Looking for tricks to teach your dog (or cat)?
By the looks of it, dogs and cats are full of tricks we could never begin to teach!
Dogs and cats have some extraordinary abilities. Dare I say … superpowers?
Dogs’ Super Nose!
Whereas humans only have 4 million smell receptors, dogs have over 100 million! The part of the dog’s brain that is responsible for decoding different scents is 40 times larger than a human’s.
Dr. Michael T. Nappier of the Virginia Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine shares this fascinating fact: a dog’s sense of smell is so powerful, they can “…detect the equivalent of a ½ teaspoon of sugar in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.”
This incredible superpower gives dogs amazing skills. It has been proven that dogs can sniff out certain types of cancer in humans. It all started in 1980, when a woman went to the doctor to get a mole checked because her dog wouldn’t stop sniffing it and eventually began to bite at it. It turned out to be melanoma. This led scientists to test dogs’ ability to sniff out cancer. Trained dogs have been able to sniff bladder cancer, lung cancer, and ovarian cancer in a few studies. Talk about a meaningful trick to teach your dog!
Tricks to teach your dog: Natural disaster alarm?
Beyond their incredible sense of smell, dogs can even sense natural disasters and weather events, such as earthquakes and storms.
Way back in 373 BC, Greek historian Thucydides reported rats, dogs, snakes, and other animals fleeing from the city of Helice just before a horrific earthquake hit and destroyed that city. Since then, similar reports of animals acting strangely just before a catastrophic natural disaster have been reported, such as during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
A particularly fascinating study comes from Stanley Coren, PhD, who was researching Seasonal Affective Disorder in dogs when his study coincidentally aligned with an earthquake. He recorded a rapid increase in the dogs’ anxiety just one day before the earthquake.
There are a few theories surrounding dogs’ ability to sense natural disasters. And it all comes down to their extraordinary senses! It’s possible that dogs are able to sniff changes in atmospheric pressure or hear specific sound waves (such as “P waves) emitted natural disasters
Still looking for tricks to teach your dog? The ones they’re born with are better than we could ever imagine!
Cats: built like superheroes!
Cats have their own set of uniquely incredible abilities. They’re truly built like superheroes!
Most people know that big cats, such as cheetahs, can run amazingly fast. Well, house cats too can reach unbelievable speeds: 30mph! Faster than the fastest human sprinter, Usain Bolt!
Cats can jump five to six times their height and are wildly flexible. Ever seen a cat groom themselves? They can reach their entire body to groom!
Their tails have more abilities than just being a useful tool to understanding their emotions. Cats’ tails allow them to balance incredibly well.
Ever heard that old saying, “cats always land on their feet?” Cats have an extraordinary ability to fall from high heights, unharmed. There are reports of cats falling from 32 stories high and walking away unharmed, but this is very rare – more commonly a healthy cat can fall about 8 feet without being injured. So please do take precautions to protect your cat from these types of risks.
Cats have incredible hearing – they can hear 5 times better than humans! Their ears can pinpoint the exact location of a sound.
Cats Captivate Us!
Cats have one very special superpower: they truly captivate our attention, and our hearts.
“Cats” is one of the most commonly-searched-for words on the Internet. And if you were to add up all the views of cat videos on Youtube, it amounts to 26 billion. Buzzfeed editorial director Jack Shepherd found that cat content gets 4 times more viral (as far as “views” are concerned) than dog videos do.
Cats have some other-worldly powers as well.
In 2007, an essay published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported on the spooky abilities of Oscar, a cat in Rhode Island who lived in a nursing home. Over a five-year period, Oscar predicted the deaths of residents in the nursing home. He would sit on their beds with them the night of, or hours before, their deaths. Dr. Dosa was initially skeptical of these reports, so he went to go and find out on his own. Over the course of his research, Oscar predicted the deaths of 50 nursing home residents.
Who knows what we don’t know!
Animals have incredible abilities, and who knows what we don’t yet know about them!
You may have heard of Bunny, an internet-famous dog who is learning how to communicate with her guardian through buttons. Her guardian, Alexis Devine, says she’s learned over 100 words to date.
It’s crazy to think how much we don’t know about animals simply because we don’t enable the tools for them to tell us.
Looking for tricks to teach your dog or cat? Maybe they need to start teaching us a thing or two!
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