Fun Facts About Dogs
- Dogs only sweat from the bottoms of their feet, the only way they can discharge heat is by panting.
- Dogs have about 100 different facial expressions, most of them made with the ears.
- Dogs have about 10 vocal sounds.
- Dogs do not have an appendix.
- There are more than 350 different breeds of dogs worldwide.
- Dalmatians are born spotless: at first pure white, their spots develop as they age.
- Contrary
to popular belief, dogs aren’t color blind; they can see shades of
blue, yellow, green and gray. The color red registers on a grayscale in a
dog’s vision.
- Most domestic dogs are capable of reaching speeds up to about nineteen miles per hour when running at full speed.
- Using
their swiveling ears like radar dishes, experiments have shown that
dogs can locate the source of a sound in 6/100ths of a second.
- Domesticated for more than 10,000 years, the dog was one of the first animals domesticated by humans.
- Cats do not have sweat glands.
- A cat can jump as much as seven times its height.
- Cats have five toes on each front paw, but only four toes on each back paw.
- Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
- A pack of kittens is called a kindle, while a pack of adult cats is called a clowder.
- An adult cat can run about 12 miles per hour, and can sprint at nearly thirty miles per hour.
- A cat's tongue is scratchy because it's lined with papillae—tiny elevated backwards hooks that help to hold prey in place.
- The nose pad of each cat has ridges in a unique pattern not unlike a person's fingerprints.
- Cats'
bodies are extremely flexible; the cat skeleton contains more than 230
bones (a human has about 206), and the pelvis and shoulders loosely
attach to the spine. This adds to their flexibility and allows them to
fit through very small spaces.
- Cats have better memories than
dogs. Tests conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that while
a dog's memory lasts no more than 5 minutes, a cat's can last as long
as 16 hours—exceeding even that of monkeys and orangutans.