Pet and Animal Facts Page 2 at FamilyPets Net the Home of Family Pets and Animals.

Pet & Animal Facts Page 2

A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it's own weight each year.

A bird requires more food in proportion to its size than a baby or a cat.

A capon is a castrated rooster.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

A cat's jaws cannot move sideways.

A chameleon's tongue is twice the length of its body.

A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can't.

A Cornish game hen is really a young chicken, usually 5 to 6 weeks of age, that weighs no more than 2 pounds.

A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.

A female mackerel lays about 500,000 eggs at one time.

A Holstein's spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.

A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length.

A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic in 1872.

A rat can last longer without water than a camel can.

A typical bed usually houses over 6 billion dust mites.

A woodpecker can peck twenty times a second.

A zebra is white with black stripes.

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.

All clams start out as males; some decide to become females at some point in their lives.

All pet hamsters are descended from a single female wild golden hamster found with a litter of 12 young in Syria in 1930.

An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Animal gestation periods: the shortest is the American opossum, which bears its young 12 to 13 days after conception; the longest is the Asiatic elephant, taking 608 days, or just over 20 months.

Ants are social insects and live in colonies which may have as many as 500,000 individuals.
Pet & Animal Facts Page 3