Page 66 - Dog

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AMAZING FACTS

Dogs can smell and hear better than Dogs eat quickly and can regurgitate
they can see. Dogs see things first by food very easily. This is useful for
their movement, second by their brightness, wolves, who are able to travel a long way
and third by their shape. from a kill back to their dens, where they
regurgitate the food to feed their pups. It is
also useful for other dogs, who get rid of
Rhodesian ridgebacks have a visible bad food by throwing it up.
ridge, which is made up of forward-
growing hairs running along the top of
their back. Long-faced dogs have eyes on the
sides of their head, and so have a
wider field of vision. Short-faced dogs tend to
A dog’s sense of smell is at least a have eyes that are facing forward, and so are
thousand times better than ours. very good at judging distances.
“Scent” dogs, which have been bred to pursue
other animals by their smell alone, can
distinguish several different scents at the Big dogs
same time, and identify them as well. Dogs tend to A Newfoundland dog swimming
have 20 to 25 times more smell- have larger
receptor cells than people do. litters than Newfoundland dogs are strong
small dogs, and agile swimmers. Like many
but small breeds of dog, they have webbing
dogs usually between their toes, which helps them
live longer paddle through water.
than large
dogs.
A newborn puppy is deaf for two to
three weeks until its ear canals
open up.

Most puppies have 28 temporary
teeth, which they begin to lose at
about 12 weeks of age. They have usually
grown their 42 permanent teeth by the time
A bitch suckling Bulldogs were originally they are six months old.
her young bred to bait and fight bulls
and bears.
Hair from some dogs, such as the Unlike cats, dogs cannot retract
Samoyed, can be spun into thread (pull in) their claws.
and woven into clothes. Dogs only have about 10 vocal
sounds, whereas domestic cats have
about 20. Dogs communicate a great deal Bloodhounds have an amazing sense
Dogs hear much better than humans through body language—young puppies of smell. They can successfully follow scent
do. Dogs can hear high-pitched understand hand signals before words in trails that are more than four days old.
sounds that humans are not aware of at all. early training.
They can also hear sounds from a great
distance, and can work out the location of
a faint sound. Almost one in three families in the Bloodhound
United States and France owns a
dog, whereas in Germany and Switzerland
The basenji, an African there is only one dog for every
wolf dog, is the only 10 households.
breed of dog that is not
able to bark.
On average there are 320 bones in a
dog’s skeleton, but the exact number
depends on the length of the dog’s tail.

A dog was the first animal to go into
space. In 1957, Russian scientists
sent Laika, a small dog, around the earth
in a satellite.
Basenji
The greyhound is one of the oldest
breeds of dog.

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