20 Fun dog facts

Did you know?

Rottweiler was bred originally as a cattle driver dog.

Sgt. Stubby. A Pit Bull war hero. Stubby was wounded in action twice, he saved his entire platoon by warning them of a poison gas attack and he single handedly captured a German spy.

Predominantly white Boxer won't have a certified pedigree and can't be shown.

German Shepherd Dog aka Alsatian has 220,000,000 sensory 'smelling' cells. Man has 5,000,000

The jaws of the Pit Bull are functionally the same as the jaws of any other breed

Ingesting as few as 4-5 grapes or raisins can be poisonous to a 20 pound dog.

Dogs have twice as many muscles for moving their ears as people

Dogs turn in circles before lying down because in the wild this instinctive action turns long grass into a bed.

Pit Bulls score an 83.4% passing rate with the American Temperament Test Society. That's better than the popular Border Collie (a breed who scores 79.6%). View the ATTS stats.

The normal body temperature for a dog is 101.2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dogs can see color but it is not as vivid a color scheme as we see. It is much like our vision at twilight.

During the middle Ages, Great Danes and Mastiffs were sometimes suited with armor and spiked collars to enter a battle or to defend supply caravans.

Pekingese were worshipped in the temples of China for centuries.

The most dogs ever owned by one person were 5,000 Mastiffs owned by Kubla Khan

The name of the dog on the Cracker Jacks box is Bingo. The Taco Bell Chihuahua is a rescued dog named Gidget

Dalmatians are completely white at birth

The Basenji is the world’s only bark less dog

Dog nose prints are as unique as human finger prints and can be used to identify them

The average dog can run about 19 mph. Greyhounds are the fastest dogs on Earth and can run at speeds of 45 mph

Some dogs can smell dead bodies under water, where termites are hiding, and natural gas buried under 40 feet of 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.

Male dogs will raise their legs while urinating to aim higher on a tree or lamppost because they want to leave a message that they are tall and intimidating. Some wild dogs in Africa try to run up tree trunks while they are urinating to appear to be very large.