Crocodiles and alligators are surprisingly fast on land. Although they are rapid, they are not agile. So if you ever find yourself chased by one, run in a zigzag line. You'll lose him or her every time.
A cow's only sweat glands are in its nose.
Pigs can cover a mile in 7.5 minutes when running at top speed.
Many hamsters blink one eye at a time.
Most cows give more milk when they listen to music.
A male moth can smell a female moth from 100 yards away.
The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
The average human will eat 8 spiders while asleep in their lifetime.
Some lions mate over 50 times a day.
Walt Disney was afraid of mice.
Mosquito repellents don't repel - they hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
Livestock excrete 130 times as much waste as people.
African elephants are the largest mammals living on solid ground. They reach lengths up to 7.5 m and weights up to 7500 kg.
A mole can dig 60 feet of tunnel or more per day. This is equivalent to a five-foot woman burrowing the length of two football fields, while pushing two-ton objects out of her way.
The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.
More types of fish swim in Brazil's Amazon River than in the entire Atlantic Ocean.
The owl can catch a mouse in utter darkness, guided only by tiny sounds made by its prey.
The animal with the highest normal blood pressure is the giraffe. However the animal with the highest peak blood pressure is the flea, whose blood reaches a pressure of 10 atmospheres just before take off for a big jump.
The Golden mole is one of the strongest animals by size of body weight. A captive Golden mole was able to exert a force equal to 150 times it's own weight.
The camel first evolved in North America. It died out in the ice ages, but some had emigrated and survived in South America, Eurasia, and North Africa.
Dogs cannot see as well as humans and are considered color blind. A dog sees objects first by their movement, second by their brightness, and third by their shape.
The sperm of a mouse is longer than the sperm of an elephant.
The East Alligator River in Australia's Northern Territory was misnamed. It contains crocodiles not alligators.
The largest recorded flea is the North American Hystrichopsylla schefferi, measuring 12mm in length - almost 1/2-inch!
If left to her own devices, a female cat may have three to seven kittens every four months. This is why population control using neutering and spaying is so important.
The female flea consumes 15 times her own body weight in blood daily.
Squid can commit suicide by eating their own tentacles.
The black widow spider can devour as many as twenty 'mates' in a single day.
The typical housefly cruises at 8 km/hr.
Of the million-plus species of insects on earth, 3,000 of them are mosquitoes. More than 165 of those live in the United States.
Kittens are born with both eyes and ears closed. When the eyes open, they are always blue at first. They change colour over a period of months to the final eye colour.
Some butterflies are poisonous. When a predator, like a bird, eats one of these butterflies it becomes sick, vomits violently, and quickly learns not to eat this type of butterfly.
Yaks milk is pink in colour.
Recent studies have shown that interacting with companion animals may speed recovery from illness, reduce stress, and promote family bonding.
If you could count the number of times a cricket chirps in one minute, divide by 2, add 9 and divide by 2 again, you would have the correct temperature in Celcius degrees.
Cats are pure carnivores. They need a high level of protein in their diets - around 30% - and lack the digestive equipment to do well on a diet of grains, fruits or vegetables. Hence although dogs do just fine on a vegetarian diet, cats do not.
Goldfish history can be traced back over 1500 years to Ancient China.
A young male gorilla (about 8 to 10 years old) is called a black jack. He’s almost as big as a Silver Back, but his hair has not turned silvery yet, and he still has a lot to learn.
Ants are said to never cross a chalk line. So if you've got ants, draw a line on the floor with chalk or wherever the ants are coming in and see for yourself! They won't cross the line. Baking soda works, too!
Coral reefs are massive limestone structures that provide shelter for over 25 percent of all marine life.
The most popular marine aquarium saltwater fish is the clown fish. Other popular saltwater aquarium fish include angelfish, royal gamma, hamlets, spotfin, yellowtail damsels, and blue tangs.
Siamese kittens are born white because of the heat inside the mother's uterus before birth. This heat keeps the kittens' hair from darkening on the points.
All dogs are probably descended from an animal called Tomarctus. This animal lived approximately 15 million years ago.
To purr, cats use extra tissue in the larynx (voice box). This tissue vibrates when they purr.
The world’s oldest known captive goldfish, Tish, died peacefully at home in his tank at the age of at least 43 in 1999.
A mature male gorilla is called a Silver back This refers to the silver-colored hair covering his back, which occurs when he’s about 10-12 years old.
Nationwide, grandparents annually spend an average of $195.24 on their companion animals and $178.68 on their grandchildren.
A Cornish game hen is really a young chicken, usually 5 to 6 weeks of age, that weighs no more than 2 pounds.
Stag beetles have stronger mandibles than humans.
Only 4% of the lost cats that enter U.S. animal shelters are returned to their caregivers.
Lewis and Clark traveled with a 150-pound Newfoundland named "Seaman." This pooch was a respected member of the expedition team and his antics were included in the extensive diaries of the famous explorers.
When a dog licks you with a straight tongue, he's saying "I Love You."
Of people with companion animals, 18% sleep with them.
Only 2 out of 10 kittens born in the U.S. ever find a life-long home.
About 22% of the world's catch of tuna goes into cat food in the United States.
The only two animals that can see behind itself without turning it's head are the rabbit and the parrot.
In the US, it is reported that the 5 most popular dog tricks are - Sit, Paw, Roll Over, Speak and Lie Down.
It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.
Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.
Between 1902 and 1907, the same tiger killed 434 people in India.
Asian tree frogs build nests in trees over water. When their tadpoles hatch, they drop directly into the water.
The pet ferret (Mustela putorias furo) was domesticated more than 500 years before the house cat.
In Ventura County, California, cats and dogs are not allowed to have sex without a permit.
The two-foot long bird called a Kea that lives in New Zealand likes to eat the strips of rubber around car windows.
In Cleveland, Ohio, it's illegal to catch mice without a hunting license.
It was once against the law to have a pet dog in a city in Iceland.
Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.
The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by Egyptians in 2000 B.C.
You're more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day than in any other weather.
When snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food.
Spotted skunks do handstands before they spray.
There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones.
It's against the law to catch fish with your bare hands in Kansas.
'Zorro' means 'fox' in Spanish.
The air is so polluted in Cubato, Brazil, that no birds or insects remain and most trees are blackened stumps. It's Mayor reportedly refuses to live there.
The term "dog days" has nothing to do with dogs. It dates back to Roman times, when it was believed that Sirius, the Dog Star, added its heat to that of the sun from July3 to August 11, creating exceptionally high temperatures. The Romans called the period dies caniculares, or "days of the dog."
For Stephen King's "Cujo" (1983), five St. Bernards were used, one mechanical head, and an actor in a dog costume to play the title character.
The closest relative to the manatee is the elephant. Scientists think the elephant crawled back into the sea to become a manatee.
Before the enactment of the 1978 law that made it mandatory for dog owners in New York City to clean up after their pets, approximately 40 million pounds of dog excrement were deposited on the streets every year.
Dolphins are the only other animals besides humans that get pleasure out of sex. They are also the only other animals that have sex for reasons other than reproduction.
The declawing of a pet cat involves surgery called an onychectomy, in which the entire claw and end bone of each toe of the animal are amputated.
Pekingese dogs were sacred to the emperors of China for more than 2,000 years. They are one of the oldest breeds of dogs in the world.
A cat uses its whiskers to determine if a space is too small to squeeze through. The whiskers act as feelers or antennae, helping the animal to judge the precise width of any passage.
Scientists found a whole new phylum of animal on a lobster's lip.
Ancient Egyptians shaved off their eyebrows to mourn the deaths of their cats.
The distance between an alligator's eyes, in inches, is directly proportional to the length of the alligator, in feet.
Macaroni, Gentoo, Chinstrap and Emperor are types of penguins.
More than 99.9% of all the animal species that have ever lived on earth were extinct before the coming of man.
The average garden variety caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.
The name of the dog on the Cracker Jack box is Bingo.
Goldfish lose their color if they are kept in dim light or are placed in a body of running water, such as a stream.
When a domestic cat goes after mice, about one pounce in three results in a catch.
The male penguin incubates the single egg laid by his mate. During the two month period he does not eat, and will lose up to 40% of his body weight.
Chinese Crested dogs can get acne.
According to one study, plant and animal species are becoming extinct at the rate of 17 per hour.
The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every year.
In Central America, a scientist caught over 500 different species of insects by sweeping a net through the air fewer than 2000 times.
In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
Scientists estimate that there are currently 1.4 million animal species known to science; with possibly as many as 30 million on the planet.
A rhinoceros beetle can support up to 850 times its own weight on it's back. That would be the equivalent of a man carrying 76 family-sized cars around on his back.
The pom-pom cut was originally developed to increase the Poodle's swimming abilities as a retriever. The haircut allowed for faster swimming but the pom-poms were left to keep the joints warm.
The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.
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.
Cats have a third eyelid, called a haw, that is rarely visible. If it can be seen, it could be an indication of ill health.
Cats can have freckles. They can appear anywhere on a cat's skin and even in its mouth.
A dairy cow drinks 20-50 gallons of water a day - about as much as a full bathtub.
The female dairy goat is a doe; the male, a buck; the young, kids; and a castrated male, a wether. Their life span is eight to twelve years.
Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
The Venus flytrap takes less than half a second to slam shut on an insect.
On June 20th, 1782, the United States Congress made the "American Eagle" the national emblem of the United States.
Desert plants, like cactus, developed pointy spines as protection from animals.
All dinosaurs walked on their toes.
Brazil has the most species of mammals (524), fresh water fish, insects and parrots of anywhere.
About 600 species of plants are carnivorous. Most eat insects but also on the menu are frogs, birds and even small monkeys.
When a dolphin is sick or injured, its cries of distress summon immediate aid from other dolphins, who try to support it to the surface so that it can breathe.
Herons stamp and peck at mosquitoes around their feet up to three thousand times an hour. This behaviour prevents more then 80 percent of the mosquitoes from feeding on the heron's blood.
The 'Silverback' gorilla is 30 per cent taller and almost twice as heavy as the females in the group he dominates.
The honey badger can withstand hundreds of African bee stings that would kill any other animal.
The fruit flys dna sequence is 180 million bases long, whilst a humans is three billion.
The most common name for a goldfish is "Jaws."
Male flies only gather at the base of bright lights as they are having a mating asembly.
Dogs and humans are the only animals with prostate glands.
Fish cannot live in the Dead Sea because the water has too much salt in it.
A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
Elephants can detect the aroma of ripening fruit from over 20 kilometres away.
Camel's hair brushes are not made of camel's hair. They were invented by a man named Mr Camel.
Mayflies live for a year or more as larvae, but as adults they live for only a few hours.
When a female horse and male donkey mate, the offspring is called a mule, but when a male horse and female donkey mate, the offspring is called a hinny.
A female oyster over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.
As a general rule in the animal kingdom, the more complex or relatively big the eye in relation to the body, then the smaller the rest of the brain.
Over 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles worldwide are killed by plastic rubbish every year. Marine life, in particular turtles, is prone to mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, ingesting them and dying of intestinal blockage.
The Whale Shark can get up to 50 feet long and weigh over 16 tons. Its mouth can open as wide as five feet.
A crocodile's digestive juices are so strong that it can digest a steel nail.
Julius Caeser, Henri II, Charles XI and Napoleon all had ailurophobia, a fear of cats.
The Maine Coon cat is America's only natural breed of domestic feline.
Did you know that at Disneyland they have like hundreds of wild domesticated cats running around the park? They never come out during the day because there's too many people, but the reason they're there is to catch the mice.
The average outdoor only cat has a lifespan of about three years. Indoor only cats can live sixteen years and longer.
The world record frog jump is 33 feet 5.5 inches over the course of 3 consecutive leaps, achieved in May 1977 by a South African sharp-nosed frog called Santjie.
The world's smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat of Thailand, weighing less than a penny.
The anaconda, one of the world's largest snakes, gives birth to its young instead of laying eggs.
Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet.
A cat's tongue consists of small "hooks," which come in handy when tearing up food.
Rats are omnivorous, eating nearly any type of food, including dead and dying members of their own species.
Elephants can communicate using sounds that are below the human hearing range: between 14 and 35 hertz.
The normal temperature of a cat is 101.5 degrees.
The fastest moving land snail, the common garden snail, has a speed of 0.0313 mph.
The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.
A 7-year study, which concluded in the summer of 2000, found that 33 U.S. deaths were caused by rottweilers, pit bulls were responsible for 27 deaths.
The average adult male ostrich, the world's largest living bird, weighs up to 345 pounds.
When ants find food, they lay down a chemical trail, called a pheromone, so that other ants can find their way from the nest to the food source.
The turbot fish lays approximately 14 million eggs during its lifetime.
The bones of a pigeon weigh less than its feathers.
Carnivorous animals will not eat another animal that has been hit by a lightning strike.
A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
The 1st buffalo ever born in captivity was born at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo in 1884.
Howler monkeys are the noisiest land animals. Their calls can be heard over 2 miles away.
A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic in 1872.
The fastest bird is the Spine-tailed swift, clocked at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour.
There is no single cat called the panther. The name is commonly applied to the leopard, but it is also used to refer to the puma and the jaguar. A black panther is really a black leopard.
A capon is a castrated rooster.
The world's largest rodent is the Capybara. An Amazon water hog that looks like a guinea pig, it can weigh more than 100 pounds.
The hummingbird, the loon, the swift, the kingfisher, and the grebe are all birds that cannot walk.
The poisonous copperhead snake smells like fresh cut cucumbers.
Cheetahs make a chirping sound that is much like a bird's chirp or a dog's yelp. The sound is so an intense, it can be heard a mile away.
The underside of a horse's hoof is called a frog. The frog peels off several times a year with new growth.
Aphids are born pregnant without the benefit of sex. Aphids can give birth 10 days after being born themselves.
Pigs, walruses and light-colored horses can be sunburned.
An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
Cats have more than one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
The biggest member of the cat family is the male lion, which weighs 528 pounds (240 kilograms).
Most lipstick contains fish scales.
Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants.
Each day in the US, animal shelters are forced to destroy 30,000 dogs and cats.
A shrimp's heart is in their head.
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
A cockroach will live nine days without its head, before it starves to death.
The cat lover is an ailurophile, while a cat hater is an ailurophobe.
A woodpecker can peck twenty times a second.
Lassie was played by several male dogs, despite the female name, because male collies were thought to look better on camera. The main "actor" was named Pal.
German Shepherds bite humans more than any other breed of dog.
A female mackerel lays about 500,000 eggs at one time.
It takes 35 to 65 minks to produce the average mink coat. The numbers for other types of fur coats are: beaver - 15; fox - 15 to 25; ermine - 150; chinchilla - 60 to 100.
The biggest pig in recorded history was Big Boy of Black Mountain, North Carolina, who was weighed at 1,904 pounds in 1939.
If a male cat is both orange and black it is (besides being extremely rare) sterile. To have both the orange and the black coat colors, the male cat must have all or part of both female X chromosomes. This unusual sex chromosome combination will render the male cat sterile.
A cat cannot see directly under its nose. This is why the cat cannot seem to find tidbits on the floor.
Ants don't sleep.
Owls have eyeballs that are tubular in shape, because of this, they cannot move their eyes.
A bird requires more food in proportion to its size than a baby or a cat.
The mouse is the most common mammal in the US.
A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length.
The Canary Islands were not named for a bird called a canary. They were named after a breed of large dogs. The Latin name was Canariae insulae - "Island of Dogs."
There are 701 types of pure breed dogs.
A polecat is not a cat. It is a nocturnal European weasel.
A baby bat is called a pup.
Despite man's fear and hatred of the wolf, it has not ever been proved that a non-rabid wolf ever attacked a human.
There are more than 100 million dogs and cats in the United States. Americans spend more than 5.4 billion dollars on their pets each year.
Cat's urine glows under a black light.
It is estimated that a single toad may catch and eat as many as 10,000 insects in the course of a summer.
Amphibians’ eyes come in a variety shapes and sizes. Some even have square or heart-shaped pupils.
Dogs that do not tolerate small children well are the St. Bernard, the Old English sheep dog, the Alaskan malamute, the bull terrier, and the toy poodle.
A 42-foot sperm whale has about 7 tons of oil in it.
It can take a deep-sea clam up to 100 years to reach 0.3 inches (8 millimeters) in length. The clam is among the slowest growing, yet longest living species on the planet.
Despite man's fear and hatred of the wolf, it has not ever been proved that a non-rabid wolf ever attacked a human.
Cats cannot survive on a vegetarian diet.
The cheetah is the only cat in the world that can't retract its claws.
Swans are the only birds with penises.
The cat lover is an ailurophile, while a cat hater is an ailurophobe.
A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it's own weight each year.
The penalty for killing a cat 4,000 years ago in Egypt was death.
A duck's quack doesn't echo anywhere, and no one knows why.
Only full-grown male crickets can chirp.
The Kiwi, national bird of New Zealand, can't fly. It lives in a hole in the ground, is almost blind, and lays only one egg each year. Despite this, it has survived for more than 70 million years.
Dachshunds are the smallest breed of dog used for hunting. They are low to the ground, which allows them to enter and maneuver through tunnels easily.
Cats purr at about 26 cycles per second, the same frequency as an idling diesel engine.
The venom of a female black widow spider is more potent than that of a rattlesnake.
The turkey was named for what was wrongly thought to be its country of origin.
In ancient Egypt, entire families would shave their eyebrows as a sign of mourning when the family cat died.
The greatest number of dogs ever owned by one person were 5000 mastiffs owned by Kubla Khan.
In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey.
Cats have better memories than dogs. Tests conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that while a dogs memory lasts no more than 5 minutes, a cat's can last as long as 16 hours - exceeding even that of monkeys and orangutans.
Infant beavers are called kittens.
Snails produce a colorless, sticky discharge that forms a protective carpet under them as they travel along. The discharge is so effective that they can crawl along the edge of a razor without cutting themselves.
An American Animal Hospital Association poll showed that 33 percent of dog owners admit that they talk to their dogs on the phone or leave messages on an answering machine while away.
Mockingbirds can imitate any sound from a squeaking door to a cat meowing.
Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes.
Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
Catnip can affect lions and tigers as well as house cats. It excites them because it contains a chemical that resembles an excretion of the dominant female's urine.
Ancient Chinese royalty carried Pekingese dogs in the sleeves of their royal robes.
Ducks on the outer edges of a group sleep with one eye open. Those in the center of the group confidently close both eyes.
Catfish have 100,000 taste buds.
Almost every known dog except the Chow and the Shar Pei has a pink tongue.
Platypuses aren't the only egg-laying mammals on earth. Echidnas, which resemble a cross between a Hedgehog and Anteater, also lay eggs and produces milk for its young.
Though human noses have an impressive 5 million olfactory cells with which to smell, sheepdogs have 220 million, enabling them to smell 44 times better than man.
In 1888, an estimated 300,000 mummified cats were found at Beni Hassan, Egypt. They were sold at $18.43 per ton, and shipped to England to be ground up and used for fertilizer.
Hummingbirds are the smallest birds - so tiny that one of their enemies is an insect, the praying mantis.
The slightest touch on a cat's whiskers will make its eyes blink.
By feeding hens certain dyes they can be made to lay eggs with varicolored yolks.
There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on the entire earth.
The theobromine in chocolate that stimulates the cardiac and nervous systems is too much for dogs, especially smaller pups. A chocolate bar is poisonous to dogs and can even be lethal.
When the Black Death swept across England one theory was that cats caused the plague. Thousands were slaughtered. Ironically, those that kept their cats were less affected, because they kept their houses clear of the real culprits, rats.
Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not sweat by salivating. They sweat through the pads of their feet.
You're more likely to be a target for mosquitoes if you eat bananas.
Sharks apparently are the only animals that never get sick. As far as is known, they are immune to every known disease including cancer.
French poodles did not originate in France. Poodles were originally used as hunting dogs in Europe. The dogs thick coats were a hindrance in water and thick brush, so hunters sheared the hindquarters, with cuffs left around the ankles and hips to protect against rheumatism. Each hunter marked his dogs' heads with a ribbon of his own color, allowing groups of hunters to tell their dogs apart.
All pet hamsters are descended from a single female wild golden hamster found with a litter of 12 young in Syria in 1930.
The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.
Cat's urine glows under a black light.
The Antpitta avis canis Ridgley is a bird that looks like a stuffed duck on stilts and barks like a dog. The bird was discovered by ornithologist Robert S. Ridgley in the Andes in Ecuador in June 1998. Thirty of these long-legged, black-and-white barking birds were found. It apparently had gone undetected because it lives in remote parts and, of course, doesn't sing. The size of a duck, it is one of the largest birds discovered in the last 50 years.
During the 1982 Falklands war British pilots reported that penguins toppled over backward while gazing at the planes. British navy pilots were then banned from flying low over penguin colonies. It led to a UK government study of the penguin-toppling effect. For seventeen days two helicopters were flown from varying directions and heights over the penguins. The result? Penguins do not topple over while gazing at aeroplanes.
The heart of a blue whale is the size of a small car.
