How a dog drinks, and why they are so messy ( there's a downside to having no cheeks! )

From FYFD

This high-speed footage shows how a dog drinks. The dog’s tongue curls backwards, creating a large area of surface contact with the water. When the dog pulls its tongue back up, water adheres to it and is drawn upward in a column. The dog then closes its mouth around the water before it falls. Fundamentally, this is the same mechanism as the one cats use. Part of the reason that dogs are messier drinkers, though, is that the backwards curl of their tongue picks up extra water. Because the dog has no cheeks, there’s no way to move this water from the underside to the top of the tongue and so the water just falls back out.