ANIMALS How do we know what animals think or feel? I say be kind to animals just in case it matters to them. The poet William Blake said, "How do you know but that every bird that cleaves the aerial way is not an immense world of delight closed to your senses five?" Lifespans of Animals Horse...............30 Rabbit...............5 Dog.................15 cat.................13 rat..................2 mouse......less than 1 Elephant...........100 Crocodile..........300 Cow.................25 Pigeon..............20 Eagle..............100 Whale..............100 clam...............150 Tortoise...........350 Lion................40 Pig.................25 Crow...............100 Dogs and Cats In one large city a telephone operator traced the source of an emergency phone call because the caller would not speak. The phone only emitted unusual noises. When the ambulance crew arrived at the scene, they found a basset hound who had dialed 911 in the process of chewing up the phone. In 1978, New York City passed a law that made the residents clean up after their dogs. Until that time, people had to walk around 54 tons of dog poop deposited daily. There was a dog (part collie) who liked to take baths and learned how to turn the water on and off and adjust the faucets to get the right temperature. Dogs see only black, white and gray. They can hear much better than humans, though. They can hear sounds ten times farther away than we can. The original reason for the haircuts that poodles get was to make swimming easier for them. The only things that are taxed in Ile de Sein, France, are dogs. An average dog costs its owner about $500 per year. In ten years, $5,000! "In order to keep a true perspective on one's importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him." - Dereke Bruce It costs about $30 per month to feed a horse. It costs about $15 per month to feed a cat. Americans spend almost 3 billion dollars a year on food for their kitty-cats, yet, for comparison, America spends only 700 million dollars on drug prevention and treatment programs. And speaking of cat food, a mouse can have 8 babies. Assuming four of them are female, and knowing that a mouse can give birth 60 days after being born itself, after 18 months, a pair of mice can become 4.5 million. If you have to introduce a second cat into your house, your first kitty cat may have trouble getting used to the new intruder. If you put a little perfume on both cats, so that they will smell the same as each other, they will trust each other more. A man named Sir Henry Wyat was sentenced to the Tower of London, at a time when prisoners generally starved to death. Sir Henry's kitty-cat seemed to understand the situation because she snuck into the Tower bringing him a freshly-killed pigeon every day. When the king heard of this, he must have felt sad for the kitty, because he immediately set Sir Henry free. Cats will not walk on aluminum foil. This is good to know when you are trying to protect something that your cat would tend to walk on such as a part-done jigsaw puzzle. Cats' whiskers have a function similar to those curb feelers which were so common on cars in the 1950's. When a cat looks into a small tunnel or opening in the bushes, the whiskers are used to gauge the dimensions. If the opening doesn't rub the whiskers, the cat's body will fit through. Why are cats so meticulous about keeping clean? They lick off all blood and odor-causing matter to prevent attracting flies and bigger predators that would be interested in the odor of blood. The world's fattest cat was "Tiger" a part-Persian who weighed over 42 pounds. If your kitty-cat scratches up valuable furniture, tape balloons to it. The cat will never scratch there again. It is often reported that cats cannot taste sweet flavors. Actually, they can sense sweetness, but do not have much interest in sugary things. What is particularly interesting about their sense of taste, is that they have a special taste for the flavor of water, which we humans cannot taste. ;qooooooo.,,,xkiiiiiii: This is what happens when a kitty cat walks across the computer keyboard while you are trying to write a book. If you need to give liquid medicine to a cat, don't try to feed it to the cat. This would only result in a battle. Instead, spill the medicine on the kitty's fur. The cat will lick it off in the process of cleaning. When a cat turns around and around before laying down, this is an instinct left over from the days when they slept in tall grass. The turning action pushed the grass down into a nest. Birds Chicks that have just hatched will follow the first moving thing they see and think that moving thing is their mommy. I wonder what happens when the first thing they see is a cat? Mynah birds can be trained to say "hello" to people. There is one mynah that even says "hello" to photographs of people. He recognizes them even if they are wearing sunglasses. Some vultures have learned that for dinner they can crack other bird's eggs by throwing stones at them. When the subject of a national bird came up, Benjamin Franklin suggested a turkey, but an eagle was selected. In 1876, when constructing the 550-foot tall Washington Monument, (when it was 153 feet tall), workers had to get a rope to the top, but they did not have any sort of scaffolding. They tied a thread to the leg of a pigeon, put him inside the unfinished tower and made a sudden noise. The scared bird flew up to the top, and out. A string was attached to the thread and pulled to the top, and then a rope was pulled to the top with the string. There is a species of bird called European Grosbeak. It's official scientific name is Coccothraustes coccothraustes coccothraustes. A human heart beats at about 50 to 100 beats per minute. A hummingbird's heart beats between 36 and 1200 beats per minute. When at rest, the bird's heart beats at 480. Our body temperature is always close to 98.6. Theirs is between 55 and 110 degrees. Some people in China use live quail in the winter as hand warmers. If you give an oystercatcher a choice between one of her own eggs, or a fake egg made of wood, she will sit on the wooden one. There were a flock of ducks that lived on the roof of a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee who used to take the elevator to the ground floor when they wished to go anywhere. There was a research project that involved having a scientist yell at chickens - then measure their health compared to other chickens that were treated nicely. As it turns out, the chickens treated nicely are more resistant to infection. The largest chicken egg ever laid weighed over one pound. The passenger pigeon, which became extinct in 1914, numbered over two billion just thirty-five years earlier. They used to fly in such large flocks that it would seem like night in the middle of the day. Farmers used to shoot at them and would sometimes hit two or three with one shot. There is a bird in Antarctica that repels threatening animals in unique ways. The bird throws up in the enemy's face. If that doesn't work, it blows snot at them with enough force to bowl a human over. When a gas pipeline crossing the California desert springs a leak it would normally be hard to find the break. To find the leak easily, the gas companies put a chemical into the gas that arouses the mating instinct in buzzards. They congregate around the area of a leak, making it easy to spot. A 300-pound ostrich has 45 feet of intestine. Their eggs have a shell so hard that a 250-pound man can stand on one without breaking it. Brains The cerebellum is the rear part of the brain which is most convoluted. It has long been considered the center for balance and muscular coordination. (In birds it is much larger than the same organ in other animals - because they need it for flying). Recently it has been discovered that there are direct circuits between the cerebellum and emotional responses. Scientists raised three groups of monkeys. Some were raised by their mother. Some were raised by a stationary Chlorox bottle covered with fur. The last group were raised by a Chlorox bottle that was remotely controlled and acted somewhat like a real mother. The monkeys with the movable bottle mother grew up nearly as normal as those raised with a real mother, but those with a stationary mother, grew up schizophrenic. A fish's brain weighs about the same amount as its spinal cord. In humans, the brain weighs 55 times more than the spinal cord. The brain of an elephant is four times bigger than a human brain. The animal with the largest brain compared to the size of its body is an ant. Human brains weigh about 44 to 50 ounces. The biggest brain in any class of apes is only about 16 ounces. Dolphins have brains that are 40 percent larger and more wrinkled than humans. Are we really the most intelligent animal on earth? The answer is probably yes. Much of the dolphin's brain is taken up with their sense of sonar. Scientists are now assuming that they can not only "see" their surroundings and other dolphins with their sense of sonar, but that they can actually see into their friends. They would not have to ask another dolphin if it is feeling ok, they can see their friend's innards for themselves. Have you ever tried to sell something big to someone, who tells you, "I'll have to sleep on it." There is validity to this technique. A person can enhance their decision making power while sleeping. This is done through dreams. It seems that while dreaming we are practicing our thinking skills, and more specifically, reprocessing our thoughts and activities of the previous day. We are able to see issues more clearly the next day, and therefore make better decisions, because we have new power. We have let our brain develop the issue overnight. This is an essential trait to survival. For proof, we look at the spiny anteater, a simple mammal who does not have periods of rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep. This indicates that the little guy does not dream. The spiny anteater has another oddity. He has the biggest prefrontal cortex (the thinking part) in relation to the rest of his brain of all animals except humans. Yet he is stupid, and we are not. Why? He has to process all his thoughts in actual time, as they are happening, because he cannot work things out while dreaming. This must be a bigger job than you would think. His offspring could not evolve much farther in intelligence because their brains would have to become prohibitively large. Instead, they evolved dreaming. We humans dream, so our large brains can be used for more intelligent pursuits. This dreaming business is very essential to the formation of permanent memories. Dinosaurs Some dinosaurs had two brains! Since nerve signals move from one part of the body to another relatively slowly (It takes 1/50 second to notice a pain in your foot.) and since these beasts were so large, a second brain was located at the base of the tail to maintain control the back of the creatures. Interestingly, the rear brain was bigger than the one in their heads. The Largest dinosaur, Brachiosaurus weighed as much as a town of 800 people, was taller than a four story hotel, and was as long as two of the longest school buses. Who says all dinosaurs have died? There is a species of lizard called Komodo monitor that can grow to over ten feet long and weigh 365 pounds. Komodo Dragons can eat a pig whole. Actually, most scientists are now saying that dinosaurs were very unlike lizards. Their legs generally were directly under their bodies, not sticking out from their sides like lizards. Their bone structure was more like that of warm-blooded mammals. Tracks have been found made by of groups of dinosaurs moving together in herds with a spacing and depth of impression indicating sustained high speed, again more a mammalian trait than reptilian. One theory regarding the extinction of dinosaurs which is gaining some acceptance is that because they were warm-blooded creatures with a high metabolism, they were more susceptible to viruses or bacterial infections than their cold-blooded predecessors. According to one scientist, they might have all died of diarrhea. Can you imagine the mess? Everyone knows that there are places underground that have fossils 70 million years old. What most people don't realize is that these things didn't all die. Scientists recently bored a hole 850 feet down into the era of dinosaurs and found 3500 living, undiscovered species of fungi, protozoa and bacteria. The scien- tists do not know whether these are the same as those who lived in prehistory or whether they have mutated. Invertebrates The horseshoe crab is an animal that has not evolved. It is the same as it was 300 million years ago. If you took all the earthworms that are under a typical football field and lined them up, the line would be 94 miles long. They will move ten tons of dirt in a year. Giant earthworms have been found as long as 11 feet. Yuk! Some fleas freeze solid every night, then thaw out to resume their lives in the daytime. Mosquitoes can drink 150 percent as much blood as they weigh. A reason to avoid blue jeans: Mosquitoes are twice as interested in blue as any other color. There is a water beetle that has four eyes. Two are mounted high on its head for seeing through air, and two are lower, for looking into the water. The mayfly has a two-hour long lifespan. It has no mouth, because it will not have time to digest a meal. The largest moths in the world have a 14 inch wingspan. These "Hercules" moths live only 2 weeks and never eat. Would you be scared if one landed on your head? Insects are nearsighted. They cannot see farther than 9 feet. How is it that insects get stuck to a spider's web, yet the spider does not? The spider's feet secrete a bit of oil. If a spider slips or falls, it can get trapped in its own web. Bees have to fly a total of 72,000 miles to gather enough honey for one jar. Ants sleep about three hours, then stretch and appear to yawn, just like people do when waking. If you could jump as high as a grasshopper, relative to its size, you could jump more than 1/2 mile straight up. There is a species of bug that can fly up to 818 miles per hour, faster than the speed of sound. If you could weigh all the bugs in the world, and weigh all the people in the world, your pile of bugs would weigh twelve times as much as the people. How do spiders make their silk? They excrete a polymer and then stretch it so quickly that this stretching creates aligned, crystalized solid molecules. Spiders inject their victims with a chemical that dissolves them. Then the spiders drink their lunch with their mouths which are soda straw-like. A tarantula can totally liquify a mouse. The crosshairs that you see in a surveyor's transit have to be very thin. Some transit makers use the silk of a black widow's web. If a drop of liquor gets on a scorpion, it will immediately commit suicide with its own stinger. Some male moths can locate a single female moth by her odor up to one mile away. If you cut the head off a cockroach, it will continue to live for up to many more weeks. Scientists have found out that termites are affected by music. They will eat up your house twice as fast if you play rock music. The ears of some bugs are located in unusual places. Crickets listen to sounds with their knees while cicadas hear with their stomachs. The giant squid has the largest eye of any living animal at up to nine inches in diameter. (fifteen inches according to another source) These squid live so deep in the ocean that live ones have seldom been seen. Dead ones have been found that are up to 55 feet long. Jellyfish are animals who are composed of mostly water - 95 percent. A sponge is a unique character. If you cut him into several small pieces or squeeze him through a screen, his parts will eventually reform the original shape without any harm done. Octopi have three hearts. If a lobster loses an eye, it will grow a new one. Starfish have a gross and unusual manner of eating. They regurgitate their stomach through their mouth onto their food, and absorb it directly. Then they suck their stomach back in. Lower Vertebrates Some anglerfish, who live in the ocean at depths of over a mile, have unusual lives. To see where they are going in that depth, or perhaps to attract food, the females have a chemically operated lamp that hangs on a stalk in front of their mouths. The male doesn't need to see because early in his life, he bites into the belly of the female and stays there forever. After a while the female grows skin over the connection, and the male degenerates, losing his teeth, his fins, and any manner of life beyond being a small appendage hanging off the female. Some catfish have taste buds over their entire body. When Pacific salmon get to a certain age, their pituitary glands suddenly secrete poison to kill them. A fisherman in England hooked three pike at once. While pulling in the first, it was eaten by a second who had been eaten by the third. While fishing at a pond in New York State, a man lost the glass part of his lantern. Five years later, once again fishing in the same spot, he caught a fish that was wearing that same glass lantern chimney, stuck around it's body. One species of shark is so competitive that the babies fight each other within their mother, until only one is left to be born. Sharks never get sick. Sharks almost never get cancer. Scientists are studying them to find out why and whether their protection is adaptable to humans. Sharks will eat anything. The only exception, is that they will not eat anything in the vicinity of where they give birth. This is because they are so stupid, this is the only way nature protects them from accidentally eating their own babies. The people of the world eat over 200 million frogs per year. So many people around the world enjoy eating frog legs that there is likely to be an eco-system problem in Asia, where most frogs for food come from. They eat zillions of insects, keeping the wildlife balance in check. Perhaps people would stop eating frogs if they realized that the frog's legs are usually cut off while the frogs are still alive. When horned toads are threatened, they shoot jets of blood from their eyes. Crocs eat rocks. The first meal of a baby crocodile consists of several stones. Scientists think these are for ballast, to help the croc keep upright while swimming and/or to grind up food during digestion. If alligator eggs are kept above 86 degrees, all the babies will be males. If incubated at below 86 degrees, all females will result. Another theory about the extinction of dinosaurs is that with a global change in temperature, only one sex would have been born. A seven-inch chameleon can stretch its tongue up to ten inches to eat bugs that are passing by. Scientists have discovered that a chameleon will still imitate the colors of its surroundings, even if blinded. There is a species of lizard that has three eyes. Two of its eyes are located in the normal place, the third one is on the top of its head. There is a species of snake that is awake for two hours per day, and sleeps the other 22 hours. There have been snakes born with two heads. They usually coexist alright until one tries to eat the other. When researchers in Louisiana placed rubber snakes and turtles on highways and observed the behavior of 22,000 motorists, they discovered that 87% of the drivers purposely avoided hitting the creatures, but 6% of drivers went out of their way to "kill" the rubber animals with their tires. Warm blooded animals versus cold blooded animals: The warm-blooded animals are always ready to move or react to their environment, while the cold-blooded animals must be careful not to be caught at the wrong temperature, when they cannot react quickly to an emergency. On the other hand, warm-blooded animals must spend much of their time eating to supply their energy requirements. If people were reptiles instead of mammals, we would have to eat only once per week. Mammals Rabbits sleep 16 times per day. The blood of mammals has exactly the same dilution of salt as ocean water. We all know that whales are big, but few of us realize just how big. The biggest species is the Blue Whale. This animal is bigger than any dinosaur that ever lived. The biggest dino (brachiosaurus) was only 50 tons and 80 feet long. One blue whale is as big as 25 of the largest elephants. (150 tons, 100 feet long) Think of 75 Volkswagen vans. They are that big! And they grow fast. Youngsters gain weight at the rate of ten pounds per hour. A blue whale's tongue is about the same weight as three Chevy station wagons. Their heart is about the same size as a Toyota. This monster organ beats about nine times per minute. (at the other end of the spectrum is the hummingbird with up to 1200 beats per minute, or 133 beats for every time the whale's heart beats. The life of a domestic elephant in Thailand: School begins at age three. The elephant is introduced to two boys who will learn with them. The boys are called mahouts. For the next six years they learn all about working with each other to get wood out of the jungle. For the next fifty years, the elephant and the mahouts are employed by the timber industry. The reason there are two men for one elephant, is that should something happen to one of the men, the other will be able to continue working with the elephant. Then, at age 59, the elephant is retired, and gets to graze freely in the forest for the next forty years or so. The mahouts, if still alive, still visit the elephant in the forest every few days. An elephant can eat a quarter-ton of grass in one day. The skin of a hippopotamus is an one and a half inches thick and nearly bullet-proof. When hippos are upset, their sweat turns red. The stomach of a hippopotamus is ten feet long. You can convince a cow to go up stairs, but it is nearly impossible to get one to come down. The record for milk production from one cow is 11,756 gallons in one year. Sometimes a moose will approach a car, thinking it is another moose. They are very nearsighted animal. Aren't you glad you are not a koala? Koala bears have a diet that consists of only one thing, eucalyptus leaves. Interestingly, their appendix is up to 8 feet long. Teddy bears were named after U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. He enjoyed a koala bear that was given to him, and toy manufacturers started making a toy bear, named after the President. A man named Marinus was so mad when a bear killed his mule, that he captured the bear and taught him how to plow his fields. A horse cannot focus its eyes in the way humans do. They have to change the angle of their heads if they want to see close objects clearly. A man in France who had been hunting on his pony had a problem. The pony was injured. So, he carried the pony more than a mile to a veterinarian. The pony weighed almost a quarter-ton. Brand-new baby giraffes are six feet tall and weigh almost 200 pounds. Kangaroos push off the ground with their tails when they jump. Squirrels forget where they hid about half of their nuts. The word Hamster is from a German word that means "to hoard." Breathing liquid is possible. Mice have been held under the surface in a beaker of liquid that is saturated with oxygen for several hours. This could allow divers to rise or sink rapidly without getting the bends. The only problem is the first breath - overcoming the instinctual fear of drowning. Pre-mature babies have already been forced to breathe liquid when their lungs are too underdeveloped to breathe air. The technical name for the black rat is rattus rattus. A rat must never stop gnawing. This action grinds down their ever-growing incisors. If they were not provided with anything to gnaw, their lower teeth would eventually grow through their skull and into their brain. A scientist, W. Donner Denckla, at the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (of all places), removed the pituitary glands of rats and injected the necessary hormones for survival. These rats lived much longer and showed less signs of aging than ordinary rats. At 24 months of age, only 2 out of 125 control rats were still alive. This is a typical lifespan for rats. Of the 95 rats without the pituitaries, even though handicapped, at age 34 months, 20 were still alive. This is equivalent to humans at age 95, where only 1 percent of us are still alive. Humans have been a very successful species in terms of the number of individuals living on the earth at this time. We are the first animal that can exchange information outside of DNA. Other animals must rely upon what is built into their system, primarily instincts, for their information about how to deal with their environment. People can talk to each other about their environment. For example, I can tell you not to eat the leaves of a cherry tree, because they are poisonous, thereby saving your life. Some old male monkeys become bald, just like some humans. Many scientists believe it is possible, through artificial insemination or perhaps more natural techniques, to cross-breed humans and gorillas. There is really nothing to stop someone from doing this. Think of the ethical questions that the baby would bring up. Would you raise the child as a human? In 1914, France's first lady was kidnapped by an orangutan who had escaped from the zoo in Paris. He carried her up into a tree and kept her for hours. She was so embarrassed by this incident that the government kept it a secret for forty years. It is possible that a single pig caused the War of 1812. This pig was always getting into the neighbor's garden and eating up the nice things he found there. Finally the neighbor got mad and attacked and killed the pig with a pitchfork. The pig's killer was a congressional candidate who lost the election by one vote. This was the vote cast against him by the late pig's owner presumably because he was upset about the loss of his pig. When the matter of deciding about the war was voted upon, the issue passed by one vote. This was the vote of the candidate who had won the election by one vote. The world's most outrageous musical instrument was made in France during 1450. Connected to a keyboard was a long row of spikes. Under each spike was a pig, arranged according to the pitch of its oink.