Dog Quirks – Why Does My Dog Do That?

The in-laws are visiting, maybe your boss is over for dinner, or maybe you’re hosting a football party and, without warning, your dog chooses that specific moment to emerge from behind a wall as though stepping onto stage. Looking around the room, almost building the suspense, he drops his rear-end with a loud pronounced “thud” then proceeds to drag it across your living room floor with the tenacity only your dog has.

These kind of dog quirks may be what give your dog its personality, whether they are leftover instincts from a wilder time or an indicator of various conditions may just depend on the acts themselves. Read more below for specifics on these sometimes humorous or embarrassing activities or quirks.

Dog Quirks and What They Mean

• Strokes Ground with Paws After Eliminating – Scent glands in their paws leave another layer of a personal signature in “tagging” their visited areas.
• Moves in Sleep While Dreaming – Dogs have similar sleep stages as humans so they too experience similar sleeping activities/ sleep stages in their sleep as we do.
• Butt Scooting – Your pet’s anal glands can become infected or irritated, this is the most common cause for that wonderfully embarrassing activity.
• Caching treats – Coyotes and foxes in the wild exhibit this trait, “Caching” simply means saving their food or burying it for later/ leaner times. Our domesticated pets do this out of instinct rather than necessity, but it can be a perceptible odd behavior.
• Circling before lying down – “Rounding” as it’s known comes from an instinctually wilder time when they made their own beds. Circling around would lay the grass down and give insects a warning that they were going to lay down, and flatten the snow or grass into a bed thereby giving a “mark” of territory or sorts.
• Digging Holes in the Landscaping – Often times comes from the instinct of foraging for food and caching or both.
• Yawning – Yawning in dogs often is a calming action on their part, letting us know that their patience is running thin. Also another little tidbit, dogs that are close with their owners can “catch” a yawn like their people do with each other; a fun experiment, look at your dog the next time you yawn and see if this theory is true.

Odd Behaviors or Quirks are Part of Our Pets

No matter our understanding or not, the quirks of our pets are part of them. They come natural for them and can actually help us understand our loved ones better if we understand those traits. Knowing these traits can help us read and tailor our actions, better communication with our pets is something everyone desires, perhaps it’s just learning to speak their language that separates us.