About Dogs 3

We are back! Lets start to the Nervous System! Its about the brain and senses.

The brain is the information and command center to the dog and the rest of the nervous system is its communication network. The brain receives information from all its senses: smell, sight, hearing, touch, and taste. Then it sends out commands that controls the muscles and other parts of the body. And like your brain the dogs brain learns, solves problems, and remembers.
Vision is the most important sense for humans for dogs its different. Dogs have smell. Dogs noses uses 10 times more brainpower for smelling than you do. The smell detectors are in a layer of spongy tissue that covers the bones inside the naval cavity. A dog has millions of these detectors. If you could unfold the smell receptor tissue in your nose, it would be about as big as a postage stamp. Unfolded, the same tissue in a big dog would be almost as big as a grownup foot! Many working dogs use their smelling skills to do jobs that people are unable to do. Some of these jobs include finding lost people, sniffing out bombs, detecting pests such as termites, hunting underground truffles which are a type of mushroom, and searching victims of disasters. Some dogs have even show the ability to help doctors by smelling a patient's breath to detect signs of cancer! Dogs are good at finding out what direction smells are coming from because they can move each side of their nostrils. The bigger the nose is the better.
Dogs have eyes like humans. But humans can see more colors than dogs. If you see a rainbow its red and orange and yellow and you know. But dogs only see yellow and blue in the rainbow. How do we know? Well scientists learned about dogs' color vision by teaching them a " one of these things is not like the others" game. The dogs were shown sets of colored lights, where two were the same color and one was different. To get a treat, a dog has to indicate which color was different by touching it with its nose. After many tests, the scientists figured out which colors dogs could tell apart.

Now lets talk about the muscle system. A dog uses its muscles to run and wag its tail and jump and all those sorts of things. Muscles also enable a dog's internal organs to function. A dog's body has three types of muscle tissue: skeletal, cardiac, and smooth. Skeletal muscle moves the limbs and the other parts of the dog's body that you can see moving from the outside. Most of these are voluntary muscles. That is, the dog can choose whether or not to move them. Cardiac muscle is found only in the wall of the heart. This muscle contracts by itself, without signals from the nervous system. But the nervous system does not send signals to speed up or slow down in the heart rate. Smooth muscle is the muscle tissue in the dog's organs such as the muscles that squeeze food through the digestive system. These muscles are controlled by the dog's nervous system. The dog can't choose whether or not to move them. Their muscles can help people by swimming to a person who is drowning or even to help the dog win a competition. They even help run after a hurt person so the dog can move.

Now lets talk about skin and fur. Do you know dogs have whiskers like cats? You just can't see them as clear as cat whiskers. Whiskers are very special for animals they can sense things very well when they are touched by something. They are very useful for dogs that are blind. Anyway a dogs skin is more than just a barrier between the dog's body and the outside world. It helps the dog keep a steady body temperature by changing the flow of the blood to the surface more blood when its hot out, less when its cold. The hair that grows from the skin insulates the dog. The skin also a sense organ for detecting touch, pain, and temperature. Hackles are coarse hairs over the dogs shoulders, at the base of the neck. Some dogs also have rump hackles over their hips. Muscles in the rump area make these hairs stand up. A dog raises its hackles when it is feeling aggressive or afraid.

I learned all this body information from the book Uncover A Dog by Paul Beck they even have other information I didn't talk about yet. I just used the information people don't really know about. Okay About Dogs 4 will be coming up next. See you soon!