system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do some dogs wipe their feet after "doing their business"?
gpt
I read this explanation a while back, and thought I'd share it:

> Dirt scratching, or scraping, has been studied by ethologists. These are mostly observational studies, where numbers of canids were observed performing various elimination, sniffing, and marking behaviors. The behaviors are counted and the surrounding circumstances recorded. Dr. Marc Bekoff points out that it hasn’t been studied all that much in dogs though, compared to the study of other animals. He and others are gradually filling in the blanks, however.

> Here are some of the functions for ground scratching that ethologists have proposed:

> - Dispersing scent from the dog’s urine or feces.

> - Dispersing scent from glands in the dog’s paws.

> - A visual demonstration in real time, in the presence of other dogs.

> - A visual demonstration in the form of leaving marks on the ground.

> Dirt scratching may be communication to other dogs, but speculations by ethologists about the content of that communication are still very conservative.