Interesting Facts

The Honorary PDSA Dickin Medal, has been posthumously awarded to famous war horse Warrior, dubbed "the horse the Germans could not kill". (Warrior arrived on the Western Front on August 11 1914 and stayed there throughout the war.  He was injured several times, but survived to eventually return home to the Isle of Wight in 1918 where he lived until his death aged 33. The Dickin Medal, also know as the Animal VC, is the highest award an animal can achieve while serving in military conflict. 65 of these medals have been awarded - to 29 dogs, 32 Second World War messenger pigeons, four horses, and a cat.)

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

Frank Hayes, is the only deceased jockey to win a horse race. (Yes, in 1923, Mr Hayes suffered a heart attack during a horse race at Belmont Park in New York, but he didn't fall off the horse, Sweet Kiss, who went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.)

The only animals that aren't banned from the grounds of the Houses of Parliament are dogs and horses. (Oh and politicians of course.)