From the masthead at the top of the web site of the Irish Working Terrier Federation
A nice link to this blog is also at the top of the site, and also this very good graphic:
"The greatest danger to a working terrier is admiration in the show ring."
4 comments:
I'm a bit of an Anglophile and am appalled by the hunting ban and am,belatedly,learning more about how it works over there. Thanks for all the links. So, as I gather,in order to dock tails or remove dew claws on pups the stock must be certified as working pest removal and must be done by vets? Wow. There is a school of thought nowadays to dock beagles.Mostly a deep South thing where the briars are vicious and they have bred their dogs slow and mouthy. The tail keeps the beat for the mouth and their dogs are a bit too smooth-coated,so I can almost understand. They mostly use sheep bands.I'll only take rear dew claws and they are a rarity,but, up north they take the front ones as they say they are ripped off in crusted snow.Glad to be in the New World.
Robert,
You are indeed lucky in the new world, where hunting is seen as natural predation management. Where sport hunting is properly regulated and the media make some effort to print a balanced story.
In Britain and Ireland the ANTI's have gained ground over the last few decades not because they have put forward a new argument but because numbskulls have posted photos on social media.
The battle rages on.
Grammar NAZI comment:
"photos'" shows possession of plural photos.
That little apostrophe gaff bothers me enough to comment!
As a mis-educated (but self-corrected) New World plebe I just assume British Islanders have their own language mastered.
5string,
Good catch. I did not think there were people in the world ho would be bothered by something like this.
Just to make you less bothered, the graphic has been corrected.....maybe...check it out
Meanwhile back to defending terrierwork. :-)
Taken from a Daily Mail article;
"Perhaps you could try to answer the following question. Which is correct?
(a) Dos and don'ts (b) Do's and don'ts (c) Do's and don't's The answer, according to Ms Truss, is (c). She says that for plurals of letters and certain words then an apostrophe is required.
For example, if you were asking how many s's there are in Mississippi or talking about the noise a crowd made on bonfire night - 'There were lots of oooh's and ahhh's.'
The answer according to Mr Richards is (a). He says: 'Lynne Truss can write what she likes but she's got to justify why you might use one when there are no missing letters and no possessive sense.
'There is no role for the apostrophe in plurals at all.'
Who will arbitrate? Well, David Crystal, professor of linguistics at Bangor University, isn't one for taking sides but he does believe that apostrophes in plurals are sometimes necessary.
'What if I ask you to dot your i's and cross your t's? How will you spell that? If you didn't use an apostrophe you'd have the word 'is' instead of i's.'
As he puts it in his book The Fight For English: 'Inserting an apostrophe is as good a way as any of showing there is an unusual plural.'
But Crystal goes further, and makes a good case for there to be a little more leniency in tricky circumstances.
'Punctuation has always been a matter of trends,' he says. 'Commas, hyphens, semicolons, apostrophes - all have been subject to changes in fashion.
Thinking about these issues as a two-part solution (correct vs incorrect) doesn't help.
'As with many linguistic issues, there are three solutions - correct, incorrect and optional (i.e. can't decide!). Pedants forget about context, which is what removes ambiguity in most cases.
For example, in the case of the Parents' Association, there could be no such thing as an association for one parent, so the apostrophe is simply unnecessary, which is why most people leave it out.
'The other thing people forget is that when the rules were drawn up 150 years ago, it was by printers who forgot about exceptions - such as some plurals - that had been in the language a long time.'
This is the point at which I decide I have had enough of apostrophes. Yes, it will still distress me to be offered a list of martini's or cocktail's. But I think in future I may require a more niche challenge. It's time to protest against the split infinitive."
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