Trump is off on his foreign jaunt. As he visits each country and meets their leaders, we can safely assume there is at least a 50/50 chance that he will trigger a major insult. So, I figure that within the next week we could very well be at war with Muslims (Saudi Arabia), Jews (Israel), Catholics (Vatican), Europeans (Brussels and the EU headquarters), and the Mafia (Sicily), all at the same time. Sad!
In light of that, we need something to take our mind off of our impending doom. And what better way to do that than to talk about man’s (and woman’s) best friend?
Here are a few things you may not know about your bone-chomping and sofa-destroying wannabe-wolf.
Your dog thinks you’re really cool
Dogs are so warm and cuddly, aren’t they? There’s nothing like snuggling on the couch or bed with Fido on a cold winter’s night — whether you use him as a pillow, wrap your arms around him, or have him lie across your feet, he will keep you toasty warm indeed.
Being mere silly humans, without superior Canine Wisdom about all things, we tend to anthropomorphize our pets. If we feel something toward them, we find it easy to believe that they feel the same way about us. So, naturally, I bet you think your dog finds you warm and cuddly too, right?
Wrong. Sorry to burst your bubble: Fido does think you’re cuddly but he doesn’t think you’re warm at all. Quite the contrary!
A dog’s internal body temperature is much higher than ours, averaging about 102° F. That’s why Fido feels so warm to us, shedding his heat into our cooler bodies.
Think about when you touch a cool surface in your room temperature home, like a bathroom tile. Heat from you (about 91° F on your skin) is being transferred to the tile (72° F), so you experience the tile as cool. If you were the tile, you would experience heat when a human touched you, just as we would if something touched us that was 10 or 20 degrees warmer than our own temperature.
So, Fido snuggles up to you and thinks “Oooh, my Walks-On-Two-Legs feels cool!”
We humans don’t do cold well at all. A drop below room temperature affects our naked bodies quickly, resulting in shivers at the least and hypothermia if the drop is very large or sustained for a long time. Even the hairiest of us don’t have enough fur to fluff up to retain our body’s heat.
Dogs, on the other hand, seldom find cold a challenge. If they’re healthy, dry, and mature (puppies aren’t so hardy), dogs can usually tolerate temperatures that would be dangerous to naked humans over even a short period [note: do bring your dogs inside to sleep or rest if temperatures drop near freezing, even if they appear to be happy and warm outside].
Obviously there are variations with dogs. Those with thick fur and bred for arctic climes, like Samoyeds, are much more cold tolerant than skinny shorthaired Chihuahuas. Like humans, a hefty build provides more insulation than a model-thin physique and elderly dogs are likely to get more easily chilled, just like our own grandmas. In general, however, most dogs can handle weather down to 40° F or so and the majority aren’t even bothered until it dips down to nearly freezing. Almost all dogs should be kept indoors as much as possible though if the weather is in the 20s (F). Remember that dryness is a key element to cold tolerance so bring them in if it’s rainy or slushy or the dog otherwise gets wet!
Their bodies generate heat readily and their fur automatically adjusts to maintain a nice insulating layer of air to help retain heat. They curl up into a position that protects their most susceptible bits (face, legs, paws, etc.) and minimizes the amount of surface they expose. That helps keep their own body heat from escaping into the air around them.
But, they don’t do heat as well as we do. They sweat very little, just a bit in the paws and their notorious wet noses. Like us, they have sweat glands with each hair follicle but the glands don’t produce perspiration like ours do; instead, they secrete a microscopic amount of odoriferous liquid that gives each dog its own unique scent.
Therefore they have to pant to shed excess body heat, not nearly as efficient a cooling method as our naked skin which radiates it away. So, just as we tend to shy away from cold surfaces (being heating-deficient creatures), they tend to enjoy coolness where they find it (being cooling-deficient creatures): that cuddly cool thing they like just happens to be you!
Fido — and friends — definitely warm up our beds, for better or worse. In the summer, you might miss his cuddly companionship but you might sleep better if he sleeps on the floor. However, in the depth of winter, when he and his buds surround you with luscious warmth, you’ll understand the meaning of the phrase “a three dog night.”
Tip: if the “Day After Tomorrow” ice apocalypse ever occurs don’t bundle up with another human in a sleeping bag and hope to survive. You’re both just swapping the same (decreasing) body temperature and will soon be frozen people-sicles. Toss your best friend out and invite in your real best friend, the furry one who will happily share his superior heating ability and keep you both warm and cozy.
You see your dog as furry but he sees you as fuzzy
They may not be able to fly or leap over tall buildings in a single bound but dogs sure do seem to have a lot of superhuman abilities, don’t they? When you’re near to collapse after a long walk, Fido is eagerly urging you to go on for another mile or ten. The world’s fastest human struggles to run at a pace that barely matches even the most mediocre hound (and a greyhound can go from 0 to 40 mph in a mere three steps!).
Fido can hear ultra-high pitched whistles and can smell that a missing person walked past a spot yesterday. He navigates over rough, rocky terrain with sure-footedness while we stumble about and hope we don’t fall and break something.
So, naturally, he has super duper vision too, right?
Wrong, again. Fido’s eyesight is downright terrible.
He should be wearing glasses. And even if he did, his vision would still suck, for the most part. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this attractive couple and and then look again, as Fido would see them.
Lucky Angelina and Brad. If Kay Nyne had been their Hollywood agent, they might never have landed their first jobs. She wouldn’t be able to tell if they were goodlooking or not; they would just be some washed out, blurry figures to her. Fortunately, they chose a human agent and the rest is Tinseltown history.
If you took your dog to an optometrist and could get him to sit still for an examination, the doctor would sadly tell you that his eyesight is about 20/75. That means he needs to be 20 feet from something to see it with the same clarity that you see all the way from 75 feet away.
Fido’s distance vision is pretty bad but his closeup vision isn’t any better. With the way his eyes are set in his head, he gets cross-eyed and can’t focus on things right in front of his snout. Of course, when they’re that close he doesn’t need to see: his incredible sense of smell will tell him everything he needs to know about that blurry object.
Poor Fido lives in a dreary visual world; his color sense is extremely limited compared to ours. So even if we put glasses on him, it wouldn’t help him see the rich and vibrant imagery that we take for granted.
If you remember your biology studies in school, you will recall that we have two types of cells in our retinas: rods and cones. Cones come in different flavors, corresponding to the wavelength (color) of light to which they are sensitive. We have three types of cones — red, yellow, and blue — which let us distinguish tones across the entire visible spectrum. Our canine companions only have two types — yellow and blue — which makes them functionally equivalent to a red-green colorblind human.
In other words, they see the entire spectrum that we do but much of it looks the same to them. They see variations of yellow and blue where we see red and green. A red ball doesn’t catch Fido’s eye any more than a yellow one. To him, there is little difference between the two balls; he sees both as just shades of brighter or deeper yellow.
In addition, he has far fewer cones than we do so the colors that he does see look dull compared to the way we see them. His eyes have a higher proportion of rods than ours, especially on the outer parts of the retina, increasing the sensitivity of his peripheral vision.
Those rods, which respond to all wavelengths (colors) of visible light, give Fido much better night vision than we have. In addition, he has an extra feature — the tapetum lucidum — that gives him a real advantage. It is a layer of specialized tissue behind his retina that bounces light back through the retina, giving the rods yet another grab at using it. With extra rods and the tapetum lucidum, Fido can easily see by faint moonlight or the soft glow of a digital clock.
The flip side of Fido’s tendency to go cross-eyed at closeup is that he has a much wider field of vision than we do, about 240° compared to our measly 180°. That’s important for living in the wild back when he roamed the steppes as a wolf: he could spot the movements of both prey and other predators all around him.
All of those extra rods and that enhanced peripheral vision make Fido’s eyes (and optical processing in the brain) trigger happy. His sensitivity to movement is ten to twenty times better than ours. The smallest motion by a rabbit quivering under a bush is instantly detectable to Fido and he is off in pursuit of Bugs Bunny for dinner.
With his blurry vision, how does Fido recognize you walking home when you’re still halfway down the street? Well, vision isn’t just the eyes, it’s the entire system that begins with the eyes and ends in the brain. Fido has an excellent sense of patterns. Your general blurry appearance is familiar enough but it’s how you move that clues him in long before you’re in range of his nose (which absolutely tells him that you are you). To Fido, your gait, your arm movements, the up-and-down motion of shoulders and hips, all distinguish you from someone else of similar build.
I know this from personal experience. My dogs usually spot me walking home from hundreds of feet away and begin running to me. It’s flattering to be so adored but it also leads to a real nuisance. After greeting me, they want to run over to a neighbor’s yard and bark like mad through the fence at his dogs, causing a huge ruckus. So, if no one is around to see me acting like an idiot, I will change my gait, imitating a deranged gorilla with wide stance and loose curving arms. They fall for it every time, unsure if it’s me until I get close to home.
Maybe it’s a good thing there aren’t canine eyeglasses. I’d never be able to fool them again.