The mysterious world of pets

Last week’s topic was remarkable things about animals you might normally consider unremarkable; pigeons as potential surgeons, snails asleep for years, that sort of thing. That left me wondering if there’s stuff we don’t know about dogs and cats.

Did you know some seeing eye dogs are trained to “do their business” on command (did you say “sit” or ... ?). Cats are farsighted, overlarge eyes make it difficult to focus on anything less than 12 inches in front of them, relying instead on their whiskers to sense what they can’t see. Stray dogs in Russia have figured out navigating Moscow’s subway system, having also learned the most likely stops for finding food. Twenty million of our federal tax dollars were used in the 1960s to train cats equipped with mini cameras and microphones to spy on Russians. The program was canceled when the first feline 007, en route to an assumed Soviet secret meeting, was run over by a Washington, D.C., taxi. Paul McCartney claims the Beatles added a high-pitched frequency only their dog fans can hear at the end of their “A Day in the Life.” Sir Isaac Newton is credited with inventing the pet door (the flap cut into a full-sized door) as a way stop his pesky cat, constantly demanding to come and go, from interrupting his experiments.