Interesting Facts

According to a survey carried out by the sustainable food and farming organisation Leaf (Linking Environment and Farming), more than one in three British children have never heard the classic farmyard sounds in real life. (Increasingly, youngsters are only hearing the sound of nature through their computer or TV screen, which means they have never heard a real cow go “moo”, a sheep go “baa”, or a pig go "oink". This means many kids are oblivious to where the food they eat comes from.  25% didn't know the names for baby cows, sheep, pigs or chickens, and more worryingly one in five had no idea bacon comes from pigs, while one in 20 thought we get cheese from them. Pig cheese? Eew! My favourite was that 5% percent of the children surveyed believed strawberries grow inside the fridge.  Which has a certain logic to it.  At least they had thought about it a bit.) 

According to a study carried out by the WWF (World Wildlife Federation) 25% of Brits believe that the dodo still exists. (The unfortunate flightless bird actually became extinct over 400 years ago, and yet 14 per cent of the respondents believe it is currently under threat from hunters, whilst 12% said it was not even endangered!. % OF RESPONDENTS THAT MISTAKENLY IDENTIFIED THE BELOW AS ENDANGERED SPECIES Red Admiral butterfly           38% Red kangaroo                        36% Swan                                       28% Weever fish                            28% Crane fly                                 21% Flamingo         ...

Researchers from World Animal Protection have discovered how to tell if a cow is in a bad mood – by measuring the temperature of its nose. (They carried out the study by stroking the animals to put them in a calm and relaxed state before they took their temperature. How do they know the cows weren't just annoyed, and wanted to get back to the field?)

According to a study carried out at the  University of Tokyo, compared with 13 other mammal species studied, African elephants have the most genes related to smell: 1,948. (That's more than twice the number of olfactory genes in domestic dogs and five times more than in humans. The following animals were tested in the battle of the schnozes:- Elephant - 1948 Rat - 1207 Cow - 1196 Mouse - 1130 Horse - 1066 Dog - 811 Guinea Pig - 796 Rabbit - 768 Human - 396 Chimpanzee - 380 Marmoset - 366 Macaque - 309 Orang-utan - 296 So, why don't we use sniffer elephants or even sniffer rats?) Source - The Wright Stuff

L-Cysteine is an amino acid used to prolong shelf-life in commercially produced bread. (It can be found in duck and chicken feathers and cow horns, but most of the L-Cysteine used in food production comes from human hair. Most of the hair used to make L-Cysteine comes from China, where it's gathered from barbershops and hair salons. You can avoid L-Cysteine baking your own bread, as it is not an additive in flour, but if you find the idea of eating other people's hair, steer clear of fast food places such as McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts and Burger King, who allegedly use L-Cysteine as an additive too.) Source