Have you ever seen a dog scrape its bottom on carpet or grass and drag itself along.

Yes women particularly find this a bad look, while some others find it humorous.

The reality is that its usually some form of medical condition that hasn’t been fixed yet, so if you love your dog, you need to get to the ‘bottom’ of it.

If your dog is wormed monthly and you dont see any worms in their poos (some are microscopic) – but the worming treatment should work and that can usually be ruled out.

The next most common explanation is anal gland blockage that most commonly occurs in smaller dogs. Usually a higher fibre diet can fix this, but there are other reasons why the glands get blocked. It can be the formation of the wholes or the viscosity of the liquid – many reasons. BUT usually a dog will be licking and scratching at the area, there may be a bad smell when they do leak unexpectedly etc. Blocked glands are a very serious dog condition that can require surgery if they arent to cause more pain or even end up being fatal. You can feel around inside their butt if you are so inclined, but so can your vet.

ASSUMING its not anal glands why do dog allergies cause dog scooting?

This is one of the most amazing things I have discovered with a few of the oodle dog varieties.

They often have very few complaints because they are bred between two different breeds which helps reduce the impact of a breed specific issue. BUT they can have skin allergies from the poodle and another breed which increases the allergy.

Poodles are well known to be a tidy dog, they are very smart and also are concerned about their appearance and in particular what hangs off their bottom if they have just done a poo.

If you have a poodle cross mix, you may also find that if they have a dog allergy, the might also regularly have the runs or diarrhea to the point that their bottoms are often a little messy. If you feed your dog a very high fibre diet it might artificially create a blockage so that it appears that their intestines are working right, but that often is just disguising the malnutrition.

But the whole point of this train of thought. is that a poodle mix or other dog with diarrhea regularly may have a high inclination to get that off its butt. Hence the boot scooting on their butt. Yes anal gland blockage can have the same result, but if you have checked for that, and its not that, then it might be this:

After your dog has done its scooting, it might just have doubled its skin allergy issue directly from contact of its bottom skin with the allergy causing grass. While your dog is not rolling around on grass on its back where the coat gives some layer of direct contact protection, but the skin allergy causing grass is directly in contact with its anus.

In trying to clean itself it might have started a vicious cycle where now its bottom is itchy because it tried to itch itself on grass, which in itself is causing the itchiness !

PS my dog is also a very playful, very social and very dominant dog. It knows when other dogs are not to be dominated and it must use self control because it is such a social dog. In frustration he will then often scoot around on his bottom, with his penis hanging out and a big smile on his face.

So somewhere between getting grass contact skin allergies, runny poos and a level of sexual satisfaction from scraping his butt, my dog could have many things contributing to his love of scooting. The vets all say his glands are fine, so I mostly go with the dog skin allergy issue either causing the scooting or at least maintaining it when he is out.