seems to jump onto my clothes occasionally even when I am being careful. How does that happen? It is one of those mysterious things that I think should not be possible. There must some explanation for food that seems to be able end up on my clothes by jumping. Perhaps Dr.Larry Kyle added some genes from a kangaroo to my food.

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  7. With the snow fall my livestock is upping their eating. Junco’s and cardinals are neat, squirrels not so much.
    I am sloppier at everything. Fibromyalgia makes some of us clumsy: we drop things, trip over things. Usually with food I am all right, except every now and then the fork. Concentrating on the task stops most of it. When you eat with guests or out with other people or church dinners whatever, you are supposed to carry on a conversation, which interrupts the focus on handing the knife and fork.
    So I am a misanthropic eater.

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    1. Once I came home and found a chunk of jelly doughnut on my mailbox. The mailbox is the kind that mounts on the wall of the house and projects out about 4 inches or so. At first I thought the mail carrier had been having a snack on his/her route and accidentally left it there. Some days or weeks later, though, I saw a squirrel leap from the floor of the porch onto the mailbox. I guess he thought it was a safe place to leave his treasures since it was difficult to get to.

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      1. i di that with tea cups and then cant find where i left them. i have a cup i carry around with me and i set it down so i can use two hands and then move on and remember that i set it down and i backtrack for 5 minutes and if i cant find it i go fill another and figure ill drink ice tea later. i get into a little trouble this time of year.

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  8. When l first saw today’s title, l got all excited that we were going to share drinking stories. lnstead, the subject is cat and dog tube and ladle tongues. There’ve been a handful of people over time with whom eating became an ordeal. We’ve all know them; they’re the ones who fill their mouths and while chewing keep talking. My mother was one of these mouthful talkers. The more repugnant it was, the more l couldn’t help but focus on her mouth, sometimes losing my appetite. l tried not to look – l really did, but reminding myself “Don’t look, just don’t look” has the opposite effect; l wound up staring at her moving mouth and nothing else. lt’s the “Don’t think about a white elephant” concept.

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  9. Cats and dogs drinking reminds me of our barn at milking time, and I am sure I am repeating: as the first cow(s) was milked, the dog and cat(s) would sit and watch patiently. Then milk would be poured in an old pie tin. Boots would lap up half the milk, rather neatly for a dog. Then he would wait for the cats to have what he thought was their share, then he would finish it off. One of the hot topics in evolutionists and animal behaviorists for last 2-3 decades has been how and why altruistic behavior occurs in animals, and humans for that matter.

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      1. Just a bit of trivia here – in researching how long a cat’s life is last night, l came across a few items stating that the oldest cat in world history lived 39 years and 3 days.

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  10. I’m a pretty neat eater. Folks programmed me that way. I remember on my first trip. We went to Florida and we were going to eat at a very fancy restaurant (a converted paddlewheeler called ‘Empress Lily’). The folks sat me down at the hotel room table and went through proper dining etiquette. When we were actually at the restaurant, an elderly couple got up as they had finished their meal and came over to our table while we were halfway through. They said that they were very concerned when we were seated next to them, expecting that I would be a horrible 9 year-old and ruin the dining experience. They specifically complimented me on my manners and expressed their appreciation. Made quite an impression on me.

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    1. Sandy and I always compliment parents we see who have behaved kids with personality. When you start looking for it, you see it more often than you might think. Every parent we have said that to has fully understood what we mean.

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  11. I don’t have a dining table in my new home, so I often eat in my chair. That means any dropped food goes on the carpet or on me, and me is the better option there since my shirts are easier to clean than the carpet.

    My first English setter was an amazing dog. Spook was physically and ethically fastidious. He never . . . NEVER . . . did anything against the rules. Spook had a curious way of drinking. He’s put his nose up against the side of the water dish and then make small, cautious little lapping motions with his tongue. We figured out he was disgusted by throwing water around and particularly didn’t want to get water sprinkled on his nose. When my Labradors or springers drank, they left puddles around the bowl. When Spook drank the floor was as clean afterward as if a cat had been drinking.

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  12. my preparing to cook is a messy event.
    i am amazed at how my wife cooks and the kitchen looks perfect as she is cooking in it. when i ma cooking the animals gatehrh round waiting for chunks of stuff to go flying. the floor the counter top the pans the burners. my wife cleans up after me and it is all good. when i clean up i am told it looks like i didnt so i kind of stop bothering when i try there is no recognition of the effort to get it clean only comets on the areas missed.
    when it is time to eat. the counter in the kitchen is fair game. if i am eating on a white linen table cloth at a fancy set up i am the one with an outline left where my bowl and plate used to be.
    i laugh when i think about my son who went to day care at age 3 or 4. the teacher was very concerned because he appeared not to know anything about silverware. he ate everything with his hands. we broke out laughing and said ” you mean you dont want him to eat with his hands anymore?” we dont use silverware exceppt with soup. she got a kick out of it too.
    he eats both ways now.
    im working with the other kids tto see if they want to think about silverware too.
    my basset is such a slob she splashes all over when drinking water out of the toilet. you gotta be letting it fly to get over the sides of the bowl.
    shes getting old all of a sudden. she had a hesitation the other night about going up the stairs to bed. she stopped halfway and had a hard time gettting the rest of the way up. now she fights real hard every night to go from the bottom to the top and tries to get enough snoose to go before she begins. i am not looking forward to carrying her up the stairs in a basket. maybe it is time to install the dale connelly stuff lifter for people with ladders and old dogs who dont want to be carrying them while the climb ladders or stairs . hmmm it would sell well on the channel where they have the walk in bathtubs and the help ive fallen and i cant get up commercials.

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  13. I find sloppy table manners revolting. I lose my appetite if I’m with someone who chews with their mouth open or insists on talking with a mouth full of food. Both at home and at the boarding school proper table manners were stressed, and there were consequences if you screwed up. That said, I realize that proper table manners are a cultural thing; what’s considered proper in one place may be considered rude or worse somewhere else. After 49 years in the US I have still not converted to the American way of using a knife and fork, doubt that I ever will.

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    2. The french think it is rude to put your hands in your lap at the table. In America elbows off the table; in France elbows on the table. But that has changed in France they tell me.

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  14. Oh yeah, I’m a messy eater. When I make popcorn, the dog follows me closely when I take the bowl in another room to eat. She knows she will get a lot of dropped kernels to snarf up. And I don’t know how many times, especially in berry season, I’ve gone through the day with a food stain (or two or three) on my shirt. I don’t wear white shirts for obvious reasons. I also wear an apron when I cook. I also spill beverages down my neck and onto my shirt – thankfully, it’s usually water.

    The dog is a slightly messy drinker but she can’t spill nearly as much water out of her water dish as two one-year-old boys can. It is the funniest thing EVER to slap that water right out of the bowl, especially if your brother is doing it with you.

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  15. Hey there–
    I’ve always found it troublesome to eat popcorn or chips one piece at a time. It works better for me to rummage around in the bag until I get a good ‘finger full’ to eat from. So, yes, there are bound to be some crumbs and spillage.

    Someone on here suggested the movie ‘Tampopo’. We started that as a ‘family movie night’ selection… until we got to the couple in the hotel room and Whoops– ‘How about we find a different movie Amelia??’ And she wasn’t really watching anyway so yes, that was OK.
    I don’t know how you can eat with chopsticks and not be messy. seems to me there’d be bits of noodle or rice flying all over.
    (It is a good movie.)

    Our indoor dog Allie takes a mouth full of food, carries it over there and drops it, then eats it there. But there’s always a pile of crumbs over there. she does eat the popcorn I drop so it’s a fair trade. 😉
    As I typed this, she went to her dish in the living room, got a mouth of food and carried it into the dining room where I am and ate it here. Usually she carries it into the hallway. Curious.

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  16. As a person who works with light and color, you would maybe like the Movie Renoir. But not with your daughter. Nude modeling. but it is so beautifully shot, the style is so, ah, what, sort of restrained in dialogue and action and lets the images carry the story, befitting an impressionist. The story is fascinating. As much about his son Jean and his “wife” the model and later actress. Jean was a great filmmaker, not appreciated in America as much as in Europe. The man who plays the painter does it so well. It arrests my attention because Renoir suffered from severe arthritis for over 20 years but kept painting, although he did not have brushes strapped to his wrist as they show.

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  17. All my cats like to drink water from the sink and/or bathtub faucets rather than from dishes.

    This is Jory at the bathroom sink: He stands with his front paws in the sink and his hind legs on the rim, looking at me expectantly, tail curled over in question-mark position.

    I turn the faucet on to a thin stream.

    He stares intently at the water hitting the drain.

    I close the drain so that a little water can pool there.

    Then he ignores the water in the pool and turns his face up to the faucet and laps some water from the stream. But only till the water pooling around the drain reaches his paws. He doesn’t like his paws to get wet, so he stops lapping. So I open the drain and let the water out.

    Then he stares intently at the drain till I close it again. Then he goes back to lapping at the faucet. Till the water reaches his paws again. Open drain. Close drain. Repeat.

    To borrow Anna’s description of her basset: he has just the two brain cells.

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