Have your seen more squirrels these days lying belly down with their limbs stretched out? well, what … [+]
If you are feeling a little too hot at work (in a temperature and not a sexiness sense), should you just lay on the floor on your belly and spread out your arms and legs? After all, that’s what many squirrels seem to be doing these days. With temperatures at the too freaking hot levels in recent week, squirrels and other animals have been doing a lot of “splooting” to beat the heat. Now, you may be wondering whether “splooting” is a made-up word because spell-check recommends using “looting” instead. But “looting” at work would be very different from “splooting” there, and the New York City (NYC) Department of Parks & Recreation defined “splooting” as “stretching out” on “cool surfaces to reduce body heat” on a tweet on Tuesday:
As you can see in the tweet, another word for splooting is “heat dumping,” which I described for Forbes about a year ago. By stretching yourself out, you are trying to maximize the contact between your body and a cooler object. It’s called a heat dump since such contact then allows heat from your body to be transferred or dumped to the cooler object whether it’s the floor, the ground, a patio, a ledge, or any other flat surface. Of course, you want to make sure that you include the word “heat” when you tell people that you want to take a dump on the floor.
You also want to make sure that the object that you are laying on is cooler and not hotter. Otherwise instead of heat dumping, it would be cooking yourself as heat tends to move from hotter to cooler objects.
The National Park Service described splooting as a laying “spread-eagle, usually face down with all arms and legs spread out” and showed a bear in such a “spread-eagle” or rather “spread-bear” position:
Why are these animals doing the “spread-squirrel” or “spread-bear” positions face down or on their bellies rather than on their backs? Well, “fur” sure, the reason is probably because most animals tend to have less fur on their bellies and therefore less insulation to prevent the heat transfer. So if you have a really, really hairy chest, splooting may not work so well.
The NYC Parks tweet was followed by others on Twitter sharing photos and videos of various animals splooting. For example, this tweet was very bunny:
And this tweet showed what’s been happening during the dog days of Summer:
Then there was this tweet from FOX29 Philly with a video showing two humans doing a different type of man-spreading:
Of course, doing this at work, on a date, at a party, or in a restaurant could be a bit disconcerting for others if you happen to be human. As a human, you may differ in social customs from those of squirrels, bears, bunnies, dogs, and other animals. For example, squirrels don’t buy Dogecoin at 69 cents.
Nevertheless, chances are you’ve practiced heat dumping in one form or another. Touching any part of your hot, hot body to something cooler in essence may allow you to bring down your skin temperature to some degree, so to speak. The object may be a water bottle, an ice pack, a cool towel, that life-sized figurine of Harry Styles that you keep in your bedroom, or your icy significant other. Again, if you tell your significant other that you are heat dumping him or her, make sure that you include the word “heat.” Naturally, the heat transfer works best when there are no clothing or other materials between you and the cooler object. Of course, you could practice splooting au naturel in the privacy of your own apartment or home but you may want to lock the doors, pull down the window shades, and clean the kitchen floor first.
So if you see squirrels or any other animals laying belly down with their limbs stretched out, it may not be because they had a hard night partying or have been watching the prices of crypto plummet. They could very well be splooting, especially when it is at the heat of the moment.
