FACTORALY - E6 DOGS

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

As an ex-postman, Simon has had bad experiences with dogs. Bruce having had them all his life, feels quite differently. If your best friend is hairy, you're in for a wufferly time and you'll be sure to... SQUIRRELS! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello hello i like that hello but can you do it in a slightly different delivery sure give us a hello but make it more like a goodbye all right then hello perfect good it's fact orally it certainly is another exciting episode awaits us yes it certainly does hello simon wells hello bruce fielding i will forever now refer to you as bruce fielding rather than just bruce will you i will how about if I call you Si or S? Do you know what? I'm perfectly happy with Si. Are you? I have many people calling me Si. Do you? I think it doesn't suit your voice though, so maybe don't. Okay. Okay. All right, Mr. Wells. Good. That's the intros then. And hello to you, our dear, valued listeners. How are you

all today? Yes, yes. Have you got together maybe and shared an MPV? Well, indeed. I mean, you'd all fit in an MPV, clearly. I think, what are we up to now, nine? Oh, could be. Might even need a minibus. Wow. That's an exciting moment in a man's life, isn't it? When your podcast listenership could warrant a minibus. I know. Wow. Where would they go?

Oh, good question. Factville. Factville, just round the corner from Bourneville. Yes. But less chocolatey. Indeed. Indeed. So, this is, as you may have gathered, Factorally. This is a podcast in which Bruce and I, who are both

professional voiceover artists who love random trivia, get together and discuss a particular topic each week and we see what interesting, useless facts we can derive from it. Absolutely. All to make your lives more interesting. Indeed. You're welcome. You will have dinner party conversations for seconds. Yes. If you're anything like like us too you are the person at the dinner party who bores everyone with useless irrelevant facts oh yes and uh once in a while

you meet a like like-minded individual who actually enjoys that sort of thing yes that's who we are we're up with that sort of thing we are are. We are up with it. Not down like the kids. Up. Or even like Irish priests. Down with that sort of thing. Anyway, back to the subject. So this week, we're going to be talking about something which is very close to my heart. And very far from my heart.

Which is man's best friend. Well, apart from Simon, obviously, but man's second best friend, which is dogs. Dogs. This one is dedicated to my dog, Baxter, whose name, by the way, appears in none of my passwords. That's always good to know. So, yeah, well, OK. So let's start there. You have a dog called Baxter. Tell us about Baxter.

So I first discovered a love of the bearded collie many, many years ago. And they are the most fabulous dogs in the world. They look lovely. They're very intelligent loving wonderful creatures and baxter is my fourth bearded collie um and his name they because they're beardies they have to have a b name so there's been brody buck and biggles before him and um they have to have a hard consonant in the middle so you've got something to get your teeth around when you're actually screaming at him in the park. And he is absolutely fabulous.

He keeps me busy in the evenings with lots and lots of brushing. But he is a fabulous dog and he is loved by all. Excellent. I have met Baxter. He is jolly nice. Let's leave it there. Let's leave it there. So leave it there so I um I have a different relationship with dogs uh I spent almost two decades working as a postal worker and um the

the the old stereotypical idea of a postman being chased by a dog is not entirely fictitious. Really? Yeah, yeah. I'm not suggesting for a moment that all dogs do it, but there is a certain territorialness, a protectiveness that a dog experiences when a complete stranger goes crunching up a gravel driveway, making loud noises at the door, and then scarpering. It's instinctive for the dog to perhaps feel a little wary of that and I can understand that and therefore in the course of my duty I had received a few nibbles and bites and scratches from our canine friends. I expect a lot of that is down to the owners so maybe I don't have a problem with dogs maybe I have a problem with dog owners for not training their dog well enough to know that that sort of behavior is unacceptable I don't know but it's

kind of put me off I have to train my postman actually because generally when the postman has a delivery to make Baxter is so excited he's so happy to see people and he's so friendly that he will like it's somebody at the door. It's really exciting. And once the postman knows it's Baxter, it's fine. Because he'll kind of go roaring up the hallway and go, hey, it's a friend. It's a friend. It's a friend. It's a friend.

And first time postman, they're kind of like, bloody hell, what the hell's going on? The second time, they kind of like go, you know, bend down and give him a big hug and get a big lick. And it's fine. That's the thing, there's a certain unknown quantity. We don't know what's on the other side of that door. I encountered once a French Mastiff who was beautiful, adorable, friendly. He accidentally drew blood just because he jumped up at me and had quite sharp claws. But you can't hold that against him.

My worst enemy was on a particular route. It was a scruffy little mongrelly thing who chased me up and down the road every day. And one day it managed to catch me. It ran faster than me. And it was uncomfortable. But yes, so there we go. I don't hate dogs. I just don't love them but i mean effectively dogs are dogs are wolves i mean they're domesticated wolves and foxes and jackals

yeah so that's that's kind of how the the whole process began isn't it that's how the relationship between man and dog began that we started incorporating them into the household to protect us, to help us hunt and that sort of thing. We've had working dogs for millennia. We use them to round up sheep. We use them to go and pick up birds that we've shot out of the sky, if you're into that sort of thing. And therefore, they're functional. They have a task and they are they're they're functional they have a task uh and they you know they are used for that task they have strong jaws they're they're good

runners they are animals that have that are very good at being animals yes so it's not 100 surprising to think that every now and then you know they might become defensive yes and remember that they are a dog and not a lap cat. It's very odd, isn't it, when you say they're all descended from wolves and you think of the diverse range of dogs from a great dame to a chihuahua. Yes. How on earth either of those things are related to a wolf is quite surprising. So there are over 360 distinct breeds of dog in the world.

Or are there? Oh, you know something. I don't know. Well, the thing is, it depends on where in the world you are. Because, for example, the Kennel club says that there are 222 breeds whereas the americans think there are 285 breeds and originally there were over a thousand breeds but they've kind of they've kind of come down although with there are new ones that are being brought on board do you know what the

most popular dog is most popular queen of dog in the world uh well certainly in the uk oh uh is it sort of something like a uh is it like a labrador or something it is well done yes get in top marks retriever labr. Absolutely the top one. And most recently, there's 61,000 retrievers. Right. 61,000? 61,000. You'd think there'd be more. Oh, I was thinking that was quite a lot.

Oh, are you? But it's actually the second most popular dog is the French Bulldog. Oh, really? it just massively exploded right about 54 000 french bulldogs it's quite a few isn't it so i read that there were an estimated population of 11 million dogs yes in the uk so proportionally that 54 000 isn't a lot but it just shows how many different breeds there must be to make up that and don't forget those are pedigree breeds so explain pedigree breeds so pedigree breeds means a pure bloodline so this is when um dog a is the same breed as dog b and they get it together and produce dog c um whereas uh the there are several names for dogs

that don't have parents of the same breed. Liverpool Terrier, I think, is one. Oh, right. But basically mongrels. Mixed breed dogs, there's an awful lot of them. Technically, most dogs are mongrels because you have to crossbreed to get the desired result, whether you want a flat face or whether you want a flat coat or whether you want a woolly dog.

And bred for things like keeping your hands warm, which is quite interesting. Dogs are bred for keeping your hands warm. So what the Chinese used to do is they used to make it sort of like a hand warmer, like a muff thing that you put both hands in but you put a dog in there as well oh i see and the warmth of the dog would actually keep your hands warm that's great and similarly uh very useful sort of medically for things like period pains oh okay so uh lap dogs were originally, I mean, as any woman will tell you, having like a hot water bottle on their tummy

helps significantly with period pains. Yes. But if you have a living, breathing hot water bottle, i.e. a dog, you can just have that as a lap dog on your lap and that adds the weight and the warmth and actually helps you to deal with the pain. Is that why lap dogs

became a thing? Exactly Oh that's interesting So one of the breeds that I was having a little look at in terms of doing its job, whatever its function is, is the Saint Bernard or the Saint Bernard depending on your persuasion

Saint Bernard Very good I don't know why we're saying it in French because they're Swiss depending on your persuasion. Saint Bernard. Saint Bernard. Very good. Très bien. I don't know why we're saying it in French because they're Swiss. But the Saint Bernards were first mentioned in a piece of writing in 1707 by the monks of the Saint Bernard monastery

in Switzerland. Yes. Which was in a particularly harsh environment and the monks kept these dogs to help them rescue people who may have got lost along the craggy alpine paths in that area and you know because they're strong and they're quite agile and they have incredibly good senses of smell in fact the the sense of smell apparently a dog has a sense of smell that's between 10,000 and 100,000 times better than ours, depending on the breed. Gosh.

Which is due to a part of their nose, which is called the Jacobson's organ, which heightens their smell. And they can smell objects or humans or whatever it is up to about 12 miles away. I can't even imagine how confusing that must be. Oh, there's a burger. Oh, there's a person. Oh, there's a car confusing that must be oh there's a burger oh there's a person oh there's a car that must be very disorienting um but yeah so these monks had these dogs they helped them to rescue people and um you know the stereotypical image of a saint bernard having a barrel of whiskey or brandy around its neck to revive oh yes um people that they found who who are lost um the monks of saint bernard's have said that's a complete falsehood we we don't do that that's

been made up um and it's down to a a particular painting uh made in 1820 by a painter called edwin landseer and he he made this lovelylooking painting of a couple of alpine mastiffs rescuing a man in distress with a barrel of whatever it might be around their neck. How fascinating. But it never happened. But this image has sort of taken off, and it's impossible to think of a St Bernard

without having a barrel around its neck. Well, I've driven the Col de Saint Bernard many, many times because it's a brilliant driving road. And when you get up to the top of the Col de Saint Bernard many, many times because it's a brilliant driving road. And when you get up to the top of the Col de Saint Bernard, there's all the touristy shops and the cafe and the restaurant and stuff. And it's just packed full of little cuddly toys of St. Bernard dogs with little brandy barrels around their necks. And it's all due to this one chap who painted a picture. Isn't that great? There you go. One of the things that I was involved with a little while ago was guide dogs for the blind. Oh, right. Okay. And guide dogs is fascinating. I mean, guide dogs

have been going for about 100 years now. I think they started in Liverpool in 1931. Okay. And they are absolutely brilliant. They can help people to live normal lives that are sight impaired, either blind or partially sighted. Partially sighted is usually better with the dog. Right, okay. There are places where they teach dogs how to become guide dogs.

And then once a dog has been taught, then they pair the dog with the new owner. And one of the places they do this is actually in Greenwich Park. Oh, right. So I've actually been to a pairing. You have to pair the dog with the owner. But it's absolutely fascinating. They test them on the road. So there'd be a test driver

and a test walker with a dog. And the dog trainer will walk out into the road as the test driver is driving down the road towards the dog. And the idea is that the dog will pull the trainer back uh the dog will pull the pull the trainer back onto the pavement and to let the driver go and i was talking to one of the one

of the guys who does this test driving thing and he said he once got beaten up by somebody because they they sort of saw him like driving straight at this guy with a guide dog not slowing down and then he slowed down afterwards and stopped and And this guy got him out of the car, grabbed him by the lapels and said, didn't you see that bloke with the guide dog? Brilliant. Yeah, I'm training him. Oh, dear. It was so good.

But they are absolutely brilliant. And not all of them make the cut. Right, OK. Some of them are just, they're trained up and they just can't make it. Right. So they become other things. They become like hearing dogs for the deaf. Ah.

Or they join the army. Okay. Or they work for Customs and Excise. I have an interesting story on that subject. My grandmother-in-law was going through customs at the airport once back in the 80s. And someone from security pulled her aside and said, would you mind if we just shoved some drugs in your suitcase because we're training our dogs,

and we want to see whether they can detect this stuff. And she said, yeah, all right, that's fine. So they planted some drugs into her suitcase and gave her the instructions, just carry on as if it's not there, walk through customs as you ordinarily would, hopefully the dog will sniff you out, we'll pull the dog back, you can give us the drugs back, everything will be fine. So she followed the instructions, she walked towards customs, she walked right through customs and right through to the other side of customs

and the dog didn't spot her and this was the beginning of her career she suddenly realized i can make a living of this um so this poor little old lady was standing there sort of heading towards the exit of the airport waiting for the dog and she sort of looked over her shoulder and said um excuse me do you want your drugs back afraid that she would never actually be accosted wow so um clearly that one didn't pass the test needed more training indeed so yes so dogs are very well equipped to do all the things that a dog is meant to do. They also seem to have a very good internal clock. They can quite accurately sort of tell what time of day it is.

They know when their owners are about to come home, you know, long before the car pulls up or the door opens or whatever. Although there is a theory that it's actually not just that they understand time, it's that there are cues that happen at the same time each day so they they go by a cue for example if if you hear you know that it's 7 or 7 15 or yes okay so so that there are various clues that give them the idea of the gives it gives it the appearance that they are good at timekeeping. So that may not actually be true. Interesting. But it may not be true.

I'm perfectly happy to be corrected. That's how we learn. Myth busting is another part of facts. Now, the lifespan of a dog. I've never quite understood the concept of dog years. People say about X number of years to a human is like X number of years to a dog. But I believe on average dogs live for about 10 to 15 years. Is that your personal experience of having owned a few? Sadly, it is, yes.

Right. Yeah, I've been lucky in that they've gone for the high end of that okay like for the 15 years okay but um yes they they they generally that they say that um one dog year is the equivalent of seven human years but it doesn't quite work that way that's kind of it's a bit like saying if you want to calculate centigrade from fahrenheit or yes uh you sort of fahrenheit from centigrade rather you double it and add 30 right and if you double the centigrade and add 30 you get a fahrenheit which is kind of true it's in the ballpark where you are okay there are

websites where you can actually put your dog's age in and it will actually calculate what your dog's age is in human years. That's useful, isn't it? Not really. But then I suppose as humans are now tending to live longer themselves, they may have to adjust that calculation. I suppose so. But then dogs are living longer as well. Are they? And that's not just down to evolution, but it's down to nutrition and medicine as well are they and that's you know not just down to evolution but it's down to

nutrition and medicine as well so i remember when i was a kid you basically gave your dog a a tin of food you gave him a tin of pal or something yes and there were commercials on the tv which featured dogs getting very excited about tins opening yeah yeah it features highly on the opening sequence of back to the future well exactly and then there's kibble which is which was brought in which is an easier cleaner way of handling dog food which is basically food infused biscuits yes okay there is now a new school of thought uh called raw feeding okay where you feed raw food to your dog you feed your dog the kind of food that it would be able to eat in the wild as a wolf or as a fox or a jackal um so this is very much um uncooked untreated meat fish whatever mixed with vegetables and berries and

herbs and all sorts of green stuff to offer your dog a very good diet and I've been feeding my dogs raw for the last many years now right and they seem to thrive on it and it gives them a nice silky coat and stuff like that so but there are there are vets that will tell you that it's very bad and you can give yourself all sorts of diseases by handling which is true i mean if you think about it if you handle raw chicken yes for human consumption yes be as bad for you as handling raw chicken for for animal consumption yes so you have to be as bad for you as handling raw chicken for animal consumption. Yes. So you have to be wise about it.

You do. You do. Now, talking about the nutritional aspect, it's alarming, the things that go through my mind when I'm trying to get to sleep. Do you remember white dog poo? I do. I don't know when the shift happened, but I remember as a nipper back in the 80s, you would find white dog poo on the pavement. Yes. And now you don't. Not very often. Is that a nutritional thing? Is that because the dog's diets have changed? It's kibble. It's because of kibble. Yeah.

So stools. Let's talk about stools. That's a whole other episode. So dog stools. If you feed your dog raw, for example, one of the ingredients of raw food is bone. Okay. And the more bone in a dog's diet, the stiffer the stools. More calcium and so on.

Exactly. So, you know, sometimes you eat dog poo, which basically is like a lake of something unpleasant. But actually, if you feed your dog raw, they usually come out little sort of black pellets. Oh, really? So they're much easier to pick up. They don't smell it's it's so much easier and better and more helpful with a raw diet to uh to pick up after your dog but the more bone they eat the paler their poo is so dogs used to be given on a regular basis used to be given bones from the

butchers do you remember when they used to be butchers? I vaguely, I think I've heard of those. Yeah. So butchers used to give people the bones that they no longer needed. Yes. And those bones were given to dogs. And when dogs eat bones, A, their poo goes stiffer and B, it goes paler. So white poo was basically from dogs that had eaten a lot of bones. Ah, right. Okay, so somewhere around the late 80s, early 90s. Big on kibble. Big on kibble, not so big on bones. Yeah. Interesting.

There you go. We've solved that mystery. Thank you. You're welcome. Anytime you want to talk about dog poo, ask. In fact, you can always tell a dog owner because if you go through their pockets, you'll find little plastic bags.

Yes, little poo bags. Yes. Now, we've developed a bit of a theme recently, which we get to a certain point in the podcast when I start breaking out the Guinness World Book of Records. Oh! And we talked about various different breeds, big ones, small ones, etc.

Some as big as your head. Indeed. Or bigger. So I decided to look up the biggest and the smallest ever dogs. The largest dog. These are both quite recent as well, actually. It's not sort of a historical record. They're both, I think, they're sort of both still alive.

So these are current records. There is a Great Dane called Zeus, who's a two-and-a-half-year-old dog. He is the tallest dog in the world. He stands at three foot five-and-a-half inches off the ground. At the shoulder? At the shoulder.

And if he goes up on his hind legs, he's over seven foot tall. That's quite large. That's a big dog. Isn't it? That's a foot higher than either you or I. I know. I know. But they're such charming, sweet, good-natured dogs as well,

which is just as well, frankly, because they could rule the world if they decided where it's going to be. The extent of my knowledge of Great Danes is Scooby-Doo, and the fact that i can go oh i'll tell you what we haven't talked about i'm sorry let's talk about the smallest oh good point right smallest dog um probably no surprise it's a chihuahua uh there is a chihuahua from florida called pearl who is only three and a half inches tall that's really small isn't it and five and a bit inches long roughly the size of a dollar bill

it's hardly big enough for a hamburger no it's like a pocket so you talked about scooby-doo which brings us to a whole other area of dogs, which is dogs in cartoons and popular culture. Ooh, OK, challenge accepted. When you said it, I kind of laugh. I have a certain sort of laugh which goes... Oh, OK, so that's Muttley from Wacky Waces, isn't it? Dick Dastardly's dog.

Rattling, rattling, Rattle, rattle, rattle. Yes, very good. And then there was, I guess, Superman's dog. Superman's dog. He had a dog called Crypto. Did he? Not after the currency, after Krypton. Oh, okay.

Right, yes. A dog that wore a cape, which is a very strange thing to see. I don't remember Supermanman having a dog but fair enough yes so so he did do you remember the jetsons i do remember did they have a dog they had a dog called astro aha um spoke an awful lot like scooby actually um i think i have a vague memory of him hovering as if he had some kind of special space-aged collar or something on him that made him hover that might be entirely false why not let's assume it's true tell me in the comments if that's a false memory or not um other dogs in popular culture there must have been loads um

there's lassie yes of course who was some kind of collie what's that sim? They're down the well. Do you remember The Littlest Hobo? Vaguely. It was a Canadian show when I was a kid. There was a husky, I think, a husky-esque dog who went around the country helping people and then moving along. Had a really nice theme tune. It gets stuck in your head after a while.

I won't do it. Other dogs in popular culture. I won't do it. Other dogs in popular culture. Huckleberry Hound. Of course. From Hanna-Barbera. Yes. Do you know Hanna-Barbera, interesting, stupid fact about Hanna-Barbera?

Go on. Is that all of their animated, or most of their animated characters, regardless whether they were human or animals, always wore a little collar. If you remember, if you think about them, they're wearing a collar and a small tie. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Whether they're wearing clothes or not, they had a collar and a tie. And the reason for that is that you could animate the head separately to the rest of the body. But it's really hard to do that unless you've got some kind of physical way of disjointing the head from the body. And a collar and tie is a very easy way of doing that. Yes, that's fantastic. I love that. Oh, Goofy, of course. Oh, perfect. Now, OK, come on, explain this to me. Goofy is an upright humanoid dog who talks. Yes. Pluto

is a dog that acts like a dog. Every now and then you'd see Goofy and Pluto going for a walk. That makes no sense to me. Did Pluto forget to evolve? What happened there? That's very odd, isn't it? It never really occurred to me. Yes, you're absolutely right. Very odd.

Snoopy. Snoopy, of course Snoopy. I knew there was one hanging around in the back of my mind snoopy from the peanuts cartoons yes yes fantastic dog he's a very good dog he's a very good dog i'm trying to think of whether were there any other cartoon dogs oh yeah brian brian griffin oh b Family Guy. Who basically runs the show. Well, there you go. I think that's as many dogs as we can think of in popular culture.

We've missed loads. I expect so. The comments will be full of dogs. How dare you? You've neglected my favourite childhood episode of Insert Title Here. Yes, I remember Insert Title Here. It was a good show. I very nearly included

Dino from the Flintstones because he was very dog-like. Right, well. So that's dogs. That is dogs. We've made a bit of a dog's dinner of that. Yes. But it's a dog's life, so it's okay. We've doggedly carried on though indeed we have um dogs have got all sorts

of things in there like the loyalty and the companionship and everything do you know what i like dogs i kind of got that impression when i'm on holiday without my dog i go up to strangers dogs and go excuse me would you mind if i gave your dog some love because i'm not with my dog the thing is that the strangers that own the dogs understand yes okay they feel your pain I go up to strangers' dogs and go, excuse me, would you mind if I gave your dog some love? Because I'm not with my dog. The thing is that the strangers that own the dogs understand. Yes, OK, they feel your pain. Well, there you go. So that's another episode of Fact Orally.

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