Canine Behavior: Why Do Dogs Mark Their Territory?
The simplest answer is they don’t.
The Concept of Territory Is Fairly New
The idea that dogs mark their territory is a myth, a fable, an idea that’s not grounded in in reality. There are several reasons why.
First of all, in biology a territory is defined as an area which a group of humans or animals will defend against intruders of the same species. But dogs don’t have territories. In a multiple dog household, for instance, one dog is sometimes said to act territorial (or dominant) over the couch while another is said to be territorial over the back yard, etc. But these dogs live together. So they are in no way defending the couch or the yard from intruders. Yes, some dogs may bark at intruders, which on the surface may seem to be a territorial behavior. But since territoriality involves defending against intruders of the same species, and since such intruders onto a dog's home turf may include the mailman, neighborhood cats, raccoons, etc., as well as other, unknown dogs, these behaviors don’t all fit the territorial model.
In humans, the concept of controlling territory is fairly new. It first developed when humans began living in permanent settlements. Before that, we were hunter-gatherers with no clearly defined territories. In fact, there are still a number of hunter-gatherer societies living in various parts of the modern world. And, in most cases, they tend to avoid conflict, and would rather find new hunting grounds rather than defend whatever patch of land they're currently using as a home base. In other words, they have no concept of territory. Or if they do, they’re not interested in defending it against intruders.
Marking vs. Urinating
Still, in The Intelligence of Dogs, author Stanley Coren gives us the classical explanation of this myth: “All canids use urine ... to mark the limits of their territories. In males this marking behavior is usually accompanied by leg lifting to direct the urine against large objects (trees, rocks, bushes) to place the scent at nose height for other dogs and to allow the scent to radiate over a large area. Some African wild dogs ... scrabble as high up the trunk of a tree as possible before squirting their message.”
First, dogs often urinate far beyond the boundaries of their so-called territory. Secondly, males aren’t the only ones who lift their legs; some (usually anxious) females do as well. Thirdly, dogs don’t just urinate on large objects, but on vertical objects (trees, posts), unfamiliar or inorganic objects (tires, plastic bags, fire hydrants), and on top of another dog’s urine (males usually urinate on top of another male’s scent, but not a female’s).
Coren is not responsible for the myth. His offhand re-telling of it, as if it were a scientific certainty, merely highlights a general tendency in science I call “the fallacy of degree-not-kind,” where many scientists blur the line between describing animal behavior in human terms (a process known as anthropomorphism), and describing behaviors in terms of the actual cognitive abilities an individual animal is actually capable of.
Of course if a biologist who witnessed the African wild dogs scrabbling up the tree trunks did so with the belief that dogs urinate to send a message, their behavior would, no doubt, confirm his hypothesis. But if we approach this with a clearer mind we might ask, how could these dogs possibly know the “nose height” of another, purely hypothetical dog who might or might not come along at some undetermined point in time?
It’s simply not possible.
Mental Planning and Reading One’s “Pee Mail”
Another explanation as to why dogs mark can be found in The Secret Life of Dogs, by anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. She compares a dog’s urine marks to Hansel and Gretel’s trail of pebbles and bread crumbs: a means of finding their way home. But that would mean the dog was planning for the potential (thus, hypothetical) possibility of getting lost. I’ve never seen any evidence for that kind of thinking in any of the dogs I’ve known. They live totally in the now moment.
Still another comes from Roger Caras, whose voice used to be heard each year at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York, was fond of saying that when a dog sniffs a fire hydrant he’s “reading his mail”. This is highly anthropomorphic, yet it’s hard to dispute that a dog does get information from the scent of other dogs this way. The only question is, did the dog who left the scent do so with the intention of “sending a message?”
It doesn’t make sense that any dog would have the intelligence necessary to leave messages for other dogs in this manner because in order to do so he would have to have a sense of self-and-other, meaning he would have to first have a sense of self-awareness. He would also need to be capable of propositional and/or hypothetical thinking, directed fantasy, mental time travel, not to mention a full-blown theory of mind. “If I mark this fence (propositional thinking), Spike will come along some time in the future (directed fantasy, hypothetical thinking, mental time travel), sniff it (more fantasy, more hypothetical thinking), and know he’s in my territory (theory of mind, abstract and conceptual thinking) and start to feel nervous about being here (more theory of mind).”
That’s pretty complicated thinking for a dog.
A More Reasonable Explanation
Meanwhile, I got my first glimpse into a more reasonable explanation of why dogs mark—one that has nothing to do with “territory”—many years ago when I took my dog Freddie to a training session I had with a six-month Maltese male named Buckwheat who hadn’t had much socialization with other dogs. Freddie’s presence made Bucky a little nervous, but not to the point that he couldn’t learn the games we were teaching him. However, at several key points during the lesson—which was taking place in the dining room—I put Freddie in a down /stay by a piano in the living room. Later Bucky’s owner told me that immediately after Fred and I left, Bucky had gone over to the piano and had urinated on the spot where Freddie had been lying.
Why did he do that? To mark the limits of his territory? He was already inside his territory; in fact, he was inside his “den.” Did he do it to send a message? No.
The answer is simple. The rug held remnants of Freddie’s scent, enough to make Bucky feel nervous. So he put his own scent on top of it. Yes, in a sense, he marked the carpet, but not to tell Freddie that it belonged to him. He just did it to relieve his own internal tension.
A few years later, while doing research for a subplot about kidney disease for my 4th novel, ‘Twas the Bite Before Christmas, I learned that in mammals, the need to urinate is controlled, in large part, by the neuropeptide vasopressin. Higher levels of vasopressin increase water retention, reducing the need to urinate. Low levels are associated with excessive urination, bedwetting, etc. Vasopressin also has a converse relationship with the stress hormone, cortisol: when cortisol levels go up, vasopressin goes down, suggesting that there’s a causal relation between stress and excessive urination.
So it seems far more likely that when one male detects the scent of another, (particularly an unknown male), it could cause a perhaps low-level stress reaction, which would then increase his need to urinate. As he does he would feel the pleasure of releasing some of the tension and pressure in his body. This would reinforce the behavior, making it a purely emotional response initially, which becomes a Pavlovian response over time; it wouldn’t have to derive from any kind of high-level cognitive ability.
Later, when this dog smells a urine mark he’d made earlier, he would probably re-experience the original lessening of tension and the pleasure it produced. (Of the five senses the sense of smell is the one most likely to evoke memories.) He learns to mark in order to relieve emotional tension and to feel connected to his environment.
This explanation is simple, whole, and complete. It requires no complicated thinking. It obeys the rules of parsimony and logic. And it only requires that a dog have the ability to experience tension and pleasure, and to form simple physical and emotional associations.
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
