Dogs drink quite differently from cats and under the sloppy-looking actions of canines raising fluids into their mouths to swallow lie a precise method of high-speed, accurately timed movements that optimise their ability to acquire liquids, researchers have discovered.
Using photography and laboratory simulations, researchers studied how dogs raise fluids into their mouths to drink. The scientists also found that even though feline and canine mouths are structurally similar, their approaches to drinking are as different as — cats and dogs.
“We know cats and dogs are quite different in terms of behaviour and character,” said Sunghwan Jung, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics at Virginia Tech College of Engineering in the US.
“But before we did fundamental studies of how these animals drink fluids, our guess was dogs and cats drink about the same way. Instead we found out that dogs drink quite differently than cats.”
According to the research, dogs and cats are biting animals and neither have full cheeks. And without cheeks, they cannot create suction to drink - as people, horses, and elephants do. Instead they use their tongues to quickly raise water upward through a process involving inertia.
Both animals move their tongues too quickly to completely observe by the naked eye. But dogs accelerate their tongues at a much faster rate than cats, plunging them into the water and curling them downward toward their lower jaws, not their noses.
Dogs precisely bite down to capture the water. In an instant they reopen their mouths and immerse their tongues back into the water. Cats, on the other hand, lightly touch the surface of the water with their tongues, usually never fully immersing them, according to previous imaging by Jung and other researchers.