Interesting Facts – Dogs

Its time to come with a new post in the “Interesting facts” series and this time I chose to know more about my favourite pet animal. I had a liking towards dogs from when I was young and I also had a pet dog for almost 10 yrs. So here are a few interesting facts about them,

• Dogs were the first animals domesticated by people.
• There are 701 types of pure breed dogs.
• The fastest dog, the greyhound, can reach speeds of upto 41.7 miles per hour. The breed was known to exist in ancient Egypt 6,000 years ago
• The average dog lives to around 15 years of age.
• The smartest dogs are the Jack Russell Terrier and Scottish Border collie. Dumbest: Afgan hound.
• Dogs hearing is very acute. They can register sounds of 35,000 vibrations a second (compared to our 20,000)
• Dogs usually have 42 teeth.
• Dogs have three eyelids - They have an upper and lower eyelid and a third one inside of the other two. It helps protect the eye from dirt and dust. It is also called a "haw".
• Dogs can learn up to 50 words of any human language.
• Dogs are not color blind. They can see color but it is not as vivid a color scheme as we see. It is much like our vision at twilight.
• Dogs naturally have a wonderful sense of smell. They have many more sensory "smelling" cells than a man's 5,000,000. An Alsation (often used as a 'sniffer" dog) has 220,000,000.
• Dogs, like humans, are either right or left handed... or is that paws?!