LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Dogs
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Dogs are highly social animals. This can account for their trainability, playfulness, and ability to fit into human households and social situations. These attributes have earned dogs a unique position in the realm of interspecies relationships despite being one of the most effective, voracious, and potentially dangerous predators. Dogs and humans at times co-operate in some of the most effective hunting in the animal world; in that context, dogs are superpredators.
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Show hours: Dogs will be on display to the public and demonstrations will run from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Best in Show will go into the ring approximately 6:00 PM each day. Tickets are available at the door. For more information call 248-DKC-SHOW [(248) 352-7469], or online at www.detroitkennelclub.com.
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Dogs and humans often have an interdependent relationship. Humans give dogs food and shelter, and dogs give humans companionship and work. How does this relationship compare to those between humans and fish, horses, cats, pigs, sheep, birds, and other domestic and farm animals? How about wild animals—everything from squirrels to zebras? Are these relationships similar at all? Why or why not?
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Dogs have nearly 220 million smell-sensitive cells over an area about the size of a pocket handkerchief (compared to 5 million over an area the size of a postage stamp for humans). Some breeds have been selectively bred for excellence in detecting scents, even compared to their canine brethren. What information a dog actually detects when he is scenting is not perfectly understood; although once a matter of debate, it now seems to be well established that dogs can distinguish two different types of scents when trailing, an air scent from some person or thing that has recently passed by, as well as a ground scent that remains detectable for a much longer period. The characteristics and behavior of these two types of scent trail would seem, after some thought, to be quite different, the air scent being intermittent but perhaps less obscured by competing scents, whereas the ground scent would be relatively permanent with respect to careful and repetitive search by the dog, but would seem to be much more contaminated with other scents. In any event, it is established by those who train tracking dogs that it is impossible to teach the dog how to track any better than it does naturally; the object instead is to motivate it properly, and teach it to maintain focus on a single track and ignore any others that might otherwise seem of greater interest to an untrained dog. An intensive search for a scent, for instance searching a ship for contraband, can actually be very fatiguing for a dog, and the dog must be motivated to continue this hard work for a long period of time.
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Dogs vary in size more than any other land animal and come in 155 breeds in the U.S. alone, according to the American Kennel Club. The new finding... suggests that relatively few genes may separate dogs as different as tiny toy poodles and massive Saint Bernards, says geneticist Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who led the new study. "When you look at their appearance you're struck by the amazing amount of variation," she says. "You just expected it to be a more complicated story."
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Dogs frequently eat grass, which is a harmless activity. Explanations abound, but rationales such as that it neutralizes acid, or that dogs eat grass to induce vomiting to remove unwanted substances from their stomachs,[43] are at best educated guesses. Dogs do vomit more readily than humans, as part of their typical feeding behavior of gulping down food then regurgitating indigestible material such as bones and fur. This behavior is typical of pack feeding in the wild, where the most important thing is to get as much of the kill as possible before others consume it all. Individual domestic dogs... may be very "picky" eaters, in the absence of this social pressure. Dogs may also appear to eat grass when they are just running the blades through their mouth to gather information.
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