SOME refer to them as their best friend and some don’t have a care in the world for them. Either way, it never hurts to learn something new about the canines of our land. This week we look at some dog facts.

1 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.

2 Touch is the first sense the dog develops. The entire body, including the paws, is covered with touch-sensitive nerve endings.

3 Dogs can see in colour, though they most likely see colours similar to a colour-blind human. They can see better when the light is low.

4 One female dog and her female children could produce 4,372 puppies in seven years.

5 A person standing still 300 yards away is almost invisible to a dog. But a dog can easily identify its owner standing a mile away if the owner is waving his arms.

6 Dogs can smell about 1,000 times better than humans. While humans have five 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.

7 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.

8 A person should never kick a dog facing him or her. Some dogs can bite 10 times before a human can respond.

9 Puppies are sometimes rejected by their mother if they are born by Caesarean and cleaned up before being given back to her.

10 The phrase “raining cats and dogs” originated in 17-century England. During heavy rainstorms, many homeless animals would drown and float down the streets, giving the appearance that it had actually rained cats and dogs.

— Melaine Warren