“Just go!”

I say that constantly to my dog, The Dingo. She paces and darts between my desk and the door when we’re inside, “Oh my god, Lady! I have to poop right now!” We head outside and then she’s all, “Hey, look! A lizard!”

She takes her sweet time going poop.

It’s a task for her to maintain her focus and remember she has to poop. If I leave her to her bat-like hearing and Terminator-like sight, we’ll be outside forever and she’ll forget why we’re out there. I don’t have a fenced in yard, so we both go outside. I mean, not “go-go.” She “goes” outside. I stand there begging her to “go.”

Anyway.

Once her body finally tells her it’s really time to poop, The Process starts. She sniffs the ground in erratic patterns. She races at almost breakneck speed in circles on her lead—she’s part Greyhound; me with the lead above my head so I don’t get caught up in her sprint. She then runs in the opposite direction, and into a back and forth pattern with her nose to the ground. I can see she has to go. It’s happening and she’s still deciding where. Finally, she squats and proceeds to walk through her pooping so the clean up is much like a twisted Easter egg hunt for me with a baggy on my hand—Michael Jackson-esque, but then again not so much.

The finale is always an exuberant scratching of the ground with her back legs, stretching each leg at the end, “Yes! I pooped. Look what I did, Lady! I am amazing!”

The below video explains why our pooches circle before hittin’ the deuce and some even weirder, way more interesting theories are dropped:

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Editor: Rachel Nussbaum

Photo: Discovery News video still