Oct 22, 2010
Alexandra Witze
How many times have you had to dry yourself with a towel of a hair dryer? Many times I think, but the furry animals I have in mind can just shake and be dry in the matter of seconds. I you have a furry pet like mice or dogs, whenever they get wet you can see them shaking about. But is it really that simple? Or is there a secret to it? To find out the engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta did tests to find out.
First they got 40 animals and 7 different species from lab rats to the engineers pet cats and dogs to lions and bears from the zoo.(No animal was harmed in this experiment), they then got slow motion cameras to film what the animals where doing. Then they just poured water on each animal and observed what they saw. They found that above the furry animals spine there is a lot of loose skin that flaps around when they shake their body and helps them get rid of any water in their fur. Because the furry animals can do this their body heat is 25% lower than a humans ans if the don't get rid of water in their fur they would easily get hypothermia and die.
Hey! That was a really cool article! I never knew why dogs did that! You had a great strait forward article. Good job!
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