Wonderful Facts About Dogs

Dogs have been tagged "Man's best friend" by many and we see them in almost every home. But how much do we really know about our dogs?

This piece of write-up will reveal to you wonderful things you never knew about dogs:

1. Dogs have a special light-reflecting layer behind their retinas which enable them to have a strong low-light vision.

This means that they can see better than humans in the dark.

Dog Paws

2. Dogs have no sweat glands in their body, the only sweat glands they have is contained in-between their paws through which they sweat.

Greyhound Topspeed

3. The fastest dogs in the world are Greyhounds, they can run at speeds of up to 72 km/h.

4. About a million dogs have been named as the primary beneficiaries of their owner's Will in the United States alone.

Doggy Nose

5. The nose prints of dogs can be used to accurately identify them. Their nose prints are as unique as the human finger prints.

6. Dogs generally have no sense of time.

Irish Wolfhound

7. The Irish Wolfhound is the largest breed of dog in the world.

Chihuahua

8. The Chihuahua is the smallest breed in the world.

St. Bernard

9. The heaviest dog is the St. Bernard.

First Animal in Space

10. The first-recorded living being in space was the dog Laika, which went into space in 1957 on the Russian satelite Sputnik II.

11. Only dogs and humans have prostates.

Barkless Dog

12. The Basanji, an African Wolf-dog specie is the only dog that cannot bark.

13. Dogs have amazing sense of smell, it is more than 100,000 times stronger than those of humans. But their eyesights are not as keen as that of humans.

14. Chocolates can kill dogs or at least make them violently ill. This is because chocolate contains Theobromine, which is very harmful to dogs.

15. All dogs -big or small- are very identical in anatomy, they all have 321 bones and 42 permanent teeths.

16. Puppies, in their first few weeks, sleep for ninety percent of the day.

17. The longer a dog's nose, the more effective it's internal cooling system.

18. All dogs are direct descendants of wolves.

19. Dogs can mate succesfully with wolves to produce feral offsprings.

20. The sense of hearing for dogs is ten times more acute than humans. This means they can hear sounds that are not even audible to humans.

Bloodhound

21. Blood hounds can single out and identify several completely different scents simultaneously.

22. A dog's heart beat at an average of 120 times per minute.

23. The oldest dog on record is Bluey, a Queensland "Heeler", it was aged 29 years and 5 months.

24. The average lifespan of a dog is 15 years.

25. Dogs that have little or no human contact in the first three months typically don't make good pets and could even be dangerous at times.

Sleeping Puppy

26. The eyes of puppies are not fully open until they are about 12 days old and their vision are not fully developed until after the first month.

27. Dogs can read the emotion on a human face, infact they are the only animal specie in the world that can do that. They can tell by looking at a person's face whether the person is happy, sad or even angry.

28. Full grown dogs have the cognitive skills of a two-year old human child. They can learn as many as 250 words and understand them perfectly.

Dog Pack

29. Dogs are natural pack animals, just like wolves and they regard their owners as their pack leader which is why they obey all his commands.

Chow Chow

Shar Pei

30. All dog species have pink tongues, except two. The Chow-Chow and the Shar-pei both have black tongues.

31. In ancient Egypt when a dog dies, the owners would shave their own eye brows, smear mud in their hair and mourn the dog aloud for several days.

Dog Petting

32. If you pet a dog, it lowers your blood pressure.

33. Dogs can detect lung cancer by smelling a person's breath.

34. The wet nose of dogs collects more tiny droplets of smelling chemicals in the air thus enhancing their smelling ability.

35. The smell of a dog's urine can tell other dogs whether the dog is male or female, sick or healthy, happy or angry, old or young etc.

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