The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Shake that puppy

From the Atlantic, an explanation of how dogs dry themselves:

A dog can shake roughly 70 percent of the water from its fur in four seconds. Nearly three quarters of the moisture in the time it took you to read that last paragraph. Pretty amazing stuff.

But that champion efficacy raises more questions than it answers.

First, why does it work so well? How long does it take your socks to dry a comparable amount if you get them wet? How are they generating all that force? Second, many mammals are capable of the shake. Is how your dog does the same way that a mouse or a lion does? Third, why do animals do the shake at all? What's the evolutionary advantage that it confers?

It tickles me that part of the research involved dumping water on mammals of different sizes. If you're going to use animal subjects, annoying them is probably not the worst thing you could do.

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