Typically, when adult male dogs go out to pee, they usually find an object to target, then raise one of their hind legs and spread their own urine on the target object, then leave and go on to find the next target object and repeat the above action.
Dogs love to pee themselves on tree trunks, bushes, streetlight poles, car tires, trash cans, etc. I’ve even seen dogs pee on the backs of people squatting on the curb.
The vast majority of people who do this are adult male dogs, and a few females do it, though it’s not very common.
Especially in the countryside, they do not pee in the house, when they want to pee, they will certainly go out, and then along the roadside of any object they think can be used, all the way to pee down until the urine is finished. It seems to be a bit like the legend of the impure and dribbling urine.
Why do dogs pee in such a strange position, have to raise a hind leg, and then sideways to the trunk of the tire or something and then pee? Can’t they pee without lifting their legs?
My dog didn’t have to lift his leg to pee when he was a kid, and he peed happily as usual, and didn’t see anything wrong with it.
When I was a kid, I literally posed this question to adults and most of them couldn’t tell me why, except my grandfather who told me why dogs lift their legs to pee.
1.In order to pee without dousing the hind legs made of clay
Grandpa told me that a long time ago, there was a big rich man in our village, and now all the fields in our village and the surrounding villages are owned by his family.
In order to manage his many possessions, the wealthy lord hired a steward.
This steward was very loyal to the rich man, but to others, especially to the poor peasants who farmed for the rich man, he was very mean and vicious, so these peasants hated him very much.
One winter, the housekeeper was out on an errand and accidentally fell, breaking his calf.
Being outside, the people in the rich man’s house didn’t find him in time, and those peasants who did find him not only didn’t save him, but didn’t even help him inform the rich man because they hated him.
In this way, the steward endured two days on the road, cold, hungry and in pain, before the rich man, who realized that something was wrong, sent out his household servants to look around and finally got him back.
However, because his broken leg was delayed for a long time, the doctor hired by the rich man had no way to connect him again, and had no choice but to amputate that broken leg, thus saving his little life.
After the butler’s leg was amputated, he couldn’t walk because he only had one leg, so the doctor said he could get a human leg to reattach it.
But who would be willing to contribute their leg for the steward to attach? Obviously the idea of trying to get someone’s leg to pick it up was out of the question.
So the doctor added that instead of using a human leg, a dog’s leg could be attached and he could walk just as well.
Since the butler was very loyal to the rich man, the rich lord took off one of the hind legs of his big yellow dog and attached it to the butler.
Now the butler had two legs to walk on, but the rich man’s big yellow dog only had three.
In order to enable the big yellow dog to walk normally and to be able to help the wealthy master watch over the house, so the doctor pinched another leg out of clay to attach it to the big yellow dog.
Since this hind leg of a rhubarb dog is made of mud, when a rhubarb dog pees, he has to lift this leg up so that his urine does not drench this muddy leg and wet it, thus damaging his leg.
Since then, the dogs have put one hind leg up when they pee.
This is the reason why dogs lift one of their hind legs when they pee.
As for the butler, since one of his legs was made from the hind leg of a dog, people later called those servants who were loyal to their masters and who flaunted their power, pretended to be foxes, and bullied the weak and fearful of the tough as dog’s legs.
2.Mark their territory
Dogs are very territorial, and they will patrol their territory several times a day and promptly mark their turf to warn others of their kind to stay away from their territory.
And it’s urine that they use to mark their territory.
Each dog’s urine will contain a number of unique pheromones and is clearly differentiated from other dogs’ messages.
Usually the dog’s urine contains information such as age, sex, size and temperament, which other dogs can recognize in time after sniffing it, and then they will judge whether they are the rival of the dogs in this territory and decide whether to leave or continue to go deeper.
And dogs don’t usually pee directly on the ground because if they do, the urine will quickly penetrate the soil and the odor will quickly dissipate.
And by peeing in places like trees and tires and streetlight poles, it preserves the urine for a long time and gives off a scent that will allow others of its kind to better recognize that this is their territory.
3.To pee higher and farther
See here may have friends will say, the dogs and do not engage in a peeing contest, but also than which pee higher which pee farther, there is a need for this?
There is certainly a need for this, and while dogs don’t engage in peeing contests, they don’t have as much time on their hands as humans do, it is very important for them to pee as high and as far as they can.
As mentioned earlier, dogs mark their territory by urine, but a dog can’t always turn inside its territory all the time, it has to leave sometime.
This will then provide an opportunity for dogs with ulterior motives to sneak in after they see the dogs in this territory leave.
They then determine things like the age and size of the dog in front of them by recognizing the urine left behind by that dog, and once they feel they can handle it, they spread their own urine on top of the object the original dog used to mark its territory, for the same purpose of marking it as their own.
Some dogs, knowing they are no match for their former dog, will deliberately wreak havoc by leaving their urine on top of the former dog’s target.
When this dog returns to the territory to do its rounds, it notices that the original markers have been peed on by other dogs, disturbing the message that they are in possession of the territory. At this point they will re-urinate to cover the urine left by these foreign dogs so as not to leave their message.
So one way or another, as the exotic dogs peed more and more, the dogs had to pee themselves higher and higher and farther and farther away in order to cover the information, only in order to quell the dogs that had their hearts in the right place.
And since dogs’ urinary organs grow under the belly of their two hind legs, they have to lift one hind leg in order to pee high and far, or else they won’t be able to achieve their goal.
To put it bluntly, the dogs are really doing this for territorial competition.
4.Leave some kind of hint for the bitch
When it comes to mating season, the males leave their traces, their pheromones, everywhere in order to gain the favor of the bitches.
And those pheromones are in their urine.
At this time, the males will leave their urine everywhere where the bitches are likely to pass, squeezing a few drops in one place, a few drops in another, as many places as possible.
Only then will the likelihood of being found by the bitches be higher, thus enabling them to recognize themselves through their urine, become attracted to them, and find them, ultimately accomplishing good things.
Of course, out of instinct, every male dog does it, and to the dogs, a telephone pole, you can pee on it, of course I can pee on it, and he can pee on it, whichever one passes by and squeezes a few drops anyway.
So in order to keep their urine as free as possible from the urine of other male dogs, so the dogs pee higher and higher.
To pee high, you have to lift your back legs as high as you can, and some even play the high game of handstands for this purpose.
The dogs are desperate to get a wife.
5.Just imitate other dogs pee
This one is mostly for puppies and bitches.
Dogs don’t lift their hind legs to pee when they are young. When they reach a certain age, male dogs begin to learn to lift their legs to pee.
I remember that it is usually when they reach almost 1 year old, when the little males are pretty much grown up, and they take after the other big dogs and mimic their mannerisms.
Raising their hind legs to pee is such a handsome and cool way to pee that they of course have to learn it as a key subject, so the puppies will raise their hind legs to pee intentionally or unintentionally, but at this time they are just peeing for fun and there is no real meaning to it.
For adult bitches, it means the same thing.
Typically, female dogs don’t lift their hind legs to pee, and when they do, it’s mostly just out of boredom or because they’re feeling playful, so they learn to pee like those adult male dogs for fun.
They do this, however, and the males express annoyance because often the markings the males have just made are overwritten again, leaving those males to do it all over again, annoying them to no end.
6.Avoid wet feet hinder leaving sweaty odor
If we look closely we can see that the male dog’s urinary organ grows under the belly between the hind legs, and if they don’t use this way of lifting one leg to spread the urine to the side and back, but pee directly, then they are likely to wet their feet with their urine.
While dogs don’t wear shoes, even if they get their feet wet, that’s just what humans think, not dogs.
Because dogs’ sweat glands are distributed only on the pads of their feet, if urine wets their feet, it may interfere with their ability to leave the flavor of the sweat glands on their feet behind.
And while this same flavor helps them mark their territory, it also allows them to mark the path they traveled, leading them back to where they started.
Don’t look at all that’s been written, but I actually prefer one of the simplest ways of saying that, out of instinct, when marking their territory, dogs have to try desperately to pee as high as they can in order to make themselves taller and to cut off any other idea of their kind taking their turf, and to achieve this they can only do so by lifting their hind legs as high as they can.
Some zoologists have studied this behavior specifically in dogs, and they have found that the greater the angle at which a dog lifts one of their hind legs, then the farther and higher they can pee. Normally, a dog can lift their back leg away to between 80-140 degrees, awesome!
Of course I didn’t look up what kind of dog could lift to a 140 degree angle, and frankly, I’m very impressed!
