Why do Dogs sleep upside down?

I recently got the following letter


Stephen,

My name is Becky, I am 11, and I ready your website all the time. You are so cute. The reason I am writing you is that I have a question. Recently I have been finding my dog Abby sleeping on her back with her paws up in the air. This looks really weird. Why is she doing this? Is it normal?




Love

Becky



Dear Becky,

Thanks for reading my site. I am glad you like it. As for Abby don’t worry. Sleeping upside down is entirely normal. In fact you might want to try it some time. We dogs often do this for safety.

The earth is a dynamic system. As you may or may not know the earth’s magnetic field has already reversed a couple of times. Can Gravity be far behind? We dogs don’t think so. We sleep upside down on days we think there might be a sudden reversal of gravity. This way if gravity reverses when we are asleep we will just wake up standing on the ceiling instead of crashing into the ceiling head first.

Sleeping upside down is relatively new. Before when we used to live outside there was no need. If gravity reversed you just fell up into the sky, however now that we live inside we have to worry about crashing into the ceiling. You don’t want to go to sleep and wake up crashing into a ceiling head first. It is bad enough when my A wakes me up to go outside I can’t imagine how cranky I would be after having crashed into a ceiling at 3:30am.

There is a whole team of dogs who are responsible for sending out warnings when the risk of a sudden gravity reversal is high. They work at the Dog Gravity Research Center (DGRC) in Tacoma Washington. Those guys do some nice work up there. I have yet to be caught off guard by a sudden gravity reversal (SGR) in fact I don’t know of any dog who has since the program was implemented in the late 1940’s.

While we still know of no way to prevent SGRs we dogs have implemented these procedures to limit their impact when they occur.

Anyway that is the reason Abby sleeps upside down sometimes, you may also notice she does not sleep upside down when she is outside. We dogs are just way more in-tune with the world that people. It is not your fault dogs are just better than people. Imagine what we could do if we had opposable thumbs.



Thanks for the letter let me know if you have any more questions


Stephen