While taking your furry little pals on their daily walks, you’ve probably noticed a peculiar habit of theirs. It’s a pooping habit, and it’s one that causes them to kick their feet after they do their thing. Ever wonder if there was a legitimate reason behind these kicks? The truth is probably more surprising than you’d think.

While taking your dog to go potty, it might have caught your attention that they use their paws to scrape, dig, and kick away at the surrounding areas. While at first you might think they’re just burying the stinky evidence, or even wiping their paws off, the real reason is actually quite a bit different.

As a matter of fact, your dog has good reason to engage in this seemingly oddball behavior. It’s something we’ve seen our pups do thousands of times, usually not even thinking about it at all. Once again, though, we’re learning that the nuances to our pets’ behavior are much more complex than we tend to think.

When your dog kicks up its paws and pushes them backward, they’re actually taking care of a whole different kind of business.

It turns out that canines contain special glands within their paws. When pressed or rubbed, these glands emit a unique set of doggy pheromones. So, a lot of the time dogs will scratch at a surface to work up those pheromones, thus “marking” the territory with their own smelly signature…as if the poo wasn’t enough.

This makes even more sense when you recollect a time when your dog stopped mid-strut to perform his little kick-off. What it was really doing was letting other dogs know that he’s staked his “claim”.

The peculiar paw-kicking behavior allows a group of dogs that don’t know each other to rapidly establish a hierarchy within the social circle. Just like stopping to whiz every few feet on whatever is there, when a dog kicks their paws it’s merely another form of showing the others “who’s boss”.

Whether they are announcing themselves as the new sheriff in town, or simply marking out their rank in a new environment, when your doggy does the potty dance, dominance has something to do with it.

This is one type of behavior where size really doesn’t matter. Be it a giant Great Dane or a tiny Chihuahua, all have been known to perform the poo-time kicks. Interestingly, if an Alpha dog picks on the presence of a stronger dog’s pheromones, the former Alpha will cease to scratch or kick their paws anymore as a sign of submission.

More interesting still, both male and female dogs will kick, dig up, or scratch at the areas surrounding their poo to spread that scent even further. This is where we can all agree that, in this respect, our dogs are a little gross. But we love them anyway.

Dogs aren’t the only species who kicks their feet after they potty, either.

It turns out that foxes, wolves, and dingoes all display this type of territorial behavior in their wild environs, too. So, if you notice your dog kicks when they do their business, it’s perfectly normal. Strangely enough, the time to worry is when you don’t see your pooch doing this if it’s something he normally does. This could be an indication of an injury to the paw or even arthritis.

There you have it. Our furbabies that love kicking their paws up to celebrate their bomb-drop is actually a well documented, observed, and natural behavior. It doesn’t make it any less strange to look at, but at least we know that our four-legged friends aren’t losing their minds.

They’re just exclaiming their undefeated awesomeness everywhere they go! Aren’t you so glad that people usually communicate with their words? Us too.

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H/T: AnimalChannel