Marking – Your Dog Has the Last Word?

We all know marking isn’t about merely emptying the bladder, it’s about ‘saying something’ and that where also has relevance.

A recent study is about countermarking – both ‘overmarking’ or’ adjacent marking’ previous scent marks. It sounds a bit like our own conversations, doesn’t it!

Karen B. London, PhD in ‘The BARK’ asks ‘who is peeing and where’, following new research on urine marking by Scientists Anneke Lisberg and Charles Snowdon in “Effects of sex, social status and gonadectomy on countermarking by domestic dogs, Canis familiaris,” published in the journal Animal Behavior.

Here’s a tiny part of what their study found:

Intact males (but not neutered males) were more likely to overmark urine from intact females, but apart from this being spayed or neutered had no relationship with the likelihood of countermarking (something I’m sure a lot of people would find surprising as excessive marking is one reason some have for getting their males castrated).

Males and females both countermarked and investigated urine.

Males who overmarked had a higher tail base position than males who did not overmark. Males and females with higher tail base positions did more urinating, marking in general and investigating of urine than members of their same sex with lower tail base positions. Neither sex nor tail base position affected adjacent marking.

Familiarity with a dog did not affect overmarking of its urine, but dogs adjacent-marked only urine samples from unfamiliar dogs. Hmmm.

‘Lisberg and Snowdon conclude that although intact males may be overmarking intact female urine as a form of mate guarding as has long been suspected, that is only a piece of the story. Both sexes, whether intact or not, appear to countermark in a competitive manner. Additionally, this study suggests that overmarking and adjacent marking may have different functions.’

Patricia McConnell has done her own less scientific observations and questions with feedback from people about their own dogs (I can’t see a mention of how many) and has drawn up somewhat different conclusions.

She suggests that overmarking may mean something different if done over familiar or unfamiliar unrine and her conclusion is that ‘the one thing we should be able to take from this project is that social status is NOT a predictor of overmarking within familiar dogs, at least not in the simplistic direction previously assumed.’

So, where are we? Tail held high whilst overmarking indicating dominance? Indicating dominance if only overmarking the pee of unfamiliar dogs? Dominance having nothing much to do with it? I have two dogs who likes to overmark other dogs’ pee and two who have little interest in marking. One marker, my Lurcher, happens to have a naturally high tail and the other, a female with a GSD’s hanging tail who holds her tail high when doing any sort of peeing, marking or otherwise – probably simply to keep it out of the way and nothing more.

I have always said that the last of my own four dogs to pee over another’s wee is ‘having the last word’, and I have one who likes the ‘last word’ more often than the others! Again, just like us!

Here is the story of little dogs I went to that toilet indoors. Is there a marking element to this I wonder.

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