Bark-Bark, Camp Folks!
We celebrate the things we appreciate and today we celebrate National Puppy Day! If you’re like me, then you already appreciate puppies quite a bit. You might need to raise your level of puppy appreciation. I like to do this by highlighting the ways puppies are different from people like you and me. Here are four different ways that you, as a person, are different from our four-pawed friends.
Physiological Development
Aside from an endless list of other things, canine length of pregnancy lasts just two months—less than a third of human gestation. And in less than three months of being born, most have gotten the hang of walking and they’re beginning to work on the finer points of their motor skills such as tail-wagging and eye coordination. It takes people three times as long before we’re even able to sit without being supported or begin crawling around.
Sleep Receptors
Ever notice how dogs might start twitching or otherwise ‘acting funny’ in their sleep? It’s because of certain receptors in their brains not turning off as effectively as they do in a human brain during sleep states. However, some human brains have what we call a sleep disorder in which the receptors are turned off even less effectively than they are in dogs. This is what we know as sleepwalking.
Scent Receptors
Did you know that puppies are deaf and blind until two weeks after birth? It’s okay, though. They’re able to perceive and navigate this world just by their noses. The olfactory or scent-center of a dog’s brain is 40 times the size of your own. Canine noses can literally perceive the world 100 million times better than yours. They simply have that many more scent receptors than human noses. Dogs continue to rely most heavily on their sense of smell even after their eyes and ears fully develop so much that deafness and blindness impairs a dog much less than it does a person.
Noseprints
Speaking of the canine nose, the actual and physical outside of a dog’s nose is the equivalent of a human fingerprint in that each puppy nose bears a pattern of ridges and creases that are unique to that puppy! Like a snowflake, no two puppy noses are identical.
It would seem that Nature could have done us a few more favors, but at least we can boast a frontal lobe unrivaled in size by any other creature. Anyway, I hope you found these differences as interesting as I did, but for now, I’m done barking facts at you. Happy National Puppy Day! Go cuddle a puppy if you’re friends with one and, as always, thanks for reading!
- John