Animal Facts

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• Seals used for their fur get extremely sick when taken aboard ships.
• Sloths take two weeks to digest their food.
• Guinea pigs and rabbits can't sweat.
• The pet food company Ralston Purina recently introduced, from its subsidiary Purina Philippines, power chicken feed designed to help roosters build muscles for cockfighting, which is popular in many areas of the world.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, the cockfighting market is huge: The Philippines has five million roosters used for exactly that.
• Sharks and rays are the only animals known to man that don't get cancer. Scientists believe this has something to do with the fact that they don't have bones, but cartilage.
• The porpoise is second to man as the most intelligent animal on the planet.
• Young beavers stay with their parents for the first two years of their lives before going out on their own.
• Skunks can accurately spray their smelly fluid as far as ten feet.
• Deer can't eat hay.
• Gopher snakes in Arizona are not poisonous, but when frightened they may hiss and shake their tails like rattlesnakes.
• On average, dogs have better eyesight than humans, although not as colorful.
• The duckbill platypus can store as many as six hundred worms in the pouches of its cheeks.
• The life span of a squirrel is about nine years.
• North American oysters do not make pearls of any value.
• Human birth control pills work on gorillas.
• Many sharks lay eggs, but hammerheads give birth to live babies that look like very small duplicates of their parents.
• Young hammerheads are usually born headfirst, with the tip of their hammer-shaped head folded backward to make them more streamlined for birth.
• Gorillas sleep as much as fourteen hours per day.
• A biological reserve has been made for golden toads because they are so rare.
• There are more than fifty different kinds of kangaroos.
• Jellyfish like salt water. A rainy season often reduces the jellyfish population by putting more fresh water into normally salty waters where they live.
• The female lion does ninety percent of the hunting.
• The odds of seeing three albino deer at once are one in seventy-nine billion, yet one man in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, took a picture of three albino deer in the woods.
• A group of twelve or more cows is called a flink.
• Cats often rub up against people and furniture to lay their scent and mark their territory. They do it this way, as opposed to the way dogs do it, because they have scent glands in their faces.
• Cats sleep up to eighteen hours a day, but never quite as deep as humans. Instead, they fall asleep quickly and wake up intermittently to check to see if their environment is still safe. Catnip, or Nepeta cataria, is an herb with nepetalactone in it.
• Many think that when cats inhale nepetalactone, it affects hormones that arouse sexual feelings, or at least alter their brain functioning to make them feel "high."
• Catnip was originally made, using nepetalactone as a natural bug repellant, but roaming cats would rip up the plants before they could be put to their intended task.
• The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans ages the equivalent of five human years for every day they live, so they usually die after about fourteen days.
• Worms goes into a comatose state that can last for two or more months. The human equivalent would be to sleep for about two hundred years.
• You can tell the sex of a horse by its teeth. Most males have 40, females have 36.

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