

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
 

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