None of this information, unless otherwise noted, is mine of origin. I have simply collected it from around the web and edited it for organization for your reading pleasure.
01. The U.S. has the highest dog population in the world. France has the 2nd highest.
02. Basic History: There are over 700 breeds of purebred dogs. Every dog on earth likely descended from a species knows as the Tomarctus – a creature that roamed the earth over 15 million years ago. Archaeology has placed the earliest known domestication at potentially 30,000 BC, and with certainty at 7,000 BC. Other evidence suggests that dogs were first domesticated in East Asia. Due to the difficulty in assessing the structural differences in bones, the identification of a domestic dog based on cultural evidence is of special value. Perhaps the earliest clear evidence for this domestication is the first dog found buried together with human from 12,000 years ago in Palestine. The oldest known breed is likely the Saluki – originally trained by Egyptians to help them track game (Though I also found a note that read, "The oldest known dog bones were found in Asia and date as far back as 10,000 B.C. The first identifiable dog breed appeared about 9000 B.C. and was probably a type of Greyhound dog used for hunting". I wonder which was correct, or if they were referring to similar breeds of dog -- as the greyhound and Saluki do have some similarities in structure.).
Tomarctus
03. Teddy Roosevelt’s dog, Pete, ripped a French ambassador’s pants off at the White House.
04. It is much easier for dogs to learn spoken commands if they are given in conjunction with hand signals or gestures.
Personal note: We have always trained our dogs with verbal and hand gestures. This made things very easy when our Cocker Spaniel, Elvis, went deaf suddenly. As he already knew the gestures, it made his communication skills have an almost seamless transition.
05. Statistics:
The largest breed of dog is the Irish Wolfhound.
The world’s smallest dog breed is the Chihuahua.
The St. Bernard is the heaviest.
The largest documented dog was an Old English Mastiff that weighed 343 pounds and measured more than 8 feet long.
The smallest dog on record was a matchbox-sized Yorkshire Terrier. It was 2.5" tall at the shoulder, 3.5" from nose tip to tail, and weighed only 4 ounces.
Dogs live 15 years on average. The oldest dog on record – a Queensland “Heeler” named Bluey – was 29 years, 5 months old.
The world’s smartest dogs are thought to be:
(1) the border collie
(2) the poodle
(3) the golden retriever.
06. Basic Anatomy: All dogs are identical in basic anatomy – 321 bones and 42 permanent teeth. Like humans, dogs have a complete set of baby teeth that are replaced by a complete set of adult teeth as they get older.
Only dogs and humans have prostates. They do not have an appendix.
A dog’s heart beats up to 120 times per minute, or 50% faster than the average human heartbeat of 80 times per minute.
The longer a dog’s nose, the more effective it’s internal cooling system.
Smaller breeds mature faster than larger breeds.
Note: There are theories that suggest that a dog with more wolf-like features will, on average, live longer than a dog with different features (e.g. a Bulldog, with its short snout, low stature, and folded ears).
07. Senses: Dogs judge objects first by their movement, then by their brightness, and lastly by their shape. A puppy is born blind, deaf, and toothless. Touch is the first sense the dog develops. The entire body, including the paws, is covered with touch-sensitive nerve endings.
A dog’s smell is more than 100,000 times stronger than that of a human’s, which they need because their eyesight is not as keen as a human’s. A dog can locate the source of a sound in 1/600 of a second and can hear sounds four times farther away than a human can. Humans can detect sounds at 20,000 times per second, while dogs can sense frequencies of 30,000 times per second.. Eighteen muscles or more can move a dog’s ear -- twice as many as those that control a human ear.
A dog’s nose works one million times better than a human’s nose. They rely more on smell than taste to identify their food. In fact, they have less than one-fifth of the taste buds that humans have. Dogs can smell about 1,000 times better than humans. While humans have 5 million smell-detecting cells, dogs have more than 220 million. The part of the brain that interprets smell is also four times larger in dogs than in humans.
The average dog has 20/75 vision, meaning a dog sees the same thing at 20 ft. that a human with normal vision can see at 75 ft. Also, objects closer than 33 cm. to their eyes appear blurry to dogs. Compare that to a human with perfect vision who can still see the details of an object only 7 cm. away from their eyes.
08. Male dogs will raise their legs while urinating to aim higher on a tree or lamppost because they want to leave a message that they are tall and intimidating. Some wild dogs in Africa try to run up tree trunks while they are urinating to appear to be very large. In Croatia, scientists discovered that lampposts were falling down because a chemical in the urine of male dogs was rotting the metal.
09. Abilities: Dogs can naturally sense many health problems in humans and can be trained to detect others. They can detect undiagnosed diseases such as cancer and autism by smell alone. They can also be trained to warn if a person is about to suffer a seizure or is having an issue with blood sugar from diabetes.
Dogs have the ability to sense changes in static electricity and barometric pressure. Because of this, dogs can often predict changes in the weather.
Some dogs can smell dead bodies under water, where termites are hiding, and natural gas buried under 40 feet of dirt. This ability has led humans to utilize them to search for bombs, drugs, survivors of accidents, cadavers, and many other things. Over 300 search and rescue dogs were deployed by FEMA and SAR to the 9/11 attack site at the World Trades Center. Counseling had to be provided for the dogs because of the devastation they felt at finding so few people that were alive.
10. Small quantities of grapes and raisins can cause renal failure in dogs. Chocolate, macadamia nuts, cooked onions, or anything with caffeine can also be harmful. Apple and pear seeds contain arsenic, which may be deadly to dogs.
Bonus! Rock star Ozzy Osborne saved his wife Sharon's Pomeranian from a coyote by tackling and wresting the coyote until it released the dog.
Added Bonus: How great was K-9?
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