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- Ostriches are often not taken seriously. They can run faster than horses, and the males can roar like lions.
- Guinea pigs and rabbits can't sweat.
- 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.
- The duckbill platypus can store as many as six hundred worms in the pouches of its cheeks.
- The lifespan of a squirrel is about nine years.
- Human birth control pills work on gorillas.
- Gorillas sleep as much as fourteen hours per day.
- There are more than fifty different kinds of kangaroos.
- 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 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.
- You can tell the sex of a horse by its teeth. Most males have 40, females have 36.
- Because porcupines have hollow quills, they are great swimmers.
- Snakes who have the genetic mutation of having been born with two heads have a hard time eating, because the two heads generally fight over which gets the food.
- Giraffes can't cough.
- Elephants can smell water from as far away as three miles.
- All shrimp are born male, but slowly grow into females as they mature.
- The stomach acids in a snake's stomach can digest bones and teeth but not fur or hair.
- Birds cannot go into outer space, because they use gravity to assist them in swallowing, so they'd quickly choke and die in a non-gravity environment.
- The Metro Goldwyn Mayer lion lived in Memphis, Tennessee.
- Humans have three color receptors in their eyes, while goldfish have four, and mantis shrimp have ten.
- Birds do not sleep in their nests, although they may rest in them from time to time.
- The average giraffe has a blood pressure two or three times that of the average human.
- More types of fish live in one Amazon River tributary than in all the rivers in North America combined.
- Penguins generally mate once and produce one egg per year.
- Cows are the only mammals that pee backwards.
- Greyhound dogs can see better than any other breed of dog.
- Snakes don’t bite in rivers or swamps because they would drown if they did.
- St. Bernard dogs do not carry kegs of brandy, and never have.
- Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms per day.
- The Kiwi, national bird of New Zealand, can't fly. It lives in a hole in the ground, is almost blind and lays only one egg each year. Despite this, it has survived for more than 10 thousand years.
- The most venomous of all snakes, known as the Inland Taipan has enough venom in one bite to kill over 200,000 mice.
- It takes seven years for a lobster to grow 1 pound.
- Giraffes are the only animals born with horns. Both males and females are born with bony knobs on the forehead.
- The giant crab of Japan can be as large as 12 feet across.
- The snapping turtle eats carrion and is used by police to find dead bodies in lakes, ponds and swamps.
- Sharks never stop moving, even when they sleep or rest.
- The woolly mammoth, extinct since the Ice Age, had tusks almost 16 feet high.
- The king crab walks diagonally.
- The East Alligator River in Australia's Northern Territory, was misnamed. It contains crocodiles not alligators.
- The average minimal speed of birds in order to remain aloft in flight is reported to be about 16½ feet per second, or about 11 miles per hour.
- A few species of monkeys and apes see the full spectrum of color, as well as some birds and possibly fish. Most animals, however, perceive the world in shades of gray, including the bull. A bull who charges a bright red cape is charging because of the movement of the cape, not the color.
- A large kangaroo would make a great long-distance jumper, covering more than thirty feet with a single jump.
- In Budapest, they control the pigeon population by mixing birth control chemicals with the birdseed.
- Lobsters are scared of octopuses. The sight of one makes a lobster freeze.
- In Vermont, the ratio of cows to people is 10:1.
- In a test performed by Canadian scientists, using various different styles of music, it was determined that chickens lay the most eggs when pop music was played.
- The average elephant produces 50 pounds of dung each day.
- A donkey will sink in quicksand but a mule won't.
- Pigs can become alcoholics.
- A blue whale's tongue weighs more than an elephant.
- A top freestyle swimmer achieves a speed of only 4 miles per hour. Fish, in contrast, have been clocked at 68 mph.
- Did you know that at Disneyland they have hundreds of wild domesticated cats running around the park? They never come out during the day because there's too many people, but the reason they're there is to catch the mice.
- More than one million stray dogs and over 500,000 stray cats live in the New York City metropolitan area.
- There are 40,000 muscles and tendons in an elephant's trunk. This makes it very strong and flexible, allowing an elephant to pluck a delicate flower or lift a huge log. The trunk is used for touching, grasping, sucking, spraying, smelling, and striking.
- Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.
- No other animal gives us more by-products than the hog. These by-products include pig suede, buttons, glass, paint brushes, crayons, chalk, and insulation to name a few.
- A bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed every animal in the Berlin Zoo except the elephant, which escaped and roamed the city. When a Russian commander saw hungry Germans chasing the elephant and trying to kill it, he ordered his troops to protect it and shoot anyone who tried to kill it.
- The bones of a pigeon weigh less than its feathers.
- The ostrich egg yolk is the biggest single cell in the world.
- The bottle-nosed whale can dive to a depth of 3,000 feet in two minutes.
- Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not sweat by salivating, they sweat through the pads of their feet.
- Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.
- The leg bones of a bat are so thin that no bat can walk.
- During WWII, Americans tried to train bats to drop bombs.
- The pupil of an octopus' eye is rectangular.
- More turkeys are raised in California than in any other state in the United States.
- One species of antelope, the Sitatunga, can sleep underwater.
- Most cows give more milk when they listen to music.
- Most tropical marine fish could survive in a tank filled with human blood.
- Most varieties of snake can go an entire year without eating a single morsel of food.
- The flying snake of Java and Malaysia is able to flatten itself out like a ribbon and sail like a glider from tree to tree.
- Rats can swim for a 1/2 mile without resting, and they can tread water for 3 days straight.
- Elephants have been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian Ocean.
- Out of all the animals a circus animal trainer works with, none are deadlier than the elephant. More deaths are caused by the elephants than the large cats circus tamers train with.
- Elephants often communicate at sound levels as low as 5Hz. This means that if you flap your hands back and forth faster than five times a second, an elephant can actually hear the tone produced.
- Mongooses were brought to Hawaii to kill rats. This plan failed because rats are nocturnal while the mongoose hunts during the day.
- Frogs never drink. They absorb water from their surroundings by osmosis.
- In Wales, there are more sheep than people. (In 1996 the population for Wales was 2,921,000 with approximately 5,000,000 sheep)
- The crocodile is surprisingly fast on land. If pursued by a crocodile, a person should run in a zigzag motion, for the crocodile has little or no ability to make sudden changes of direction.
Of the 250-plus known species of shark in the world, only about 18 are known to be dangerous to man.
- Flamingoes feel safest when they are crowded together, hundreds in a group.
- Flamingoes live remarkably long lives: up to 80 years.
- Rhinos are in the same family as horses, and are thought to have inspired the myth of the unicorn.
- Snakes continue to grow until the day they die.
- When a hippopotamus exerts itself, gets angry, or stays out of the water for too long, it exudes red sweatlike mucus through its skin.
- The Penguin is the only bird that can swim, but not fly. It is also the only bird that walks upright.
- When two zebras stand side by side, they usually face in opposite directions. They say this is so they can keep an eye out for predators.
- A typical day for a gorilla is to get up early and eat. It eats until it gets hot, then it will nap. When it gets up from its nap, they resume eating until the sun goes down.
- Chocolate effects a dogs heart and nervous system, a few ounces enough to kill a small sized dog.
- The Mola Mola, or Ocean Sunfish, lays up to 5,000,000 eggs at one time.
- Mother prairie dogs will nurse their young only while underground in the safety of the burrow. If an infant tries to suckle above ground, the mother will slap it.
- At birth a panda is smaller than a mouse and weighs about four ounces.
- The flying gurnard, a fish, swims in water, walks on land, and flies through the air.
- A camel can lose up to 30 percent of its body weight in perspiration and continue to cross the desert. A human would die of heat shock after sweating away only 12 percent of body weight.
- The venom of the king cobra is so deadly that one gram of it can kill 150 people. Just to handle the substance can put one in a coma.
- Cats purr at 26 cycles per second, the same as an idling diesel engine.
- The sea lion can swim 6,000 miles, stopping only to sleep.
- While many people believe that a camel's humps are used for water storage, they are actually made up of fat. The hump of a well-rested, well-fed camel can weigh up to eighty pounds.
- Giant squids have eyes as big as watermelons.
- Males lions can sleep for up to 20 hours a day.
- The male howler monkey of Central and South America is the noisiest animal which can be heard clearly for distances of up to 3 miles.
- Sharks can sense a drop of blood from 2.5 miles away.
- The dumbest domesticated animal is the turkey.
- Penguins only have sex once a year.
- You can cut up a starfish into pieces and each piece will grow into a completely new starfish.
- The blue whale can go up to 6 months without eating.
- Fish can be susceptible to seasickness.
- The electric eel has an average discharge of 400 volts.
- A parrots beak can close with a force close to 350 pounds per square inch.
- Lemon sharks grow a new set of teeth every two weeks. That means one shark will go through more than 24,000 new teeth in a year.
- You can identify a grizzly bear's mark by the sign of five claws. A black bear will lacerate a tree trunk with four claws.
- A bird 'chews' with its stomach. Since most birds do not have teeth, a bird routinely swallows small pebbles and gravel. These grits become vigorously agitated in the bird's stomach and serve to grind food as it passes through the digestive system.
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