longevity.

Yasuhiko Ito, Flickr It's bad news for the snarling, angry dog on the corner, but good news for the mailman he terrorizes. Scientists have discovered that bold, aggressive dogs live much shorter lives than shy, obedient pooches, the New York Times reports. Vincent Careau, of the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada, and his colleagues came to that conclusion by comparing numerous dog breeds based on their personalities. For example, poodles are ranked as 29 percent more docile than boxers, and Careau's team found that poodles are four times more likely than boxers to live past age 10. Beyond simply looking at aggressiveness, the researchers also found that the most obedient breeds, ...

Photo: Gothamist Buttkiss, a 20 lb. black pacu (related to the piranha), has been living in the same Queens pet shop since the Summer of Love. That's right, he was born in 1967, and 41 years later he's still going strong. Why is this so special? The average life expectancy of a pacu is 2 to 20 years -- so pet shop owner Steve Gruebel must be the reigning king of pacu care! Gothamist reports that the pacu was sold to a man named Kurt Emerick in 1968. At the time, the fish was only about two inches long but soon grew to be much bigger and became very aggressive. Emerick wasn't so psyched when the pacu started knocking things over in his fish tank, so he returned him to the pet shop, where ...