- The dog was the first animal to be domesticated by humans.
- The smallest known adult dog was a Yorkshire Terrier that stood only 6.3cm at the shoulder, 9.5cm in length along the head-and-body, and weighed only 113 grams.
- The largest known dog was an English Mastiff called Zorba, who weighed 155.6 kg and was 250cm from nose to tail.
- A Border Collie named Chaser has learned the names for 1,022 toys after three years of training, so many that her trainers have had to mark the names of the objects lest they forget themselves. This is higher than Rico, another border collie who could remember at least 200 objects.
- Research has found that dogs are able to tell how big another dog is just by listening to its growl.
- Of approximately a dozen dogs that were on the Titanic, three dogs survived the sinking. One family even received an insurance settlement for their two dogs that didn’t survive.
- Dalmatian puppies are pure white when they are born and develop their spots as they grow older.
- It is a myth that dogs are colour blind. They can actually see in colour, just not as vividly as humans. It is akin to our vision at dusk.
- The Poodle’s ‘haircut’ was to improve their swimming abilities. The pom-poms were left to keep their joints warm!
- Greyhounds are the fastest dogs on earth, reaching speeds of up to 70km an hour.
- At the end of the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’, an ultrasonic whistle, audible only to dogs, was recorded by Paul McCartney for the enjoyment of his Shetland Sheepdog.
- Dogs can be trained to detect epileptic seizures.
- The world’s oldest dog is claimed to be an Australian Cattle Dog named Bluey who lived to the age of 29 years and five months.
- Dog’s nose prints are as unique as a human’s fingerprints and can be used to accurately identify them.
- Dogs are all direct descendants of wolves.
- The Basenji is the world’s only barkless dog.
- Petting dogs is proven to lower blood pressure of dog owners.
- Some dogs can smell dead bodies under water, where termites are hiding, and natural gas buried deep under dirt. They can even detect cancer that is too small to be detected by a doctor and can find lung cancer by sniffing a person’s breath.
- Different smells in the a dog’s urine can tell other dogs whether the dog leaving the message is female or male, old or young, sick or healthy, happy or angry.
- The most intelligent dogs are reportedly the Border Collie and the Poodle, while the least intelligent dogs are the Afghan Hound and the Basenji.
- While the human brain is dominated by a large visual cortex, the dog brain is dominated by an olfactory cortex (responsible for smell). The olfactory bulb in dogs is roughly 40 times bigger than the olfactory bulb in humans, relative to total brain size. Consequently, it has been estimated that dogs, in general, have a sense of smell ranging from 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more sensitive than a human’s. In some dog breeds, such as Bloodhounds, the sense of smell may be up to 100 million times greater than a human’s.
- The wet nose, or rhinarium, is essential for determining the direction of the air current containing the smell. Cold receptors in the skin are sensitive to the cooling of the skin by evaporation of the moisture by air currents.
