Top Dawg Business Blog

While dogs and cats lead the pack (or clowder, as the case might be) in American pets, there are thousands of other species of pets commonly kept in this country.
• Mice: A mouse’s tail is hairless, but covered in tiny scales that help when climbing. Pet mice can live up to 3 years and are very easy to keep, low maintenance and fun to watch.
• Hedgehogs: These little critters can run as fast as 6 feet per second, as well as being great climbers, diggers, and swimmers.
• Guinea Pigs: Guinea pigs have a wide range of vocal abilities. Depending on their mood, guinea pigs will grunt, squeak, coo, gurgle, and chirrup. When excited guinea pigs will “popcorn”, or jump straight up and down. Since they have exceptionally tender feet, they need cages with solid floors.
• Gerbils: Another popular little pet rodent, gerbils thump both hind legs on the ground to communicate. They are very social and generally happier as a pair or group.
• Ferrets: Ferrets are intelligent, charming little creatures, who are exceptionally social and affectionate. A ferret can sleep so soundly that it cannot be woken up even when picked up and jostled.
• Emus: A large, flightless bird, the emu is native to Australia but has recently become a common pet in North America. Emus have double-plumed feathers, and they lay 6” long emerald green eggs.
• Rabbits: Pet rabbits live up to 12 years and can be litter box trained, so can make great inside pets. The short, stubby tail of a rabbit is known as a “scut.” Rabbits are crepuscular, which means they become most active at dusk. They love leafy green carrot tops—sometimes even more than the carrot itself. But rabbits don’t tolerate most lettuces, and can become ill from too much watery lettuce like iceberg.
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While dogs and cats lead the pack (or clowder, as the case might be) in American pets, there are thousands of other species of pets commonly kept in this country.
• Cows: The average cow produces 40 glasses of milk each day. Quite intelligent animals, cows develop a fast fondness for their owners, if given a chance. A Holstein cow’s spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots. Cows do not have upper front teeth.
• Fish: The common goldfish is the only animal that can see both infra-red and ultra-violet light. Many fish can change sex during the course of their lives. Others, especially rare deep-sea fish, have both male and female sex organs.
• Parrots: African Gray parrots are so smart that they can make up their own sentences.
• Donkeys: The placement of a donkey’s eyes in its head enables it to see all four feet at all times.
• Rats: Pet rats are friendly, loyal, and very clean. The species most often kept as a pet is the Norway rat. They are also known as brown, barn, or wharf rats. Their scientific name is Rattus norvegicus. However, these rats are not originally from the country Norway, as the name might imply. Instead, they hale from northern China.
• Chickens: There are more chickens than people in the world. Chickens absorb vitamin D from sunshine through their combs.
• Sugar Gliders: Sugar gliders are unique animals, with velvety, soft fur, large dark eyes, and a long bushy tail. They weigh only about 3.5 ounces full grown. Their most unique feature, however, is the thin skin fold that stretches between their fore and hind legs. This membrane allows the animal to glide between trees in the wild.

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• An unsprayed female cat is called a queen and an unneutered male cat is called a tom.
• A tom cat can begin mating when he is between 7 and 10 months old.
• A queen becomes fertile as early as 4 months of age.
• Cat gestation lasts for 58-65 days.
• A mother cat gives birth to a litter of kittens, but a pack of kittens is called a kindle, and a pack of adult cats is called a clowder (although most digital “spell checkers” don’t recognize the word!)
• An average of 87% of pet cats in the US are spayed or neutered by their owners.
• Kittens remain with their mother until the age of 9 weeks.
• Neutering a cat extends its life span by 2 or 3 years.
• If left to her own devices, a female cat may have three to seven kittens every four months. This is why population control using spaying and neutering is so important.
• All cats are born with blue eyes.
• Mother cats teach their kittens to use the litter box.
• Never pick a kitten up by the neck. Only a mother cat may do this safely.
• The ear canals of newborn kittens remain closed for up to nine days.
• During its lifetime, one female cat can have nearly 100 kittens.
• Kittens are born toothless, then grow baby teeth just like humans. These baby teeth are replaced by permanent teeth around 7 months of age.
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• The slightest touch on a cat’s whiskers, called vibrissae, will make its eyes blink. All cats have multiple sets of long hairs that are sensitive to pressure - whiskers, eyebrows, on the back of their forelegs, and the hairs between their paw pads. A cat uses its whiskers as feelers or antennae, helping the animal to gauge the width of a passage. Most cats have no eyelashes.
• 40% of all cats are ambidextrous. The other 60% are either “right-pawed” or “left-pawed”.
• Cats are sometimes born with extra toes. This is called polydactyl. Ernest Hemmingway was a huge cat lover and kept dozens of polydactyl cats, all borne of the same original tom cat he brought to Key West from Spain. As a result, cats with extra toes are often referred to as Hemmingway cats.
• Cats only need a sixth the amount of light that humans do to see. However, their daytime vision is only fair compared to that of humans.
• A cat’s arching back is part of a complex body language system, usually associated with feeling threatened. The arch is made possible by nearly 60 loosely fitting vertebrae in a cat’s spine. By comparison, humans have only 33 vertebrae.
• Cats have a full inner-eyelid, or nictitating membrane, called a haw. This inner-eyelid serves to help protect the eyes from dryness and damage. When a cat is sick, the haw may close partially, making it visible to the observer and acting as an indicator of illness.
• Cats can see up to 120 feet away, with a field of vision of about 200 degrees. It was previously believed that cats are color blind; but recent studies have shown that cats can see blue, green and red. In relation to their body size, cats have the largest eyes of any mammal.
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• A cat’s skeleton contains about 230 bones, compared to 206 for humans. As a result, cats are extremely flexible. And since their pelvis and shoulders are very loosely attach to the spine, they can fit through virtually any hole large enough to pass their head through.
• Most cats have five toes on each front paw, but only four toes on each back paw.
• A cat’s tongue is scratchy because it’s lined with papillae—tiny elevated backwards hooks that help to hold prey in place.
• A cat can rotate its ears independently 180 degrees, and can turn in the direction of sound 10 times faster than those of the best watchdog. This is facilitated by the cat’s 32 muscles controlling the outer ear (as opposed to a human’s mere 6!)
• A cat’s hearing is exceptionally acute. Cats can hear sounds as high-pitched as 65 kHz, while a human’s hearing stops at just 20 kHz.
• You check a cat’s pulse on the inside of the back thigh, where the leg joins to the body. Normal for cats: 110-170 beats per minute. This is roughly twice as fast as a human pulse.
• Felines prefer to eat their food at a temperature of at least 86 Fahrenheit, which explains why they don’t immediately gulp down food removed from the refrigerator.
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• Cats have 13 ribs and 30 teeth but no sweat glands.
• The nose pad of each cat has unique pattern of ridges similar to a person’s fingerprints.
• A cat’s sense of taste is keener than a dog’s sense of taste.
• Cats and humans have similar regions in their brains dedicated to emotions.
• Just like humans, cats have AB blood groups and can donate blood to other cats
• Cats take between 20-40 breaths per minute.
• A cat’s jaws cannot move sideways.
• The heaviest domestic cat ever recorded weighed 46 lbs. That’s one fat cat.
• Cats cannot survive on a vegetarian diet.
• Those dark lines around a cat’s eyes are called mascara lines.
• Cats possess over 100 vocal sounds.
• The normal body temperature of a cat is 101.5 Fahrenheit.
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• In England, all swans and sturgeons have long been the personal pets of the Queen. In fact, they are legally her property and messing with them is a serious offense.
• In ancient Greek literature, Odysseus arrived home disguised as a beggar after an absence of 20 years. His old faithful dog Argos was the only one who recognized him. The story goes on to say that Argos wagged his tail in greeting, then laid down and died.
• Lassie, the famous dog of classic cinema and TV, was played by only male dog “actors.” Although she was a female dog in the series, male collies were considered more photogenic. Pal was the name of the dog who played Lassie most frequently. Lassie first appeared in the novel titled Lassie Come Home, by Eric Mowbray Knight. This short 1930s popular novella was based on Knight’s beloved pet collie Toots.
• Florence Nightingale reportedly owned more than 60 cats in her lifetime.
• The long suffering dog in “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” is named Max.
• Crab in The Two Gentlemen of Verona was the only dog to ever appear in a play by William Shakespeare.
• Supposedly, the King of Norway for 3 years during the 11th century was actually a dog named Saurr. The story goes that King Eysteinn of Oppland conquered Trondheim (a city in Norway) and sent his son Onund to rule them. Onund was killed, but King Eysteinn overran them again and sent his dog to be their new king. His reign ended when wolves broke into his enclosure and killed him.
• The great British statesman and former Prime Minister Winston Churchill adored cats. He referred to his cat “Jock” as his special assistant. Jock was on Churchill’s death bed the day he passed away.
• Written records from China more than 4,000 years old show that dog trainers were held in high esteem and that kennel masters raised and looked after large numbers of dogs.
• Felix the Cat is the first cartoon character to ever have been made into a balloon for a parade.
• Morris, the 9-Lives cat, was discovered at an animal shelter in New England.
• Ancient Egyptians believed that Bast was the mother of all cats, who were considered sacred animals.
• The first astronaut was a Russian dog named Laikia.
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• Rats are surprisingly good swimmers, and are able to hold their breath for up to three minutes.
• Guinea pigs have four toes on each front paw and three toes on each rear paw.
• Chinchillas have as many as 90 hairs per hair follicle. Humans have only 1-2 per follicle.
• Like kangaroos and wombats, sugar gliders are marsupials, so they have a pouch in which they rear their young.
• Some male songbirds sing more than 2000 times each day.
• An un-spayed female ferret is called a jill and a fixed female is a sprite. A hob is a fertile male, while a neutered male is called a gib. Baby ferrets are kits.
• The most common pet gerbil is from Mongolia.
• Mice and rats have constantly growing teeth. They can grow as much as five inches a year.
• Rabbits love licorice.
• There are about 14 species of wild guinea pigs.
• A bird’s feathers weigh more than its skeleton.
• Rats are very social animals. In the wild, rats live in colonies of 50 to 60 closely related rats.
• Roosters can’t crow if they can’t fully extend their necks.
• The word “mouse” comes from a Sanskrit word that means “thief.”
• When scared, some chinchillas give off a smell similar to burnt almonds.
• The chicken is the most common bird on the planet.
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Dogs have over 200 million scent receptors in their noses versus humans who have only 5 million. In fact, sheepdogs have 220 million olfactory cells, enabling them to smell 44 times better than we can. If you were to unfold and spread out the membranes from a dog’s nose, they would be larger than the dog itself.
Scientists have recently discovered that dogs can actually smell the presence of autism in children, and it’s not clear whether it’s smell or some other sense that Seizure Alert dogs use to alert their humans of an oncoming epileptic seizure. On the other hand, dogs don’t have as many taste buds as humans do (they have about 1,700, while we have about 9,000) but that doesn’t mean they’re not discriminating eaters. Remember, smell is integral to the sense of taste.

Fun fact: The bloodhound is the only animal whose evidence is admissible in an American court of law.

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Twenty more fascinating facts and figures about pets:
• 1: Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.
• 2: Only two animals can see behind themselves without turning their heads: the rabbit and the parrot.
• 2.5: The smallest dog in history was a tiny Yorkie from Blackburn, England. At two years of age and fully grown he was only 2.5 inches tall by 3.75 inches long and weighed only 4 ounces.
• 2.6: The average dog owner has 2.6 dogs
• 3: The average outdoor cat has a lifespan of about 3 years. Indoor only cats can live 16 years and longer.
• 4: Abraham Lincoln loved cats. He had 4 of them while he lived in the White House.
• 5: A female cat can begin mating when she is as young as 5 months old.
• 5.4: Americans spend more than 5.4 billion dollars on their pets each year.
• 6: A cat sees about six times better than a human at night because of the tapetum lucidum , a layer of extra reflecting cells which absorb light.
• 7: Kittens have baby teeth, which are replaced by permanent teeth around the age of 7 months.
• 8.5: Great Danes can eat up to 8 1/2 pounds of food a day.
• 10: Almost 10% of a cat’s bones are in its tail, and the tail is used to maintain balance.
• 13: The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.
• 19: The Labrador retriever has been America’s most popular purebred dog breed for 19 years
• 12: An adult cat can run about 12 miles per hour, and can sprint for brief periods at nearly 32 miles per hour.
• 22: About 22% of the world’s catch of tuna goes into cat food in the United States.
• 24: Cats have an average of 24 whiskers, arranged in four horizontal rows on each side.
• 33: There are 33 recognized breeds of domestic cats.
• 42: Dogs have 42 teeth.
• 87: There are 87 known species of gerbils worldwide.
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