Some Amazing Facts about Dogs
Published on: 2023-01-20
Dogs are our natural friends, they gave us their company and love but how much do we know about this amazing creatures? There is a lot of interesting facts about dogs that we don’t really know or at least not enough.
There are more than 150 dog breeds divided into 8 different classes:
- Sporting
- Non-Sporting
- Hound
- Terrier
- Toy
- Working
- Herding
- Miscellaneous
All these have different special abilities depending of the breed.
Their sense of smell is at least 40x better than humans sense of smell.
They posses up to 300 million of olfactory receptors in their nose, compared with like 6 million in humans and the part of their brain that is devoted to the smell is about 40x greater than ours. Studies says that in perfect conditions they can smell people or objects as far as 20km away. The family of the hounds is the breed with the best sense of smell, Bloodhound, Basset Hound, and German Shepherd.
Dogs don’t feel guilt
Dogs don’t feel naturally guilty. But yes, they can feel when you are upset because something that they did or just upset in general. This is something that they have been taught by their interactions with humans, so basically they react to your body language, voice tone and verbiage. So what happens is that most likely this is something that your dog has done before, and you reacted by screaming, yelling or punishing him, so your dog has become frightened and the next time that he do something naughty they just know what is coming, they know how you are going to react and they exhibit a body language that can be interpreted as guilt.
Some dogs can sniff out medical problems
Dogs are most famously known for detecting cancer. Because their sense of smell is so great, some dogs can be trained to sniff out a variety of cancer using samples from others cancer patients. They can also detect other diseases like Malaria and Parkinson’s disease. They can also detect if a patient is going to have an epileptic seizure, a narcoleptic moment of if the blood sugar of a diabetic person is dropping or spiking. Dogs also can help to predict migraines, studies says that they change their behavior when migraines are going to happen like 1 or 2 hours before.
Some can be as fast as a cheetah
The fastest dogs are the greyhound. They are specially designed for sustained high-speed running. They can reach a speed of 45 mph (72km/h) within its first six strides from a standing start. No other land animal (except the cheetah) has that degree of acceleration, but cheetah only can maintain this speed in the shorter run, about 300 yard only while the greyhound can settle into a speed in excess of 35 miles per hour for distances as great as seven miles. What means that while the cheetah can win the short sprint race, in a longer race the greyhound will leave the cheetah behind.
Dogs don’t sweat like humans do
Dogs do sweat, but not like humans and sweating is only a small part of the process they use to cool themselves down. Most dogs are covered in fur, so they can’t have their sweat glands located in their body because those would fail to evaporate and that’s when cooling takes place, so their glands are located in their paw pads and they activate those when is hot.
Dogs are intelligent as a two years old kid
Studies says that average dogs can count (to about 5), reason and recognize words and gestures like a 2 years old toddler. They can understand 165 words, including signs, signals and gestures. The smartest breeds are Border Collies, Poodles, German Shepherds, Golden Retriever, and Doberman Pinchers.
Dogs can see in color
While dogs can’t see all the colors that humans do, that doesn’t mean that their world is entirely black and white, in fact, dogs live in a pretty colorful world. They perceive blue and yellow light but not red or green, so they likely see everything as muted shades of yellow, brown, gray, and tinges of blues. So don’t waist your time buying red or orange toys because they don’t see those colors as you, better buy some blue or yellow that are the colors that they perceive better.
Dogs dream
Like humans, dogs also go through several sleep cycles. REM sleep is the period responsible for the most memorable and vivid dreams and is believed to be a part of how the body processes memory, among other things. Scientist think that dogs dream similar to us, meaning that they replay moments from their day while they’re fast asleep.
