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 Pets are fascinating creatures. They entertain us, protect us and keep us company but, when we look at pets and the rest of the animal kingdom, an array or fascinating facts abound.
For instance, while all domestic dogs descended from wolves, through selective breeding we have created such a variation in breeds that the two-kilogram Chihuahua and the one hundred kilogram St Bernard are all classified as dogs.
The dog name, Fido, incidentally is from Latin and means fidelity.
Did you know that while dogs bark regularly, wolves rarely do, and the Basenji does not bark at all but it can yodel when happy?
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Breeding
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Dogs breed twice a year but Dingoes breed only once per year. Cats, on the other hand, are seasonal breeders and mostly breed in spring and summer, which is why it is difficult to find kittens to purchase in winter months. A tortoiseshell cat will never father kittens and a ginger cat will rarely mother kittens because the former are always female and the latter are mostly male.
We talk about the breeding capacity of rabbits but Gerbils breed much more readily. A rabbit can produce no more than 128 young in two years but a Gerbil could produce over 330 in the same time. By the way, the Jackrabbit is a hare, not a rabbit and runs quicker than all other rabbits or hares, reaching speeds of 75km/hr. Rabbits produce young which are naked and blind and are therefore dependant on the doe whereas the young of hares are born furred and with open eyes are thereby independent at birth.
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Sight
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Can dogs see colour? Dogs and cats can see colour, but not as well us humans. They see like a colour-blind person. Dogs are unable to distinguish among green, yellow, orange, and red. They also have difficulty differentiating greens and greys.
Humans with perfect eyesight are said to have 20/20 vision. We can distinguish letters or objects at a distance of 20 feet. Dogs typically have 20/75 vision. They must be 20 feet from an object to see it as well as a human standing 75 feet away. Certain breeds have better acuity. Labradors, commonly used as seeing-eye dogs, have been bred for better eyesight and may have closer to 20/20 vision but because a Seeing Eye dog cannot tell between red and yellow, it must watch traffic flow to tell its master when to cross a road.
A white cat with odd coloured eyes is deaf and if your cat's pupils suddenly dilate when it looks at you, run, because it is likely to bite or scratch.
The eyes of an owl are huge and therefore it can see one hundred times better than us at night. Owls are the only bird to drop their upper eyelid to blink. All other birds raise their lower eyelids. Owls also fly silently - this helps them to catch their prey.
Female Sulphur Crested Cockatoos have pink eyes by the way but the boy's eyes are not blue, they are black.
Eagles also have excellent sight and a golden eagle can spot a hare three kilometers away.
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Things big
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Eagles can carry over half their own body weight distances up to eight kilometers and there is one documented case of a white-tailed sea eagle carrying off a young child. This was in Norway in 1932 when a four-year-old girl was seized by the bird and carried over a kilometer where she was then dropped onto a ledge almost 800 feet in up a mountain. She was rescued and sustained no injuries.
The biggest eagle, the great Philippine Eagle with a wingspan of 2.2 meters (7ft.) is very small compared with the largest flying bird ever known. Fossilised remains of the Teratornis merriami, a member of the New World family of vultures, were found in Nevada. Its wingspan was 7.5 metres (25 ft.) and it lived over 2 million years ago. By the way, the optimum depth of water in a birdbath is six centimeters. A great depth scares the bird and a lesser depth prevents them from bathing.
 Speaking of things big, of the big cats, the Lion, often called the 'king of the jungle' doesn't live in the jungle but in open plains. It is also not the king of the big cats as it is not the biggest. The Tiger is much larger, weighing as much as 385kg compared with the largest lion on record at 313kg. The Black Panther is an enigma. It doesn't exist as a separate species but refers to either the Leopard or the Jaguar when it appears in a black colour. On the matter of that wonderful cat noise, the purr, cheetahs, pumas and ocelots share the purr with our domestic cats, and tigers also appear to emit a purry sort of snuffle, but lions, jaguars and leopards do not purr.
Still on big things, the African Elephant has three toes on its back foot but its smaller cousin, the Indian Elephant, has four, but the elephant beetle is not the heaviest insect. This award goes to the Goliath beetle. It weighs in at 100 gms, or about the size of a small apple. The longest is the stick insect, measuring up to 51 cm. in length and the smallest is the tiny hairy-winged beetle, which is only 0.2 mm long and is small enough to crawl through the eye of a sewing needle.
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Insects
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Insects also grow very quickly. The caterpillar of the polyphemus moth increases its weight 4,000 fold in its 56 days as larvae. What advantage! Growing at the same rate, a beef calf would reach 160 tonnes in the same period, which means that to save the world's protein problems, we should be eating caterpillars not cattle.
What is the deadliest insect? Not the bee but the mosquito, which has caused 50 percent of all human deaths since the Stone Age and currently kills more than 2,500,000 people each year.
Fleas are remarkable insects. A flea can jump higher than 20 cm. or 130 times its own height. This is equivalent to a human jumping over a 60-storey skyscraper. Fleas cause an itchy condition in dogs where they develop a bald back. It is commonly called 'the mange' but mange is a totally different condition.
Mange is caused by mites, which are not related to insects but to spiders. Mites have three pairs of legs when young but four pairs when they are adults. Sarcoptic mange in pets can be contagious to humans and causes intense itching. Incidentally, itching and pain are exactly the same sensation - the difference is only a matter of degree of stimulation at the site of injury.
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Dr Cam Day BVSc BSc MACVSc is a veterinary surgeon, an animal behaviour consultant and media presenter. In 1995 he qualified as a Member of the Australian College of Veterinary Scientists in the discipline of Animal Behaviour and is one of only 15 veterinarians with this qualification in Australia. He works full time in animal behaviour management in Queensland, consulting with dog, cat and bird owners on a daily basis as well as appearing on air as Brisbane’s radio Pet Vet, and writing for various magazines.
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