Strange and Bizarre Animal Facts about Animals

When tigers that kill their keepers are put down, it’s traditional to give them a last meal of kippers, which are a favourite food of tigers.

Tigers have a taste for human foetuses and can smell if a woman is pregnant. They will often kill a pregnant woman, rip out and eat the foetus and leave the woman otherwise untouched.

Apart from humans, dolphins, and chimpanzees, sheep have the largest vocabulary of any animal with over seven hundred forms of baah.

The Himalayan mouse cat, although only two inches high is technically a big cat as it has the ability to roar.

Female gorillas in captivity will often try to mate with their keepers but only if there are no anacondas nearby.

If a mirror is placed in front of a cobra the snake will hypnotise itself.

The female manhole spider is 1400 times larger than the male. The male inseminates the female by climbing inside her vagina and spitting sperm at her ovaries from several times his body length away.

Despite having a sense of smell millions of times more powerful than ours, dogs are completely unable to smell their own faeces.

Pet mice and other rodents can detect if a human being has recently had sex and will squeak to be fed, realising that their owners will likely be in a good mood and more likely to feed them after sex.

A blue whale’s fart bubbles are large enough to enclose a horse. The forward thrust generated with each fart can propel the whale fifteen metres.

Many people know that a rhinoceros horn is made of the same substance as human nails. It is less widely known that the horns do not naturally grow perfectly horn shaped and have to be sharpened by the rhino by rubbing them against stones. If there are no stones available they sharpen the horn by rubbing it against their own bottoms.

If an albatross flaps its wings more than three times in succession it passes out from exhaustion.

Humans and dolphins are the only animals that have sex for pleasure. In the wild dolphins have been known to practice safe sex using their blow holes.

Fat facts about Fat

1 They’re doing something right out West. Sixty-six percent of Americans are overweight or obese, with the national obesity rate doubling between 1976 and 1999. But as of 2007, California was the only state not getting any fatter.

2 The root of the problem? Depending on gender and how active they are, adults should eat 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day. U.S. agriculture now produces 3,900 calories of food per inhabitant per day.

3 People who regularly eat dinner or breakfast in restaurants double their risk of becoming obese.

4 Being overweight reduces a woman’s chances of getting pregnant.

5 The National Institutes of Health believes obesity is one of the reasons why the fastest-growing group of women experiencing infertility are those under 25.

6 We’re trying. Each year nearly $50 billion is spent on diet programs.

7 People who lose just 10 percent of their weight report significant improvement in their sex lives.

8 Biology is trying to help too. Leptin is a hunger-slaking hormone pumped into the bloodstream by fat cells. The more fat you have, the more leptin you make and the less hungry you feel.

9 Want to get your hands on some leptin? The hormone never panned out as a diet aid because most overweight people have become insensitive to it.

10 Over the course of a year, about 10 percent of an adult’s fat cells die. Alas, the body promptly replaces them.

11 The total number of fat cells in your body remains constant once you reach adulthood. Even after radical weight-loss procedures such as stomach stapling, fat cells return to their presurgery numbers within two years.

12 Try the vacuum instead. Liposuction is the only way to actually reduce the number of fat cells in your spare tire. Diet and exercise just shrink them.

13 New Zealander Pete Bethune gave a whole new meaning to biofuel when he used his liposuctioned fat to power the world’s fastest eco-boat. A way to solve the obesity epidemic and the fuel crisis?

14 It may make you prettier, but not healthier. Liposuction doesn’t remove fat from around the internal organs, so your fat-related health risks are unchanged.

15 Blame Mom and Dad. Obesity is more heritable than schizophrenia, high blood pressure, and alcoholism.

16 Cutting saturated fat intake to the recommended 10 percent of your calories will prolong your life, but only by a few months at most, researchers found.

17 The brain is about 70 percent fat.

18 Bottlenose dolphins use fatty tissue in the head, concentrated in an organ called the melon, to focus sound waves, giving them their sonar ability.

19 Think you have a spare tire? Whales are wrapped in fat—a thick layer of blubber—as vital insulation against the cold. Some whales have a blubber layer up to 20 inches thick.

20 Camels have the opposite problem: Living in hot climates, they want as little heat-trapping insulation as possible, so they concentrate their fat in their humps.