Appraising Cats and Dogs
Taking a look at the wacky world of household pets,
not just cats and dogs but hamsters. birds, etc.

• Each day in the US animal shelters are forced to destroy 30,000 dogs and cats.
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• All pet hamsters are descended from a single female wild golden hamster found with a litter of 12 young in Syria in 1930.
• The dachshund is one of the oldest dog breeds in history (dating back to ancient Egypt.) The name comes from one of its earliest uses - hunting badgers. In German, Dachs means "badger," Hund is "hound."
• 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.
• According to ancient Greek literature, when Odysseus arrived home after an absence of 20 years, disguised as a beggar, the only one to recognize him was his aged dog Argos, who wagged his tail at his master, and then died.
• Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
• Cats, not dogs are the most common pets in America. There are approximately 66 million cats to 58 million dogs, with Parakeets a distant third at 14 million.
• The bloodhound is the only animal whose evidence is admissible in an American court.
• The penalty for killing a cat, 4,000 years ago in Egypt, was death. German Shepherds bite humans more than any other breed of dog.
• In cats, the calico and tortoiseshell coats are sex-linked traits. All cats displaying these coats are female... or occasionally sterile males.
• A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.
  The normal temperature of a cat is 101.5 degrees.
• Neutering a cat extends its life span by two or three years.
• Pet parrots can eat virtually any common "people-food" except for chocolate and avocados. Both of these are highly toxic to the parrot and can be fatal.
• The English Romantic poet Lord Byron was so devastated upon the death of his beloved Newfoundland, whose name was Boatswain, that he had inscribed upon the dog's gravestone the following: "Beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man without his vices."
• The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.
• The theobromine in chocolate that stimulates the cardiac and nervous systems is too much for dogs, especiallysmaller pups. A chocolate bar is poisonous to dogs and can even be lethal.