How much water should my dog drink?

How much water should my dog drink?

A good rule of thumb is .05 – 1 oz of water per pound each day to stay adequately hydrated. However this is not an absolute number.  Some dogs needs are significantly higher or lower based on breed, age, activity level, diet or season.  If your climate dry and warmer and he or she spends alot of time outdoors, he or she will need more. Dogs that eat a completely dry diet will need more water than dogs that eat food that is wet.  My Saints for example, weigh about 160 lbs.  They are senior dogs so not particularly active, but Saints pant and drool more than other dogs so their needs are higher.  Based on this they need 80-160 oz (or 1.25 GALLONS) of water every day.  Since we have moved out to the desert southwest, this number will be increased because it is much hotter and dryer than the average climate.

Senior dogs are pretty good at naturally regulating their water intake but be mindful if they seem to have unexplained increased thirst and water consumption.  Food and treats that are high in sodium will cause an increase in thirst.  On average puppies need to drink about 4 oz (1/2cup) every two hours.  For larger breed dogs its just a little more, tiny breeds, a little less.

Medications like predinisone (steroids) and heart failure medication will also increase thirst.

Drinking too much water can lead to bloat, electrolyte imbalances, and hyponatremia (water toxicity) and can signify a bladder infection, another type of infection, or diabetes.  Too little water can lead to dehydration in dogs, kidney stones, organ failure and even death.

Are you giving your dogs enough water each day?  Make sure your dog has access to clean, fresh drinking water at all times.  Their health and life depends on it.

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Scientists (Finally) Discover How Dogs Use Their Tongues to Drink

"The motions are precise, even mathematical," says one researcher. Just the same, it ain't pretty.

Here's a question you've probably never had the good sense to ask yourself: What is the mechanism by which a dog drinks? In other words: How does a dog's tongue work?  

Throughout history, this riddle has been left largely unanswered, because dogs drink so damn fast. Then someone invented the high-speed video camera, and civilization cleaved into pre-HSVC and post-HSVC worlds. One of the neat things we could do in this post-HSVC world was watch crocodiles take down wildebeest crossing a river in super-slow mo (so cool). The other thing we could do was figure out how a dog's tongue works, according to NPR. 

Behold: A dog's tongue becomes a ladle! An inverted ladle, to be precise. 

"It dips down, scoops up some water, using its tongue as a pulley," writes Robert Krulwich. "This was a revelation."

However! Once scientists put down the high-speed video camera and took up their measurement tools, they discovered that all the water that the dog had scooped up with this tongue-as-ladle fell out when the dog actually brought the damn thing to his mouth. 

Watch: 

In short, the dog is basically a toddler eating soup for the first time. So, why aren't all dogs dead of thirst? Scientists entered a conclave and promised not to emerge till they had the answer. Eventually, they had the answer. The world waited.  

The dog's tongue is a sticky wick! OF COURSE THAT MAKES PERFEC -- huh? A dog's tongue is a sticky wick? That's what we're paying you for? What does that mean? Let's hand this off to Krulwich:

"A dog will extend -- no, that's too polite a word -- the dog will thrust its tongue into the water and then whip it back up, very, very fast. A stream of water attaches to and follows the tongue upward (adhesion and cohesion) -- but only for a fraction of a second. Then gravity kicks in. The rising stream of water loses its upward momentum, and just as it's about to fall back into the bowl, at exactly the point where gravity is about to win, the dog snaps its mouth shut and swallows. Done. The motions are precise, even mathematical."

Don't argue. It's math. It's physics.

(As for cats, they drink the same way, only "more carefully, more elegantly, more efficiently." Harumph.)  

Via NPR

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High-Speed X-Ray Video Reveals Secret to How Dogs Drink

Dogs aren’t the world’s most dainty drinkers. Give a thirsty dog a bowl of water and get out the umbrella. The tongue scoops, the water splishes and sploshes everywhere. Cats, on the other hand, seem to have a quiet elegance to their drinking. It’s almost meditative to some cat owners.

But this is not the time for cats to start feeling a smug superiority. (Well, no more than usual.) Science is revealing that cats and dogs both use the same techniques to get water into their mouths. Cats just tend to do it with more grace.

Dogs, for all their apparent sloppiness when taking in liquids, are actually pretty sophisticated drinkers, say scientists (Photo: Wonderlane, Flickr Creative Commons)

A study in the journal Science last year explored the science behind the cat lap. Using high-speed video, researchers were able to dramatically slow down footage of a cat drinking. They found that when the tip of a cat’s tongue barely touched the water’s surface, the water stuck to it. When the cat pulled her tongue back in, the movement created a water column on the back of her tongue, and the cat snapped her jaws around it after every lap before it could fall out.

Researcher Alfred Crompton, of Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, wanted to see how different the water-guzzling experience was for dogs. Scientists and most dog owners have assumed that a dog uses his tongue as a ladle, scooping up liquid in a haphazard, decidedly doggy way, with none of the finessed fluid mechanics employed by felines.

So Crompton took a high-speed camera and an X-ray camera and let his dog Matilda enjoy a big cylinder of broth. (See video above.)  “At first, it looked like dogs were scooping, but that is a snare and a delusion,” he said in a BBC article.

Interestingly, it turns out that the water that was collected in the ladle part of Matilda’s tongue dropped off her tongue before hitting her mouth. It turns out dogs use their tongues to get the conveyor-belt-like flow of liquid down his throat just as a cat does, Crompton reported in the Journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology Letters.

The main difference was that while a cat’s tongue barely touches the liquid, a dog’s plunges all the way in, willy-nilly.

He explained in a BBC article that the difference may boil down to lifestyle habits in general: “Cats are just a little more particular about the mess they make. They always like to be neat and clean and to tidy themselves up. They curl their tongue backwards and lay it onto the surface of liquid without penetrating it, so they don’t make a mess.

“Dogs on the other hand are a bit more exuberant – they don’t worry about spreading the liquid around and making a mess.”

But what happens when water is in a dog’s mouth is pretty astounding. I’ll let an article in LiveScience explain:

They found that dogs take a few laps before they actually swallow. Once the liquid is in the mouth, the dog brings its tongue in contact with the roof of its mouth, trapping the liquid between its tongue surface and the ridges on its palate. Then the dog extends its tongue again, still keeping it in contact with the roof of its mouth.

“This is the really cool part,” Musinsky told LivesScience. “Because the tongue is maintaining contact, but it’s also sliding out of the mouth.”

As the dog brings another chunk of liquid up with its tongue, the tongue drops away and the first bit of liquid goes to the back of the mouth. Repeating the cycle again, the dog brings a new sip of water to the front of its mouth, swallowing the first lap of water and moving the second toward its throat.

“You’ve used the tongue and palate as sort of a conveyor belt,” Crompton said.

You can see this mechanism at work in the video above.

So next time your dog goes to whet his whistle, you can watch him and admire him for everything he has to do to get it from bowl to throat.

Just don’t get too close while he’s doing it.

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