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Canine Forteana (Dogs' Weirdness & Wonders)

A dog's sense of smell is so good, it can smell a kipper on the Moon.
If that's not sixth sense I don't know what is.

Clearly a lot of scientific planning went into that.

'Have you planted the flag ?'

Roger, flag planted.

'And left the kipper for the dog nose test ?'

Confirming kipper placed. And damn glad to be rid of it we are.
 
A coworker of Filipino descent tells me that legend in the Philippines has it that if you eat dog, dogs will know. They'll follow you around and bark at you.
I had a Filipino coworker too. He was incredibly superstitious and liked dogs. So, he had an extreme aversion to eating them, which didn't go over well with his in-laws that served it to him and he spit it out. :dinner::yuck:
 
reference the way dogs circle before evacuating- I was told years ago that this is to stimulate the lower bowel into action. made sense to me at the time.
 
I can't imagine a cat doing this. To think that some here dislike JRTs.

A hero Jack Russell terrier managed to find a newborn girl abandoned in bushes.

Macho tugged at his lead to pull his owner off the path and deep into the undergrowth in a park St Petersburg, Russia. The child, too weak to cry and suffering from hypothermia, was wrapped only in a T-shirt. ‘I felt my heart pounding when I saw the baby,’ said the owner, a pensioner. “She was waving her little legs and arms in the air, but she was silent.

Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/24/jack...article.desktop.share.top.twitter?ito=cbshare
 
Dogs show a nose for archaeology by sniffing out 3,000 year old tombs

Trained canines help locate burial sites dating back to the iron age in Croatia

The scent-tracking abilities of trained dogs have helped archaeologists discover iron age tombs in Croatia dating back nearly three thousand years.

The dogs sniffed out burial chests containing human bones and artefacts in a hilltop fort in the Velebit mountains along the Adriatic coast. Experts have said that using dogs could be a good way to identify archaeological sites, as it is less destructive than many traditional methods.

“Dogs’ noses obviously don’t make mistakes,” said Vedrana Glavaš, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Zadar in Croatia and the lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

Glavaš had already found a few tombs in a necropolis near the prehistoric hilltop fort of Drvišica, which dates back to the eight century BC. Hoping to find more, she contacted Andrea Pintar, a trainer who works with dogs used for sniffing out graves in criminal investigations.
(C) The Guardian. '19.
 
I know it's palaeontology, not archaeology, but:

Dog walker discovers 65 million-year-old fossil after pets sniff it out

A dog walker has claimed he discovered a 65 million-year-old skeleton on a Somerset beach after his sharp-nosed dogs sniffed it out.

Jon Gopsill, 54, was on the coast near Stolford, Somerset, with his two pets when he stumbled across the five-and-a-half foot long fossil, which had been exposed by recent storms.

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Poppy and Sam

It is thought that the prehistoric fossil is from the Jurassic period and was a porpoise-like sea mammal known as the ichthyosaur.

Amateur archaeologist Mr Gopsill has reported his findings Somerset Heritage and the Natural History Museum.

TELEMMGLPICT000219273261_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqKMHqiEQqDqDVNuTOclNc-qOYBKvF4Gt0aqYxNueHFz4.jpeg


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...covers-65-million-year-old-fossil-pets-sniff/

maximus otter
 
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It's apparently a temporary side effect of the mother dog's pregnancy, but it still took the owners aback ...

GreenPuppy-NC-2020.jpg

Not easy being green: North Carolina dog births unique puppy

The Avengers may have gained a canine sidekick after a North Carolina family’s dog gave birth to a bright green puppy named “Hulk.”

Gypsy, a white shepherd owned by Haywood County resident Shana Stamey, delivered eight puppies Friday morning. Gypsy’s three-hour labor was going smoothly until the fourth puppy came out as a small, but mighty tuft of lime green fur, Stamey said.

“I started freaking out,” Stamey told news outlets. “But everybody was healthy.”

Experts said there’s a normal explanation for the puppy’s coloration — and no, he wasn’t exposed to any gamma rays. Liquid from inside Gypsy’s stomach likely stained the white dog’s fur during pregnancy, Suzanne Cianciulli, the manager of Junaluska Animal Hospital in Waynesville, told news outlets.

Regular baths and daily licks from Gypsy are expected to fade Hulk’s green hue in a few weeks, Stamey said. ...
FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/ebd51f15786dda74e2d84ea76cfcf8cc
 
Liquid from inside Gypsy’s stomach likely stained the white dog’s fur during pregnancy

I'm not having that. No liquid can escape from a pregnant dog's stomach into her uterus and stain the fur of just one of her pups.
 
I can't imagine a cat doing this. To think that some here dislike JRTs.

A hero Jack Russell terrier managed to find a newborn girl abandoned in bushes.

Macho tugged at his lead to pull his owner off the path and deep into the undergrowth in a park St Petersburg, Russia. The child, too weak to cry and suffering from hypothermia, was wrapped only in a T-shirt. ‘I felt my heart pounding when I saw the baby,’ said the owner, a pensioner. “She was waving her little legs and arms in the air, but she was silent.

Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/24/jack...article.desktop.share.top.twitter?ito=cbshare
What a fantastic dog, I'd like to fuss him till his fur fell out. He deserves a hundred of the smelliest treats available and a fresh rotting dead rat to roll in every day for a year.

(I have owned JRTs and know what they like.)
 
****Frides Mod Edit: language.****

I've never taken to Jack Russells - stroppy yappy little buggers with attitude. When I was a kid we looked after a friend's for a couple of weeks. We had a couple of hamsters in a cage about 5 ft off the ground. It liked to jump up and swing to & fro with it's teeth clamped on the bars of the cage.

It used to jump over the garden fence & we'd find it 4 gardens away. We took it for a walk in a largeish wood & it ran off & disappeared. We searched but had to come home without it. I can't remember the details but somehow we got it back after a nervous few days. The wood was about 20 miles away.

Much later I had a job situated on an industrial estate with an encampment of travellers opposite. They had a JRT which if you were on a bike, would go for & try to bite your ankles & you'd attempt to kick it whilst pedalling.

Associated with the same job, there was a nearby supplier I went to sometimes where the fork lift driver had a JRT which would jump up & ride along with him. He always said - "don't go near 'im, he'll nip yer". I kept my distance.
 
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I've never taken to Jack Russells - stroppy yappy little buggers with attitude. When I was a kid we looked after a friend's for a couple of weeks. We had a couple of hamsters in a cage about 5 ft off the ground. It liked to jump up and swing to & fro with it's teeth clamped on the bars of the cage.

It used to jump over the garden fence & we'd find it 4 gardens away. We took it for a walk in a largeish wood & it ran off & disappeared. We searched but had to come home without it. I can't remember the details but somehow we got it back after a nervous few days. The wood was about 20 miles away.

Much later I had a job situated on an industrial estate with an encampment of gyppos travellers opposite. They had a JRT which if you were on a bike, would go for & try to bite your ankles & you'd attempt to kick it whilst pedalling.

Associated with the same job, there was a nearby supplier I went to sometimes where the fork lift driver had a JRT which would jump up & ride along with him. He always said - "don't go near 'im, he'll nip yer". I kept my distance.

Heh!

My JRT once put an Irish Wolfhound to flight! I was knocked over by it as it fled.

Great creatures JRTs.
 
That cool, moist bare area at the tip of your dog's snout seems to be a sensitive heat detector. This is a newly confirmed capability that adds a new aspect to the canine sensory inventory.

The only other mammal known to possess this skill? The common vampire bat ...
In a Weird Twist, Dogs Might Be Able to Sniff Out Heat Emanating From an Object

We already know dogs are amazing creatures, and scientists just discovered another talent our canine friends seem to possess: they appear to be able to sniff out the heat of other animals through their cold snouts.

It's all apparently down to the rhinarium – that area of smooth, furless skin around the nostrils of most mammals. When it comes to dogs, that patch of skin is moist, cool, and packed with nerves, and can apparently sense weak thermal radiation.

This is a rare trait, with only black fire beetles, certain snake species, and the common vampire bat known to have this heat-sniffing capability – and they all use it to hunt prey. ...

It's possible that other animals possess this same skill and we just don't know about it, the team behind the study says – and that could lead to a whole host of prey-predator relationships and predator hunting strategies getting re-evaluated.

Of course, this is only one paper, so more work needs to be done to confirm this skill exists. It's also not clear exactly how this radiated heat is being sensed, or if it is definitely the dog's rhinarium involved, but the experiments are suggestive enough to warrant further investigation into the heat-smelling abilities of dogs. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/dogs-m...ut-the-radiated-heat-emanating-from-an-object
 
Here are the bibliographic particulars and the abstract for the published research report. The full report is accessible at the link.

Dogs can sense weak thermal radiation
Anna Bálint, Attila Andics, Márta Gácsi, Anna Gábor, Kálmán Czeibert, Chelsey M. Luce, Ádám Miklósi & Ronald H. H. Kröger
Scientific Reports ,volume 10, Article number: 3736 (2020)

Abstract

The dog rhinarium (naked and often moist skin on the nose-tip) is prominent and richly innervated, suggesting a sensory function. Compared to nose-tips of herbivorous artio- and perissodactyla, carnivoran rhinaria are considerably colder. We hypothesized that this coldness makes the dog rhinarium particularly sensitive to radiating heat. We trained three dogs to distinguish between two distant objects based on radiating heat; the neutral object was about ambient temperature, the warm object was about the same surface temperature as a furry mammal. In addition, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging on 13 awake dogs, comparing the responses to heat stimuli of about the same temperatures as in the behavioural experiment. The warm stimulus elicited increased neural response in the left somatosensory association cortex. Our results demonstrate a hitherto undiscovered sensory modality in a carnivoran species.

SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60439-y
 
This is why they always go straight for your groin.

Joking aside, I find it fascinating that something so significant concerning a species we could hardly be closer to has gone unrealised for so long.
 
I find it fascinating that something so significant concerning a species we could hardly be closer to has gone unrealised for so long
This is an extremely-profound point. When we are in total up-close intimate contact with a co-evolved creature (and been its proxy-creator in the sense of selective breeding)... we might >think< we've got a total understanding of its sensory capabilities: yet we're nowhere near having that understanding.

If only we could somehow model that gap not so much in our knowledge, but in our whole process of insight....and begin to fully unlock all the mysteries of man's best friend (eg the dogs-that-know-when-their-owners-are-returning phenomenon)
 
This is an extremely-profound point. When we are in total up-close intimate contact with a co-evolved creature (and been its proxy-creator in the sense of selective breeding)... we might >think< we've got a total understanding of its sensory capabilities: yet we're nowhere near having that understanding.

If only we could somehow model that gap not so much in our knowledge, but in our whole process of insight....and begin to fully unlock all the mysteries of man's best friend (eg the dogs-that-know-when-their-owners-are-returning phenomenon)

A very famous philosophical essay touches on some of these issues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat?
 
Joking aside, I find it fascinating that something so significant concerning a species we could hardly be closer to has gone unrealised for so long.

I would add that there are many at least equally significant things concerning a species we are are even closer to that have – officially – gone (and continue to go) unrealised, neglected, or denied for just as long... (Not at all surprising, though, given the fact that until very recently doctors and scientists believed that babies feel no pain.)
 
This one got a dogtorate.

Like most universities, Virginia Tech's College of Veterinary Medicine celebrated the class of 2020 with an online commencement ceremony. But unlike other schools, they included one very good boy in the graduating class: a dog named Moose.

The Labrador retriever, an 8-year-old therapy dog at the Cook Counseling Center, received an honorary doctorate in veterinary medicine on Friday. Moose, who has been with Virginia Tech since 2014, is one of the school's four therapy animals and ambassadors for mental health awareness.

Along with attending football games, club events, and new student orientations, Moose also helps students cope with anxiety, trauma and other mental health issues. The fluffy pup has helped thousands of students and assisted in more than 7,500 counseling sessions, according to his owner, licensed counselor Trent Davis.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/good...dogs-an-honorary-doctorate-degree/ar-BB14dvDB
 
Puppy believed stuck in rabbit hole for two weeks comes home

Simba the cavapoo vanished on a walk near Marlborough, Wiltshire, on 9 June.

Mr Arnott said they had been walking near their home in Aldbourne in a field with "hundreds and hundreds of rabbit holes", and the tiny dog was with them "one second and gone the next".

"There are so many rabbit holes, we didn't know which hole he could have gone in," he said.

After a two-week search involving the fire service, underground cameras, a blood hound and a psychic failed, his owners were convinced the dog had died.

"On Monday, I sealed up all the holes dug in the search because they were unsafe, thinking I was burying our little dog,"

But the following morning, a "thin, emaciated and weak" Simba suddenly reappeared at the house.

Vet Lynne Gaskarth from Drove Veterinary Hospital said it was "incredible" that Simba "survived so long underground without access to food and water".

She said he had been "severely dehydrated" and had lost a quarter of his body weight.

Simba
 
Puppy swallows stick half the length of its body:
News story

As well as being quite a feat, it also highlights that dog owners shouldn't give their pets sticks to play with. How many millennia have people been doing that? And now it turns out it's a bad idea.
 
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