There is a question I want to ask: Why dogs raise their legs when they urinate?
Male dogs do so they don’t pee on their leg. QED
SSG Schwartz
Bitches don’t raise their legs, they squat. Male dogs will sometimes squat instead of raising their legs; usually this is do to lack of socialization with other male dogs. My dachshund will do either.
Dogs like to mark vertical surfaces at nose-height. Leg-lifting is required to do this.
Look, I don’t care what you heard, I don’t pee on my leg. Ok, there was that one time…
Male dogs are marking territory - letting other dogs know they’re in town and not going to take any guff. They want other dogs to walk by and go, “Hey, I just got a whiff of Sparky. This is his turf, man.”
To do that, they want to aim at stuff at nose height for maximum effect. So they have to lift a leg.
Males who can no longer lift a hind leg due to injury or illness will squat like a bitch. One of our Newfoundland dogs has severe hip dysplasia and a torn ACL, so he squats. Of course, he’s also not out on long walks marking trees… 
We got our male dog as a puppy. He squatted until he got to be a year old or so, now he marks the fence like any adult dog.
Yes. And no.
Dogs are not territorial, they’re pack animals. Marking with urine is more akin to the tagging of the graffiti world, i.e. “Sparky Was Here”.
And dogs don’t learn to lift the leg from other dogs, it’s hardwired, and the look of surprise on my dog when he first did this is testimony enough. Better testimony is that in a wolf pack, only the alpha male is allowed to lift his leg. He domintes the other males by surpressing their natural tendency to lift the leg.
There are bitches that lift the hind leg too.
My husky bitch frequently lifts her leg, though not always.
A couple of people have mentioned “nose-height”… I had heard that it was, in part, in order to pee on a higher part of the tree (maybe higher up than what a previous dog had done) in order to seem as if “a big dog was here”; that is, to appear bigger than they are. Is there any truth/reasonable evidence that that’s the case?
Could that be common among male Dachshunds, due to their body type? Seems to me if you’re built like a Knockwurst with little short legs it might a little difficult to stand on three of them.
I don’t know, but I never saw any of the other 3 dachshunds I’ve had (RIP boys) squat.
My parents’ male German shepherd does not raise his leg. He kind of lets his hind leg behind him so that his pelvis is pointed more downward and then lets loose. Not quite a squat though.
I can picture that- I believe they are the only breed whose show “stack” has one foot slightly behind the other.
My dachshund (ironically enough named Sparky) has lifted his leg since he was out of puppyhood, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem. He’s 12 now and still lifting away.
Just anecdotal, but my dog doesn’t lift his leg when peeing on our back lawn, and does when going on bushes. When peeing on grass in the park, he doesn’t lift his leg, but after finishing he scratches with his paws to make the scent go higher.
Our bitch never lifts her leg at all, but she isn’t alpha in any way.
Dogs castrated prior to sexually maturity will often squat to pee.