"Unselling" Dogs and Selling Commitment

A repost from December 2008.

This is a terrific ad from the Netherlands, and made me recall an earlier post from this blog entitled Overbreeding: Beware of Simple Answers:

If we agree that there is still a problem ... the next question is WHAT is the problem?

You would be surprised at how little thought has gone into that question.

You see, the problem is NOT puppies. Healthy puppies are readily sold or adopted from pounds. There is always a line of people eager for a puppy.

The problem is DOGS. While puppies are small and cute, a dog is a loud, expensive, demanding, barking, defecating, and life-restricting ball-and-chain.

It turns out that a lot of people that want a cute puppy are not so enamored with the realities of adult dog ownership. In a world of throw-away marriages, jobs, cars, communities and houses, dogs have been tossed on to the pile....

...If we are really interested in reducing the number of dogs put up for adoption, we need to spend some time on the "unselling" of dogs in general, and purebred dogs in particular.

When we talk about dogs to people that do not have dogs, we need to talk about the fact that dogs are expensive, time-consuming, and smelly.

We need to acknowledge that they will occasionally pee on a carpet or wake us up at 5 in the morning. Dogs not only bark, they howl, they scratch at doors, they eat cell phones, and they will quickly reduce the resale value of your car. Not to mention that landlords hate them.

If people want to get a dog, fine, but there should be no surprises about the numerous liabilities involved, and that those liabilities can easily last for 15 years.

Link to the complete post. .

Clash of Opinions is Actually a Clash of Knowledge

In Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality and Wildness in America, David Peterson notes that back in 1978 Yale University behavioral scientist Stephen Kellert authored a paper entitled "Attitudes and Characteristics of Hunters and Antihunters" in which he summarized his research into the psychology and world-view of these two opposing groups of people.

Kellert breaks hunters down into three core groups:

Utilitarian-meat hunters;
Domination-sport hunters, and;
Naturalist-nature hunters.

Kellert notes that while the groups blur a little at the edges, these three psycho-demographic groups do exist, and represent striking differences of attitude within America's hunting population.

Utilitarian-meat hunters represent about 44 percent of all American hunters. This group tends to talk of "harvesting" game as a renewable resource and many have a "pioneer spirit" forged in self-sufficiency. As a group utilitarian-meat hunters tend to be older, more rural and less educated, but test pretty well when it came to knowledge about wildlife. Few Americans oppose them.

The second group, the domination-hunter, comprise about 38 percent of all hunters. Most domination-hunters are urban men, have served in the military, and see hunting as a way of expressing their manly prowess. Domination hunters know very little about wildlife, and many actually fear it, having an exaggerated "dangerous game" mindset of the kind we often see in pulp hunting magazines ("Mauled by a Grizzly," "When Sharks Attack", "Stalked by a Killer Moose"). Domination hunters showed little interest in wildlife in their youth, and as adults tend to see wild animals as uncontrolled and therefore as "bad" or nuisance animals. The domination hunter is the group non-hunters dislike, and which antihunters try to use to negatively portray ALL hunters.

The third group of hunters -- naturalist hunters -- represent less than 18 percent of all hunters. This group tends to be younger, more educated, and with higher levels of education and income than the other groups. This category also includes more women hunters. Nature hunters tend to backpack, bird watch and camp, as well as hunt. This group also spends more time actually hunting than either of the other two previous groups. Nature hunters have far and away the highest level of knowledge about wildlife and seek an intense involvement with wildlife and do not fear it.

Kellert also goes on to analyze antihunters as a group and finds, not surprisingly, that about 80 percent are women. Most are urban women living on one coast or another.

Antis had very little actual experience with wildlife and, along with domination hunters, had "among the lowest knowledge-of-animals scores of any group included in the study."
In another ironic parallel with domination hunters, "it appeared that antihunters manifested more fear and lack of interest in wildlife" than average Americans.

What was striking to me about reading Kellert's research was how it explains much of the silliness and stupidity we see in the arena of wildlife management today, where antihunters who have never walked a hedgerow clash all with macho-men domination-hunters who would never consider going into the woods without a Bowie Knife as large as medieval falchion.

Neither group seems to have very much knowledge about wildlife. One group does not hunt at all, and the other does not seem to hunt very much.

Left out of the debate -- and too often ignoring it -- are utilitarian-meat hunters and nature-naturalistic hunters which form a majority of the people who actually spend any time in forest or field.

The good news is that in America, unlike in much of Europe, wildlife management decisions tend to be left to an increasingly well-educated groups of professional wildlife managers with degrees in biology, zoology, resource management, forestry, population dynamics, law enforcement and even economics. The watchword in the U.S. is not knee-jerk emotionalism, but sustainability and habitat protection. As a consequence, we have more deer, elk, moose, bear, wolf, fox, alligator, whales, peregrine falcons, bald eagle, osprey, groundhog, raccoon, possum, coyote, bison, beaver and mountain lion today than we have ever had in the last 100 years, and the numbers for all of these species is going up, up, up.
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Weekend reading

Harvesting ice the Amish way

Making baby shoes

Budget Bytes - a great cooking blog

Human gummi bears

Creepy photo portraits of retired ventriloquist dummies  (!!)

How to make an emergency candle with butter

FROM THE COMMENTS THIS WEEK

Missus Moonshine

Winkel's Crazy Ideas

The Canadian Housewife

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Bear With No Hair = Horror Movie Star

I Hate Donald McCaig

I hate Donald McCaig because I got two pages into this book before 6 am, and already my day is ruined.

I will never write this good, be this wise, or be this funny.

And get this -- the damn book is already for sale, and it's not even officially out yet.

And it just gets worse.  You see, my employer expects me to work a full day, but that's not likely with this book already opened. 

So for the next eight hours I have to fake it, knocking out a phone call every dozen pages, and going to the bathroom a lot, with the book tucked up under my arm.

FML.  I do not like having to hide my addictions.

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A Failure to Communicate

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Den Repair

The entrance to this pipe has been carved away a little bit.


A few arm-thick branches and some dirt, and all is well again.


I try not to mess with entrances to settes, in part because I try to preserve settes and I think front doors are important. Another reason is that it is too easy to collapse the entrance to a sette which means you have cut off air to the dog.

In the sette, above, however, the dog could just barely get in before having to turn hard to come up a side pipe in pursuit of the quarry. In order to get a better handle on the direction this side pipe took, I decided to open it up a bit.

After figuring out the direction of the pipe, and accounting for the groundhog, I repaired the hole I had dug into the middle of the pipe as well as the den entrance itself.

Will a groundhog come back here? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What is undeniable, however, is that this den is still available to a wandering possum, raccoon, or fox.

In truth, there's no shortage of holes in the woods, but only groundhogs dig them routinely; and possums and coons never dig them. Fox only dig them (or more likely, expand them a little) in winter. Considering how much work a groundhog den actually represents (800 pounds of dirt is moved on average) by a pretty small animals, it seems to me that preservation of hedgerow settes is simply respect -- and common sense if you hope to hunt frequently on the farm in question.

Do I always do a good job of repairing a sette? Truthfully, no. That said, I am getting better at it. In old age, I find I am in less of a rush to get to the next hole. When the temperature climbs past 85 degrees in summer, I suddenly remember that there is more to life than increasing its speed!
 

..till somebody gets a cone

"It's all fun and games until somebody gets a cone.

 Poor Justice."

via c.Joy's comment yesterday

Ok that's hilarious

and cracked me up.

Things are returning to normal.

The two compadres.

Drumroll

The winners are 

#5 Abbey's Paperie Garden

# 70 Evi

Congratulations Ladies!

Get me your addresses 

and the book will be on it's way

to you ASAP

I'm headed for a nap..Miss Justice had me up at 3am

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Working at home

During the week a wonderful comment came in on the post about Kevin's Man Made Home. It was from rabidlittlehippy. I started writing a long response but then thought it was too long and I should make a post of it. The comment follows:



I'm a stay at home mum to 3 kids 4 and under and life can be very challenging sometimes. I've also battled with depression for most of my life and ante natal

A Cuckoo In the House of James Bond's "M"

Helen MacDonald has a terrific piece up over at Aeon magazineentitled "Nest of Spies," in which she deconstructs and illuminates the life of MI-5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who served as the model for "M" of James Bond fame.

James Bond, of course, was named after the author of Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936 -- a book that happened to be on Ian Fleming's desk back in 1953 when he began to write Casino Royale in 1953 while staying at Golden Eye, his villa in Jamaica. 

The character of Bond, it should be said, was modeled after the playboy-gambler-spy Dusan Popov whom Fleming had seen gamble in Portugal, placing a massive bet in order to get a rival to withdraw from the baccarat table -- the very set-up used as a plot device in Casino Royale.

In any case, it seems that "M" -- Maxwell Knight -- was not only an observer and tamer of men for the spy game, but also a skilled naturalist who lived in a house crowded with crows, parrots, foxes and finches, and that he had a particularly interesting relationship with a tame cuckoo.  Read the whole thing.

One of the points that jumped out at me was when MacDonald writes that "during the war, British wildlife had become firmly embedded in myths of national identity" and that in Britain and in other countries "[n]ational and natural histories blurred."

National and natural identities were blurring not only in British hedgerows during this period of time, but in German ones as well.

German zoologists Lutz and Heinz Heck got wrapped up with the Nazis and their dream-scape of mythical Nordic animals of forest and field, and the two brothers worked to recreate the Auroch and the Tarpan by "back breeding" primitive-looking cattle and horses in order to recreate these fabled animals.

Dogs too were not immune from this drive to create national identity. 

One of the first dogs pulled into the frame was the German Shepherd -- a dog bought and named in one day, with a standard knocked out in short order based on a sample size of one, and whose principle purpose seems to have been to have the word "German" affixed to an "uber hund" which would be a paragon of athleticism and obedience.  Hitler would own one, and perhaps not coincidentally, his dog would be named "Blondi".

The Jadg Terrier followed -- a dog created by die-hard Nazis in a purpose-created breeding camp for the express purpose of creating an uber-terrier for the Fatherland -- something every bit as good, if not better, than anything the British had. The foundation dogs here were supplied by Lutz Heck -- the same Lutz Heck who was busy back-breeding mythical Nordic creatures for a thousand-year reich.

After the war, of course, nationalist trends continued as broken countries and people tried to cobble up and associate themselves with imagined or contrived greatness.

Various kinds of water dogs, gun dogs, and lap dogs, without much distinction or true history,  were suddenly deemed to be ancient breeds and symbols of place.

A Czech dog fancier created the Cesky terrier, for example, which was nothing more than a simple cross breed of two British dogs, while the Swiss-Italian fantasist Piero Scanziani created the Neopolitan Mastiff overnight from a dog he did not breed and based on sample size of one. 

And so it goes to this day. 

I have had some fun mocking these kind of just-invented canine histories associated with regional identities, creating the Kill Devil Terrier, the White-toed Minnesota Chipmunk Dog, the Shenandoah Mountain Cur and, just this week, the Genesee Valley Beaver Dog.

At the top of this week's post on the Genesee Valley Beaver Dog, I put up an absurd picture of "Grey Owl" a fake "Indian" who was actually born in England as Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, but who passed himself off as an indigenous native of Canada for more than 20 years. 

Surely this is the kind of "cuckoo" that Maxwell Knight would have loved!  And of course, Grey Owl was not alone as a native fake, was he?  Remember Iron Eyes Cody, the crying Indian in the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign?  He was a pure-blood Sicilian born in Louisiana! Which is not to say that he did not do good work for native people and causes -- a feature he shared with Grey Owl who preceded him by at least a generation. But were these men cuckoos?  Oh yes, in every sense of that word!

Archibald Stansfeld Belaney as a boy.

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The Bigotry of Low Expectations

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Winter Fun with Old Boots

 

The Placebo Effect on Pooches?

It seems there might be a placebo effect at work when dogs get medicines. 

Or at least that's the conclusion of a very small sample study of dogs with epilepsy, 79% of which "demonstrated a decrease in seizure frequency" when they got noting more than a sugar pill.

Count me skeptical.  That said, the fact that drugs are still be tested against placebos at all is a national disgrace. 

If a drug company reports its drugs being positively seat-raced against a placebo, then the label for said drug should read, in capital letters with a black box warning: 

"Better than nothing, provided you discount the outrageous cost you are paying for this nonsense, the liver and nerve damage we have not reported, and the greasy stools that result when you take this product."

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the inJUSTICE of it all

AS if being nearly blind and deaf and covered

 in over 200 warts were not

 enough hardship on our girl Justice,

she started to grow an enormous cyst

 on her flank in December

 and today I realized I could not hesitate

 any longer as it was now growing at warp speed.

Off to see our beloved Vet

we went.  He had a pretty open afternoon and 

since he was afraid to put her under,

 he did a local and 45 minutes later

 I picked our old girl up and brought her home.

We love DR T and I told him so today.

She is very restless, and the cone on a blind dog

 is even more complicated.

I snapped this series of photos in under 2 minutes as she 

tried to get comfortable. I moved a donut bed into the room

for ease of maneuverability and then when she whined for her 

regular brown sided one I moved that in next to her.

I also lay down a dog car mat to protect the white wool rug...

Then she decided three separate times 

to lie behind the curtain,

and became caught up in it and the cone each time.

Round and round we went from round bed

 to regular bed,

 to floor, to tangled, UNTIL... 

(You can see her sizable new bald spot,

told you that thing was large)

she walked under the desk and stole Howie's bed,

quite an acrobatic feat with a small front opening.

He chuffed at her ( BAD HOWIE!) until she 

relocated out to the living room.

My poor girl.

It's gonna be a long night folks.

Justice will be 12 on March 3rd.

She's a trooper.

Tomorrow evening I'll pull the two winners 

from the giveaway...so still time to enter.

good luck to all and a special thanks

 to those sweet pals who posted about it

and said such kind words.

damn... bloggie pals are wonderful.

In other quick news

Hannah finished filming her final short film 

Monday morning and all went well.

After having Sandy delay the shoot in December,

and ripple down to losing her DP 

and a couple actors etc and having

 to find a totally new local etc..my girl pulled it off.

Including buying all the food and catering the crew

herself to save money. She came in way under budget,

and the crew loved her.

Ben did a shoot a week ago but I don't know the details of

that or I'd be braggin' on him also.

Mama is so proud of her bambinos.

see you tomorrow evening 

Z

What Would J.C. Do?

Johnny Cash seems to have actually read the Gospels.  Imagine!

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

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Herd Guarding Dogs

Livestock Guardian Dogs::Conservation Media::Vimeo.

This is a nice video about livestock guarding dogs which is the way forward for public lands ranchers who make private profits from our public lands.

If public lands ranchers on National Forest and BLM lands continue to press for wanton wolf and coyote shooting on those lands in order to protect their already heavily-subsidized flocks (non-market based grazing fees do not begin to cover land destruction and administrative costs), then the pressure will increase to simply end all public lands ranching or else to dramatically increase the cost. 

There is a middle way forward with dogs, and there is no way forward without them.
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Wash Your Dog for Healthy Canine Skin

I have had terriers for 45 years and, with one or two small and very short-lived exceptions, I have never had a dog with itchy skin. 

Why is that? 

I chalk it up to two simple factors:

1. I prefer mutts, cross-breeds, and unregistered dogs. 
   One of the main reasons we have a lot of skin problems in dogs, and especially terriers, is that most show dogs are heavily inbred and, as a consequence, they have weak immune systems and more allergies.
    
2. I wash my dogs every week. 
   I have always washed my dogs once a week, and you should too.  You have heard that washing your dog is "bad" for the dog?  Nonsense.  A dog wants to be clean and it deserves to be clean. You wash yourself at least once a week, right?  Do the same for the dog.  If you are worried about keeping your dog's coat shiny for shows, please grow up and get a life.  A dog does not want a ribbon -- its want to be free of itch.

So why do dogs get itchy skin? 

There's a lot of veterinary mumbo jumbo on that score, but let's cut to the chase and lump up the three factors:

1. Weak immune system and auto-immune disorders. 
   Dogs can get allergic to pollen and even to their own dandruff, which is one reason you want to wash your dog -- to reduce pollen and dander as well as dirt. Yes, some dogs have food allergies, but this is much less common than most people think, and the most common diet-based allergy in dogs is not to corn or wheat, but to beef.  If your dog has seasonal hotspots, it is almost certainly not due to a food allergy, but to a reaction to pollen, dander, and fleas.
   
   
2. Allergies to fleas, mites, ticks, and mosquitoes. 
   Flea bite dermititis is common, and it only takes one or two fleas for a dog with a weak immune system to go a little nuts.  One reason to wash your dog with flea shampoo once a week in spring, summer and fall, is to make sure your dog harbors few or no fleas, mites, or ticks. 
   
   
   
3. Dogs have too much hair these days. 
   Air circulation over the coat and the skin helps cut down on fungus infections. When thick hair is combined with poor hygiene (too little bathing and too little combing), the ground is set for canine skin trouble.  Again, washing your dog and combing out the under-thatch at least once a week will solve a lot of problems.
   
   

Do you need a special shampoo to wash your dog? 

No. 

The folks who claim otherwise are marketing nonsense or repeating old wives tales.  If a shampoo is gentle enough to be used on a human head once a day, it's fine for a dog once a week!

In cold-weather months, when fleas and ticks are not much of an issue, use the cheapest shampoo you can find at the grocery store.  I get Suave at about $1 a bottle, and it works fine.  Expensive non-medicated dog shampoos are all hype and marketing.  Save your money.

In summer, I use an off-the-shelf pyrethrin-based flea and tick shampoo ($4.00 a bottle on the Internet and $7 at the store), and I make sure to lather well around the ears and neck, and around the dog's vent area. 

Pyrethrin is a very safe, old, and natural insecticide made from Chrysanthemum flowers, and pyrethrin-based shampoos are famously effective at killing fleas and ticks. In doses too small to kill fleas and ticks, pyrethrin repels them, and the the active ingredient is biodegradable as well.  The US Department of Agriculture says pyrethrins are "probably the safest of all insecticides" and has approved their use around foodstuffs and at food plants. 

Killing fleas, airing and brushing the coat, and getting rid of the dirt, dander and pollen on your dog, are all key to keeping your dog's skin healthy and happy.

Do you already have a dog with itchy skin, aka a "hot spot"?

If it's a seasonal hot spot, as is so often the case, then it almost certainly has nothing to do with a food allergy, and is more likely to be due to pollen, dander and (especially) fleas. 

Wash your dog, treat for fleas, and knock down the initial itchiness with a dose of benadryl (2 mg or less per pound), and things should sort themselves out fairly quickly.

After the fleas are gone from the dog, and eliminated from its bedding as well, I generally recommend washing dogs that have skin problems with a human dandruff shampoo like Selsun Blue. 

If the seasonal hot spot problem continues (probably due to pollen) the dog should also get dosed with benadryl (up to to 2 mg per pound of dog, every 12 hours) to reduce itching.  Remember:  people take benadryl for their allergies all the time, and dogs can take it too if it is administered in the proper dose (not for cats!).  For terriers, the 25 mg. benadryl caplets sold at Walgreen's as a "sleep aid" for humans are just about perfect.

Of course not all "hot spots" can be eliminated with a good shampooing alone.  There is a chance your dog might have a fungal skin infection, aka, "ring worm."

The cheap over-the-counter remedy here is to treat the red or balding areas with a topic fungal ointment like Tenactin or its generic equivalent. Rub it into the root of the hair and the skin. This ointment is the same ointment used to treat athlete's foot and jock itch, and is sold at any pharmacy or grocery store for about $7 a tube.

Another step that may be necessary, especially if the dog has already rubbed the skin raw, is to dose the dog with an antibiotic like cephalexin (sold without prescription as "Fishflex") until the skin heals up.  A 7-day course of antibiotics will help the dog "attack the attacker" from the inside, as well as the outside.

If you suspect mange, wash the dog and bedding with a pythrethin-shampoo, and dose the dog at the mange site with a dilute (.05 percent) solution of Ivermectin as well. 
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Happy Birthday, Johnny Cash!

February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003

An American Original.
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Maybe We Should Try Suppositories?

C. Everett Koop, Dead at Age 96

C. Everett Koop was the real deal. Back in the early 1990s, when I was on the board of an adoption agency, we were presented with a conundrum: Siamese Twins (aka conjoined twins) in Thailand which, if they were not separated, were doomed to die. The issue was brought to me first, and I confess that I was a tower of "yeah buts..." but William L. Pierce of the National Council for Adoption was not. He called up C. Everett Koop, who said Children's Hospital of Philadelphia could separate the twins, but it would take more than half a million dollars. The issue came back to me. I said a half million dollars was as impossible as $50 million. William Pierce went back to C. Everett Koop, and Koop swung the iron and "boom" -- he got Children's Hospital to shoulder all bu the post-operative costs. Could I help raise the money for that? That I could do, and we did (with a lot of help from a lot of very good people), and those two kids now live in the U.S. (adopted), and last I looked they each had more than 250 Facebook friends. I am not sure anyone else knows this C. Everett Koop story, but it's not one I will ever forget. Thanks Doc. You were a light. A true light.
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His Master's Voice?

The story of Nipper began in 1884 when a small stray terrier was found on the streets of Bristol, England. Adopted by Mark Barraud and named "Nipper" for his habit of biting at people's ankles, he became a devoted pet and companion to the theatre and stage set designer.

Mark Barraud died in 1887 and his little dog went to live with his brother, Francis Barraud. Francis Barraud inherited a cylinder phonograph from brother Mark, and he noticed that when it was played Nipper cocked his head and seemed to listen to it -- as some dogs are wont to do with any strange sound.

Nipper died in September of 1895.

In 1899, four years after Nipper's death, Barraud was casting about for a subject to paint and remembered the little dog listening to the cylinder player. He decided it would make a good subject for a painting, and used the photograph, at right, as inspiration.

Barraud hoped to sell his painting of Nipper as a magazine illustration, but could find no buyers. He then decided it might find a market as an advertising vehicle.

Barraud first went to the Edison Bell Company, the maker of the cylinder player, but they turned him down. He then painted over the Edison cylinder machine and put in its place a Gramophone machine which played a disk record and had a brass, rather than black, horn. William Barry Owen of the Gramaphone Company offered to buy the picture, and "His Master's Voice" was born.

The Gramophone company was owned by Berliner, which patented Barraud's image of Nipper (patent papers pictured at right). Berliner was sued by the Victor Talking Machine Company shortly thereafter and, as a consequence of the lawsuit, Berliner was forced out of business in the U.S. and Victor acquired the painting of Nipper as part of its settlement. In the late 1920s, Victor was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), and they adopted the Nipper painting as their own trademark.

Somewhere along the line "the coffin story" was added to spice up the true story of how this painting came into being. The coffin story in entirely fiction, but a good tale nonetheless. According to the story, the dog was painted sitting on the coffin of Barraud's brother as the dog was listening to his deceased "master's voice" on the phonograph. A great tale, but pure marketing malarkey.

In 1949 the Gramophone Company decided to honour Nipper and erected a plaque above his grave under a mulberry tree in Eden Street, Kingston-on-Thames, England.

Francis Barraud died in 1924 at the age of sixty-eight, having made a good living painting copies of his now-famous painting. At least 24 "Barraud originals" still exist.

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Boomerang Slide Tag Collars for the Field

Boomerang Slide Tags. . . .

They do not dangle and they do not wear out. They go on single-thickness flat collars (leather or nylon) or snap-clip adjustable nylon collars, or double-thick flat collars, depending on what version you order.

 

You can order just the slide tag, or you can order a slide-tag-and-collar set. The snap collars, for the record are first rate. You cannot go wrong ordering a collar-and-slide tag set.

The slide tags do not come off. They stay where you put them, and the stainless steel engraving is deep and does not wear off.

I have slide tags on six sets of collars for the dogs (including my locator collars), and also a slide tag on my son's Pitbull, as well as a small slide tag on my house and car keys (because people will return your keys if you give them a phone number to help them out).

Remember that a microchip in your pet is a secondary form of identification.

Your dog's primary ID should be a solid collar and a slide tag that is easy to read and will not come off.

No tag is better than a slide tag. None.

My small collar tags have my web site URL (http://www.terrierman.com) as well as cell phone number and email (which also comes to my cell phone as well as home computer).

Boomerang Slide Collar Tags come with a simple guarantee:
 

We guarantee our CollarTags to last the life of the pet they are purchased for. If the text ever wears off or becomes illegible, or the tag falls off the collar, the tag will be replaced free of charge. There will not be any "bogus" shipping or handling charges to get your replacement tag either.

Enough said. They take credit card and PayPal, and they ship 'em out to you fast. What are you waiting for??
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Fox at the National Portrait Gallery

Surveillance cameras observe a fox exploring the Tudor and Georgian rooms of London's National Portrait Gallery at night. Apparently, the fox was released inside the gallery on purpose, in order to create more "art".

A fox was at the U.S. Supreme Court some years back, but not on purpose, and when it was pursued after the fact it could not be found with a border terrier.
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The best moist chocolate cake recipe

I'm going a bit bonkers. I woke up an hour ago, felt that I'd had a very restful sleep, lay there for a few minutes listening to the rain and got up. I had no idea what time it was but I didn't want to be late this morning, I have to go out later and have a few things to do before I go. I looked at the bedside clock in the darkness, it was 4.45. Damn, I'd slept in. Quietly I went into the

Did Pavlov Hate Terriers... Or Love Them?

Pavlov's dogs do not seem to have included any terriers -- mostly spaniel types, by the look of it. 

Is not keeping dogs in cages a sign of hate or love? 

Or could it be that terriers are simply immune to Pavlov's little tricks with the bell?
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Can it really be that simple?

On the weekend, me and my sister were talking about a TV program called Kevin's Man Made Home. Kevin McCloud from the Grand Designs program has this new show about building an off the grid shed in the woods in England. There's been a lot of debate about how self indulgent the project is, that it's not authentic and that building regulations would prevent most people building this way etc. etc.

Genesee Valley Beaver Dog

Long before Columbus first stepped on shore, there were dogs in America -- millions of them.  In fact. prior to the arrival of the horse, the largest pack animal in North America was the dog, and it was employed to haul travois with hide, meat, tents, and cooking utensils from one camp site to another, as well as to guard camps from large predators (wolves and mountain lions) and to alert if people approached.

Contrary to popular story, dogs were not used much for hunting as their presence was far more likely to spook game before it came within arrow shot than to find it. And, of course, that is still true today; an archer that went into the woods to deer hunt with a dog by his side would be considered a fool.  Deer are taken with stealth over game trails, and that was as true 500 years ago, as it is today.

And yet, there are a few exceptions to the generalized rule that dogs were not used for hunting, but for guarding, hauling, companionship, and (yes) even food.  In areas where there were buffalo jumps (i.e. cliffs where buffalo could be stampeded off to their death), dogs were employed to spook herds forward.  And, of course, in the very Northern part of the U.S. where winter ice and robust beaver colonies were common, a particular type of smaller Indian hunting dog could commonly be found.

This dog was smaller, longer in body, and shorter in leg than the larger, more traditional wolf-like Indian dogs seen in the West, and was used to slid into beaver dams in winter to help drive the beaver out and onto the surface where they could be speared. 

This work was always done in winter because it made access to beaver dams easy, while the solid ice over the water prevented the beaver from being able to flee under water. In addition, beaver is an animal loaded with fat, which spoils quickly in summer, but keeps easily in cold weather when the added calories are most needed.

Shown, above, is an Indian Beaver Dog captured on film in the 1920s somewhere in Maine. 

Below is another Indian Beaver Dog captured on film, at about the same period of time, by the late great photographer George Eastman, who later went on to found the Eastman Kodak company, based in Rochester, New York. This dog, photographed in the Genesee Valley, is very similar to dogs which can still be found in the area among the Seneca people.

For example, the picture below is of a dog named "Froth" once owned by Mildred Kondolf, whose great grandfather, Mathius Kondolf, was manager at Reisky & Spies, the brewing company which, after the end of Prohibition, became the Genesee Brewing Company

Froth was four generations removed from "Sachem," a dog purchased by Mathius Kondolf from a Seneca tribal elder around 1900. Around Sachem's neck in the picture below is the good luck amulet the dog was wearing the day Kondolf purchased him. Inside were said to be two beaver penis bones and a small blue rock. The contents of the amulet were to show worshipful respect for the beaver, the penis bones a hope for prolificness, the blue stone a hope for clean water and hard ice.

  

Today, Genesee Valley Beaver Dogs are still used to help source commercial materials for the perfume trade, both beaver castoreum and, oddly enough, the whale ambergris sometimes found floated up along the beaches of the Eastern North Atlantic.

Pictured below is "Charlie," a modern Genesee Valley Beaver Dog owned by Tyler Muto. 

Charlie is retired from the perfume trade (the perfume "Charlie" is named after him) and he now works at Buffalo's K-9 Connection dog training facility, where he casts a gimlit eye over all.

• Related Links:
  
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Probable Cause on a Leash?

David Drumm, a guest blogger over at Jonathan Turley's law blog has a good post up on the contrived and fraudulent use of police dogs to create probable cause to search vehicles, people and property.

Though the Supreme Court recently issued a unanimous (9-0) decision in Florida v. Harris (2013) that deals with probable cause and drug detection dogs, that court decision only affects cases where the lawyer does not challenge the competency of the dog.  Here's a hint if you are busted: always challenge the competency of the dog.

This is not to say that the dogs are not good at what they do, but simply to say that what they do is not just smell, but also take direction (intentional or not) from handlers, and in more cases than you would imagine the dog is used as an instrument of a police frame.  Oh, you did not know that police lie all the time, and that they rather routinely frame suspects, plant evidence, take kickbacks, manifest overt racism and sexism, drink too much, and also sometime beat their wives?  Guess what?  They are human, and they do all that and more every day.  Lying, in fact, is a core part of police culture os far as it relates to getting an arrest.

So what does this have to do with police and other tracker and scent dogs?  Quite a lot.  You see,

An investigation of three years of data by the Chicago Tribune found that: “only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.” When considering Hispanic drivers, the success rate fell to 27 percent. Justice Kagan, writing the opinion of the Court, noted that in such cases, “the dog may have smelled the residual odor of drugs previously in the vehicle or on the driver’s person.” Such an hypothetical claim is a little too convenient and should raise suspicions about its validity. According to J. Kagan, a dog’s alert “establishes a fair probability—all that is required for probable cause—that either drugs or evidence of a drug crime … will be found.”

Bottom line:  Any search based on a dog's "alert" should be challenged, and the dog's handler asked to produce documentation from a competent third party evaluator that the dog has actually passed a true double-blind test. Many police dogs have not.  And if more police dogs can, then how will that harm the cause of justice or the plight of dogs and dog trainers?
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A Spot of Mange

Pregnant vixen with mange.

Gideon just came down with what I believe is a spot of mange caught from one of the local fox, probably the pregnant vixen seen above, and which was been seen in the neighbor's yard in broad daylight last week.  In any case, Gideon rubbed himself raw in a single morning and afternoon while I was at work.

Step one in Gideon's treatment was to wash him with pyrethrin-based shampoo, and then to treat the mange patch with a straight dose of a 0.05% dilute solution of Ivermectin worked well into the coat and edges of the bald patch, and then left on.

Step two was to give him an internal dose of Ivermectin (the same dose as for heartworm) and to chase that with an antibiotic (Fish Flex cephalexin) to make sure his skin did not get infected. 

To knock down the itch, I also dosed Gideon with a single 25 mg. dose of benadryl every 12 hours (sold as a "Nighttime Sleep Aid" mini-caplet at Walgreens).

I repeated these steps every day for four days until good pink skin appeared.  Gideon still has hair loss at the site, but that will grow back over the course of the next two weeks.  

Mountain has been washed every day as well -- no symptoms on her, but precaution is always the best medicine.  With all the dens that the dogs are in and out of, and all the mangy fox running through the yard (and your yard too, no doubt!) this is the first possible spot of mange any of my dogs has have ever had. 
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Peanut Butter, Parsley, Dog Food and Salmonella

The emails come in as predictable as swallows to Capistrano and buzzards to Hinkley, Ohio:

• Kasel Associates Industries Recalling Certain Pet Treats Due to Salmonella Contamination - Boots and Barkley, Colorado Naturals, Nature’s Deli among brands affected – http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm340552.htm
• The Honest Kitchen® Voluntarily Recalls Limited Lots Of Verve®, Zeal®And Thrive® Products Due To Possible Health Risk –http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm340669.htm
• Kaytee Recalls Bird Treats and Greens Due to Possible Salmonella Contamination from Parsley Flakes – http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm340596.htm

 

Right.  Salmonella.  One of the most common health problems and the bain of low-life restaurants everywhere.  In this morning's Washington Post, a headline:  Feds indict 4 over 2009 salmonella outbreak linked to Georgia peanut plant.

 

Right.

 

Which brings me back to dogs and dog food. 

 

Remember my earlier post about Honest Kitchen?   They are the the second company named in the FDA press release dump last night -- right after a "lick and stick" dog food maker called Kasel Associates, and just before the Kaytee bird seed company, which ALSO says that its parsley was tainted with Salmonella (the same claim as Honest Kitchen). 

 

Hmmmm.  Same supplier for a bird seed company as for the dog food company?  Right.  So the "sources" for Honest Kitchen's food stock might not be quite as special as we are led to believe. 

 

Which is not to say Honest Kitchen is bad dog food. 

 

It is to say, however, that they have NO idea what they are putting into their dog food because they have sourced the ingredients from dozens of suppliers on five continents and make it in a "secret" factory in Illinois several time zones away from where Honest Kitchen is actually headquartered. 

 

Read my longer analysis of Honest Kitchen's marketing machinations and ask yourself if this "lick and stick" dog food maker is doing anything appreciably better or more honestly than Kasel Associates Industries, which is the no-name contract dog food maker named in the first FDA press release this morning. 

 

How are they set up any differently from Menu Foods or Diamond? 

 

That said, salmonella will always be with us so long as we serve food. 

 

And yet, rather predictably, the companies that have managed to wrap their hands around the Salmonella problem the best are those companies that make their own foods rather than contract out, those that have long-term domestic suppliers, those that have massive brands that have been in business for decades, those which fully fire-cook their foods, and those which are not secretive about where their foods are actually made.  On every one of these points, Honest Kitchen falls down.  Did we learn nothing from the Menu and Diamond dog food fiascoes? 

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