ACC
K9 Servant
Feb 1, 2010, 6:24 AM
Post #22 of 50
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Re: [ACC] THE JOYS OF BEAGLING
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BEAGLE'S SENSES Understanding your beagle means understanding the way he/she experiences the world. Beagle does this through his/her senses of smell, sight, hearing, touch and taste. SMELL...Your Beagle may go blind, deaf or both, but as long as it can smell, it'll be pretty satisfied with life. Not only does your dog hae a lot of olfactory receptors lining the mucous membranes of his nose (about 40 times more than we have), but it also has special mass of tissue called the vomeronasal organ embedded in the hard palate that appears to be useful for sexual signals. In addition, dogs have a much larger (proportionally) olfactory lobe in the brain than we do. In fact, it's been estimated that a dog's sense of smell is 1,000 times better than ours. Dogs smell so well that they can detect the individual components that go into the makeup of any odor. You may smell pumpkin pie for example, but your dog smells sugar, eggs, graham crackers and s on. Some intrigiung studies have been performed to inestigate a dog's ability to smell out skin cancer, breast cancer and bladder cancer in people. SIGHT...Like most predators, dogs have forward-facing eyes (as opposed to the sideways-positioned eyes of most prey animals). This placement gives them depth perception, although some peripheral vision is sacrificed. Still, dogs have much wider peripheral vision than we do- about 240 degees compared to about 180 degrees in people. Dogs are also better tha human at perceiving moving objects. Despite the myth that dogs only see i black and white, they do see some colors like blue, yellow and shades of gray. In fact, they can detect diffrences in blue better than people. Red and green are mystery to them, however. In terms of night vision, dogs far outpace us, partly because their eyes contain a large number of rod photoreceptors rather than color-perceiving cones. Dogs also have a special layer of tissue (the tapetum lucidum) behind the retina that helps gather light and reflect it back to the retina a second time. Thats what causes a dog's green eyeshine. HEARING...Dogs have great ears, even Beagles whose ears are droppy and have only limited mobility. studes have not shown that prick-eared breed hear better than lop-eared dogs like Beagles. Dogs are adapted to hear sounds important to them, like sound of a mouse squeaking underground or that of a refrigerator opening ever so softly. Your Beagle can also hear much higher pitched sounds than we can. TOUCH...Like humans, dogs have several diffrent methods of processing touch. They have mechanoreceptors that work to detect pressure, nociceptors that signal pain, and thermoceptors that tell them about heat and cold. Dogs can also use their whiskers, which are modified hairs, to absorb information about the world that surrounds them (the whiskers' roos are surrounded y sinuses that contain nerve endings). TASTE...You may notice that your Beagle eats everything rathe indiscriminately. Partly this is what it means to be a dog. Dogs have far few taste buds than people and what they do have are located farther back in the oral cavity- with a few even heading down the throat. In other words, your Beagle tastes foods as he swallows them, not before. In fact, even compared with other dogs, Beagles are pretty indiscriminate in their tasting habits. Dog food companies won't even use Beagles in their taste test because these dogs don't care if they are eating gourmet food or garbage. Beagles are excellent dogs in every way. If you want a dog with the elegance of an Irish Setter, the brains of a Border Collie, the trainability of a Golden Retriever, and the feisty temperament of a terrier, go ahead and get one of those dogs. But if you want charming, lively, happy-go-lucky companion to share your life, make you smile and nourish your spirit, then the Beagle is really the only sensible choice. Beagles are blessed with the best temperaments in the canine world, the kindest heart and the friendliest faces. Who could ask for more? Coming next...FEEDING YOUR BEAGLE
(This post was edited by ACC on Feb 1, 2010, 6:29 AM)
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