Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
An 18-month-old German shepherd named Luna fell off a boat in the Pacific Ocean, swam 2 miles to a nearby island, and survived for 5 weeks by eating mice before she was rescued by a team of Navy staffers. She was found to be slightly under-nourished, but in perfect condition otherwise.
A royal footman was once fired from Buckingham Palace for having a “party trick” of pouring alcohol into the royal corgis’ food and watching them stagger about.
People are more likely to donate to a sick dog than a sick child. A charity ran an experiment where they asked for money and exchanged the picture of a child for that of a dog. More people chose to donate to the dog.
Laika, the first dog in space, was taken home by a scientist shortly before her launch to play with the scientists’s kids.He wrote ‘”Laika was quiet and charming…I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live’.
The dog from Wizard of Oz was paid $125 per week which was more than some of the other actors in the film.
Pet dogs were banned in Reykjavík, Iceland for sixty years. Even today, owning a pet dog there requires special permits, hence cats are the pet of choice. The dog ban was issued in 1924, at a time when the population of Iceland was overwhelmingly rural and Reykjavík was still a small, but rapidly growing fishing town. Reykjavík was facing an acute housing shortage at the time, and as people lived in overcrowded apartments the city authorities reasoned that banning dogs would make the situation somewhat more bearable.
A service dog bit 911 into a cellphone after her owner collapsed from a seizure. She became the first canine recipient of the VITA Wireless Samaritan Award, given to someone who used a cell phone to save a life.
In 1916, the German Empire allowed citizens to take passport photos with their dogs.
A St. Bernard named Bamse was a mascot of the Royal Norwegian Navy during WWII and was known for breaking up fights amongst his crewmates. He once saved a young lieutenant commander who was being attacked by a man wielding a knife by pushing the assailant into the sea.
A dog named Chaser has the largest tested memory of any non-human animal. She can identify 1,022 toys by their name and retrieve them by name and by category.