When dogs are drinking water, they make quite a mess of themselves and their surroundings.

Although we’ve seen dozens of slo mo videos of dogs drinking water, it was never clear exactly why dogs drink liquid the way they do.

However, a new study has found that dogs drink water by slapping its tongue against the liquid because they don’t have “complete cheeks,” according to the LA Times.

For the study, researchers at Virginia Tech and Purdue University reportedly used high-speed cameras to find that dogs hit the water with their tongues to create water columns that feed into their mouths, according to the Daily Digest News. Dogs reportedly can’t close their lips fully to create suction to completely suck in the water, so instead, they use their tongues to bring the liquid towards the mouth.

It had previously been thought that dogs used their tongues like ladles, scooping up water, but researchers reportedly stated that that’s not the case at all. Dogs reportedly extended more of their tongues to hit the water into their mouths with a much wider surface area, then used their tongues to pull the water upward at an acceleration of roughly five to eight times that of gravity.

It seems that dogs reportedly beat cats when it comes to drinking water, as they move their tongues much faster than their feline counterparts.

“Dogs use a very smart [mechanism] to optimize their drinking,” stated research co-author Sunghwan Jung.