Perfectly normal. He's testing the pee. Usually see males do it to check if a female is in heat, but they'll also do it just to better decipher who left left the pee behind.
Yup. Matsu (intact male kai) does that too. Think of it like a wine tasting- you know how people taste and get a smell, and swish it around and talk about "notes of this and that," ...
Saigo did that as a pup. He still does it and sometimes he gets so excited he gets foam all around his mouth. The pee licking has something to do with how they process hormones of other dogs, especially females.
Uggh...Kurama does this too...and selective poop eating. He doesn't try to eat all poop. Just some. But definitely the tasting of pee is gross (and both my intact Shikoku do it).
Perfectly normal although not all dogs display this behavior. He is bringing molecules, likely sex pheromones but it can be other compounds, into his VNO (as Iwroth said, the vomeronasal organ) and responding to them. While it's true dogs have a great sense of smell, dogs, like many mammals, have a functional VNO which is more specialized organ for interpreting chemical messages from their own species. Horses, tigers, hedgehogs etc. show a flehman response where they curl their lip to send molecules into the VNO. Dogs aren't thought to have a true flehmen response, but I think this is semantics. The chattering and frothing you see, called 'tonguing', is pretty much analogous to flehmen. My neutered male border collie does this almost every time he smells the urine of female dogs, or even other female mammals. Like many ancestral canine behaviors it doesn't seem that all dogs, individuals and/or breeds, have inherited it.
Here's a lion flemming ("wine tasting") the odors. They don't growl, but the big cats crunch their nose, grimace their mouth, and move their head a little up and down..
My male Kai did the pee licking when he was intact, and sometimes stuck his head right under my girl when she peed (and she was spayed!), but, thankfully, he stopped doing it after we neutered him. It was kind of gross. He also had a serious marking issue (which means he took after his father, Akashi! *lol*) which also stopped!
There's an intact husky female who lives down the street. When she's in heat, Saigo (intact) goes crazy at her pee spots around her house. He'll lick the trees, grass and bushes and start foaming at the mouth. Last time he wanted to start digging a hole ( who knows why?). It's interesting to see how an intact male responds to the urine of an intact female.
Comments
Hello, adolescence!
(Sage, who is neutered, never does that, though.)
Jesse
http://www.responsibledog.net/canine_senses.html