Wives, Men, Dogs, and Cats

Long Netting with Xenophon

Source

Writing in 400 B.C., Xenophon gave a pretty good equipment sheet for long netting rabbits. These, of course, are European rabbits which den in underground warrens or colonies. North American rabbits are either cottontails which nest in above-ground scrapes, or hares (Jack Rabbits) which do the same. There is a pygmy rabbit which dens underground in the far American west, but it is so rare as to be a protected species, and most people have never so much as seen one. 

 
Has the equipment and technique changed much? Not at all!

The ordinary small nets should be made of fine Phasian or Carthaginian flax, and so too should the road nets and the larger hayes.

These small nets should be nine-threaded [made of three strandes, and each strand of three threads], five spans in depth, and two palms at the nooses or pockets. There should be no knots in the cords that run round, which should be so inserted as to run quite smoothly. The road net should be twelve-threaded, and the larger net (or haye) sixteen. They may be of different sizes, the former varying from twelve to twenty-four or thirty feet, the latter from sixty to one hundred and twenty or one hundred and eighty feet. If larger they will be unwieldy and hard to manage. Both should be thirty-knotted, and the interval of the nooses the same as in the ordinary small nets. At the elbow ends the road net should be furnished with nipples (or eyes), and the larger sort (the haye) with rings, and both alike with a running line of twisted cord. The pronged stakes for the small nets should be ten palms high, as a rule, but there should be some shorter ones besides; those of unequal length will be convenient to equalise the height on uneven ground, and those of equal length on level. They should be sharp-tipped so as to draw out easily and smooth throughout. Those for the road nets should be twice the height, and those for the big (haye) nets five spans long, with small forks, the notches not deep; they should be stout and solid, of a thickness proportionate to their length. The number of props needed for the nets will vary — many or few, according to circumstances; a less number if the tension on the net be great, and a larger number when the nets are slack.

Lastly, for the purpose of carrying the nets and hayes, for either sort there must be a bag of calf-skin; and billhooks to cut down branches and stop gaps in the woods when necessary.

Source

Life Is a Joke and Death is the Punchline

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
 . . . . . . . . . . - Horace Walpole

Talking to Non-Hunters About Hunting

I rarely attack non-hunters.  Most are simply curious and ignorant, and a little information can fill the vast empty space inside their heads.

• Hawks pluck sparrows while they are still living? 


• The water ditch along the side of the road is filled with the bones of animals struck by cars?


• Do you think Mother Nature might have give us meat-cutting teeth for a reason?


• Squirrels and chipmunks eat baby birds?


• Soy and corn fields kill more animals through habitat removal?


• House cats kill more animals than man and dog combined?


• PETA kills over 95 percent of the dogs at its shelter?


• They should get themselves sterilized if they really want to reduce their impact on the environment? 

Two or three questions leave most people silent and thinking.

That said, it's worth noting that there are three major things that impact how the world looks at hunting:

• The Nature of the Beast:
  The world is OK with killing ugly animals and destructive animals, but not animals that have ever been featured in a Disney film or in an Aesop Fable. Rabbits, hares and foxes are seen as cute cuddlies (they are), and since they do not do much harm (this is true), killing is frowned upon. Killing large predators is also bad (big fierce animals are rare) and so too is any rare animal (this is perception and has nothing to do with real rarity). I hunt fox with terriers, but it’s catch and release, and so it's considered odd but acceptable. I kill groundhogs, and since most people know they are an agricultural pest, are not very cute, are fast breeders, and have never been featured in a Disney movie, this killing does not (generally) make me a bad guy.
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• The Speed of the Kill:
  If the dogs kill fast or if a human does the killing fast, then it’s generally permitted provided the animal is common. Everyone understands that all living things die, but if a human is involved it ought to at least die fast – that’s what we bring to the table, right? So if people ask, I make a point about the fact that I do the killing – not the dogs – and that when I kill it is very fast and very precise. When ratting, the dogs kill, but it is a blink of an eye and done to an animal that the world assumes carries disease.  Not too many people feel sympathy for rats, which have short lives and die at the hands of fox and dogs and hawks quite naturally.  Is a snap trap less cruel than a dog? It is not faster!
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• The Tone of the Hunter:
  Trophy hunters are seen as people with small penises and big egos, while “nature dominance” hunters are generally seen as knuckle-dragging slobs who do not really appreciate the lives of the animals they are taking, or the habitat that those animals depend on for their existence. If you can speak passionately and scientifically about the dogs, the eco-system, the mortality and morbidity of the animals hunted, the need to protect forest, farm, field and creek, then you are given some space. Meat hunters are given some space, but it’s best if they are poor and actually need the meat. When people ask me what I do with the groundhogs, I tell them I recycle them to the fox. This makes them think – and it reminds them that death is always on deck. Am I bad for killing groundhogs, or good for feeding fox? They generally decided the latter, but they are conflicted. The idea that groundhogs are the natural prey of animals like fox and coyotes is something they have not thought about before. In fact, most people have  not thought about how animals die at all. They think animals in hedge, field and forest die in a soft dry place, gently lulled to sleep without pain or fear, on a morphine drip, and with Mozart on the tape deck.  In fact, that's not even true for most people, who typically die scared and alone and in some degree of pain in hospitals and nursing homes.  Most wild animals are killed by other wild animals, starve to death in disease and illness, or crawl off to die shattered at the side of the road after vehicle impact.  The exit that a skilled hunter offers a deer -- a bullet to the head -- is the same exit people that people most often use on themselves when they have a choice.

My God Has a Sense of Humor

God created one animal that could not get cancer, and it was not man, but the Naked Mole Rat? This is his best work? This is the one that looks most like Him? Mysterious!

Marley Got Dressed for Thanksgiving

He's an Italian Greyhound.

Spiders from Hell: Only in Baltimore

- click to enlarge - 

From the blog over at Discover magazine:

In late October, 2009, the managers of the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Baltimore, MD sought assistance in mitigating what they described as an “extreme spider situation” in their sand filtration facility. The building, consisting of almost four acres (16,099 square meters) under a single roof but with no side walls, had been prone to extensive colonization by orb-weaving spiders since its construction in 1993. However, the present infestation was considered to be worse than normal, and the facility’s maintenance and operations personnel had voiced concerns over the potential risk of bites.

As an interagency team with expertise in arachnology, urban entomology, and structural pest management, we were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three-dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanketed much of the facility’s cavernous interior. Far greater in the visual impact of the spectacle was nothing less than astonishing. In places where the plant workers had swept aside the webbing to access equipment, the silk lay piled on the floor in rope-like clumps as thick as a fire hose.

Spider webs hanging from trolley beams.

The Case for Tail Docking Working Terriers

Working Terriers

Perspective Does Not Change Reality

"We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses, but either way we have to get out a machete and shovel if our terrier goes to ground beneath it."
. . . . . --Abraham Lincoln

Let Us Give Thanks for Wild Turkey and Uncle Sam

Wild Turkey Feathers. This is a repost from Nov. 2008

Let us give thanks to the Wild Turkey, America's largest ground-nesting bird.

Back when my grandfather was born, the Wild Turkey was teetering on the edge of extinction. Today we have more Wild Turkeys in America's woods than existed in pre-Columbian times.

How is that possible?

Good question. But before we get there, let's dwell a little bit longer on the miracle.

You see, it generally requires a lot of forest -- 2,000 acres or more -- to maintain the kind of food crop and cover that Wild Turkey need to thrive.

The reason for this is that in the dead of winter, Wild Turkey depend on acorns and other nuts and seed for survival. This food is only produced in abundance by mature hardwood trees -- oak, beech, dogwood, cherry and gum.

So what's the big deal? We have a lot of forest in America.

True enough now, but not as true a century ago in the Eastern U.S. and much of the Midwest. Back around 1900, virtually all the big stands of large trees had been logged out in the Eastern U.S. and across much of the Midwest as well. As the trees vanished, Wild Turkey populations plummeted.

Wild Turkey populations were further pushed to oblivion by rapid improvements in gun accuracy, and weak game laws that had yet to catch up to the changing dynamics of landscape and technology.

By 1910, there were fewer than 30,000 Wild Turkeys left in America.

Then, an amazing turnaround occurred. That turnaround started with passage of the Lacey Act in 1900. The Lacey Act ended commercial hunting of wild animals.

Commercial hunting is not sport or recreational hunting -- it is the opposite of that. In commercial hunting, the goal is not having a fun day in the field to fill your own freezer with wild meat, but a full year in the field to fill the freezers of 10,000 people whose primary concern is the price per pound.

To put it simply, commercial hunting is to sport hunting what gill-netting is to fly fishing. One comes with a factory ship attached; the other a simple wicker creel.

No single action has done more to improve the status of American wildlife than passage of the Lacey Act. Prior to its passage, commercial hunters bled the land white, shooting everything that moved. Wild game merchants sold pigeons for a penny apiece, and ducks for only a little more.

Hunters, using cannons loaded with shrapnel, would shoot 400 ducks in a day in Maryland's Eastern Shore marshes, while market deer hunters would set up bait stations near roads and shoot 20 deer in a night.

The Lacey Act helped put an end to this kind of unrestricted slaughter of American wildlife, but it did nothing to restore badly degraded habitat.

Wildlife without habitat is a zoo.

Habitat without wildlife is scenery.

America -- still a young nation -- remembered when it had both, and it wanted it all back.

The second steps on the road to wildlife recovery occurred between 1905 and 1911. It was during this period that Theodore Roosevelt set aside 42 million acres as National Forest and created an additional 53 National Wildlife Refuges as well.

It was also during this period that Congress passed the Weeks Act authorizing the U.S. government to buy up millions of acres of mountain land in the East that had been chopped clean of its forest in order to obtain wood for railroad ties, paper, firewood and timber.

With the Depression of the 1930s, and rapid migration of millions of people from the rural countryside to the city, more and more marginal farmland began to revert back to woody plots.

Spontaneous forest regeneration in Appalachia, along with tree-planting by the U.S. Government-funded Civilian Conservation Corps, helped restore more than 6 million acres of hardwood forests on denuded land purchased under the Weeks Act.

In 1937, the Wildlife Restoration Act (aka, the Pittman-Robertson Act) initiated a new tax on rifles, shotguns and ammunition, with this dedicated revenue going to help fund wildlife conservation.

Pittman-Robertson Act funds were used to purchase millions of acres of public hunting lands and to fund wildlife reintroduction efforts for Whitetail Deer, Canada Geese, Elk, Beaver, Wood Duck, Black Bear, and Wild Turkey.

In the case of Wild Turkey, initial restocking efforts were not successful. Turkey eggs were collected from wild birds, and the poults that were hatched were released into the wild. Unfortunately, these pen-raised birds were quickly decimated by predation and starvation.

New tactics were tried. A few adult Wild Turkeys were caught in wooden box traps intended for deer (picture of deer trap at right). These Wild Turkey were then moved to suitable habitat, but these adults birds also perished under the onslaught of predation.

The reintroduction of Wild Turkeys was beginning to look hopeless.

After World War II, game managers began to experiment again. This time, cannon nets -- large nets propelled by black powder rocket charges -- were used. These nets enveloped entire turkey flocks at once.

Moving an entire flock of Wild Turkeys seemed to work. The first few flocks that were relocated out of the Ozarks (the last stronghold of the Wild Turkey) began to thrive, in part because regrown forest provided more food stock for the birds to live on. The millions of acres of mountain land purchased in 1911 under the Weeks Act had, by now, become large stands of maturing hardwoods in the National Forest system.



Turkeys caught in a cannon net.

Systematic restocking of Wild Turkey continued through the 1950s and 60s, and by 1973, when the National Wild Turkey Federation was formed, the population of wild birds in the U.S. had climbed to 1.3 million.

With the creation of the National Wild Turkey Federation, more sportsmen and private land owners were recruited for habitat protection and Wild Turkey reintroduction.

Today, the range of the American Wild Turkey is more extensive than ever, and the total Wild Turkey population has climbed to 5.5 million birds.

Wild turkey hunting is now a billion-dollar-a-year industry, with 2.6 million hunters harvesting about 700,000 birds a year.

And so, when we are giving Thanksgiving this Thursday, let us remember not only the Wild Turkey and America's hunting heritage, but also such "big government" programs as the Weeks Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Pittman-Robertson Act, the National Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Clean Water Act.

Without Uncle Sam -- and your tax dollars -- much of America's wildlife would now be gone.

It was Uncle Sam -- and Mother Nature's natural fecundity -- that brought back the Wild Turkey, the Beaver, the Elk, the Whitetail Deer, the Black Bear, and the Bald Eagle. Ted Nugent and the National Rifle Association were nowhere to be seen, and neither were Bass Pro Shops or salesmen pushing Yamaha ATVs.

So next time you are in forest or field, remember Uncle Sam, and thank God for Mother Nature. Whether you know it or not, your hunting and fishing has always depended on both of them.


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Xenophon Gives Advice About Naming Your Dog

Cynegeticus is a treatise written in 400 BC by the ancient Greek philosopher and military leader Xenophon. The title is usually translated as "On Hunting" or "Hunting with Dogs."

A free translated copy is available here (all hail the Internet!) translated by H. G. Dakyns and published in 1897.

Xenophon suggested that there was a science to choosing and naming a dog, and that the the best names are short, one or two syllables words that can be called easily, and which suggest the vitality and prowess of the dog.

They should have short names given them, which will be easy to call out. The following may serve as specimens: Psyche, Pluck, Buckler, Spigot, Lance, Lurcher, Watch, Keeper, Brigade, Fencer, Butcher, Blazer, Prowess, Craftsman, Forester, Counsellor, Spoiler, Hurry, Fury, Growler, Riot, Bloomer, Rome, Blossom, Hebe, Hilary, Jolity, Gazer, Eyebright, Much, Force, Trooper, Bustle, Bubbler, Rockdove, Stubborn, Yelp, Killer, Pele-mele, Strongboy, Sky, Sunbeam, Bodkin, Wistful, Gnome, Tracks, Dash. 

The young hounds may be taken out to the chase at the age of eight months if bitches, or if males at the age of ten. They should not be let loose on the trail of a hare sitting, but should be kept attached by long leashes and allowed to follow on a line while scenting, with free scope to run along the trail.

Other dog names suggested by Xenophon:

•  Psukhe = Soul 
• Thumos = Spirit 
• Porpax = The hasp of shield 
• Sturax = Either the spike or the butt end of a spear 
• Logkhe = Lance 
• Lokhos = An ambush or a company of soliders
• Phroura = Watch 
• Phulax = Guard 
• Taxis = An order, rank, or military post, a brigade 
• Xiphon = Swordsman 
• Phonax = Slaughterer 
• Phlegon = Blazer 
• Alke = Prowess or victory 
• Teukhon = Craftsman 
• Uleus = Woodsman 
• Medas = Counselor 
• Porthon = Spoiler 
• Sperkhon = Hastener, Speedy or "Rocket"
• Orge = Fury, Rage 
• Bremon = Growler, Roarer 
• Ubris = Hubris, Riot, Insolence 
• Thallon = Blooming or “Gaudy” 
• Rome = Strength, “Romeo” 
• Antheus = Blossom 
• Eba = Youth 
• Getheus = Gladsome 
• Khara = Joy 
• Leusson = Gazer 
• Augo = Daybeam 
• Polus = Much 
• Bia = Force 
• Stikhon = Marching in rank and file 
• Spoude = Much ado 
• Bruas = Gusher 
• Oinas = Vine, Rockdove 
• Sterros = Ripped or “King of Sturdy” 
• Krauge = Clamor. 
• Kainon = Killer 
• Turbas = Topsy-turvy
• Sthenon = Strong man 
• Aither = Ether 
• Aktis = Ray of light 
• Aikhme = Spear-point 
• Nors = Clever (female version) 
• Gnome = Maxim 
• Stibon = Tracker 
• Orme = Dash

Drs. Fosters and Smith Sell Out

Race Foster and Marty Smith are selling out to Petco who will take over the brand in 2015.

Petco is buying Drs. Foster and Smith, in order to enter the online pet medication and supplies market.

It's said that Race Foster and Marty Smith will stay on to run the 500-person operation based in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, so keep your fingers crossed that things will not go into the toilet due to decisions made in a corporate board room in San Diego. That said, it's never a bad idea to stock up on things that you order now, and will need in the future.

Dogs: Hopelessly Devoted to Our Stink

It turns out that dogs really do love us -- in fact, they love us more than anything else in the world. 

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of dog brains shows that one of the things that sets a dog's hear aflutter is the smell of their owners. From the good folks at Brain.mic

The most direct brain-based evidence that dogs are hopelessly devoted to humans comes from a recent neuroimaging study about odor processing in the dog brain. Animal cognition scientists at Emory University trained dogs to lie still in an MRI machine and used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure their neural responses to the smell of people and dogs, both familiar and unknown. Because dogs navigate the world through their noses, the way they process smell offers a lot of potential insight into social behavior.

The scientists found that dog owners' aroma actually sparked activation in the "reward center" of their brains, called the caudate nucleus. Of all the wafting smells to take in, dogs actually prioritized the hint of humans over anything or anyone else....

Among other surprising findings, the study revealed marked similarities in the way dog and human brains process emotionally laden vocal sounds. Researchers found that happy sounds in particular light up the auditory cortex in both species. This commonality speaks to the uniquely strong communication system underlying the dog-human bond.

In short: Dogs don't just seem to pick up on our subtle mood changes — they are actually physically wired to pick up on them.

The Archeology of Hunting

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Humans have spent most of their time on earth hunting, and it is not entirely surprising that there is at least some archaeological evidence of the activity.

In North American before Columbus, there were no metal tools or horses. Hunting was done entirely on foot, and hides and meat were hauled off by humans and dogs pulling travois skids.

In some rare locations a very efficient form of hunting was accomplished by running bison herds off of cliffs or "Buffalo Jumps" -- a fact we know today only because of the enormous piles of bison bones at the base of these cliffs, and the related stone tools and campfires.

Archaeologists have discovered that drive lines were made to direct herds of bison to the jumps. The drive lines consisted of rows of rock piles known as "dead men," arranged like a wide funnel that started up to 8 miles away from the jump site. The funnel gradually narrowed toward the jump end. Hunters hiding behind the "dead men" rock piles would spring out and wave robes and shout in order to frighten the animals and keep them inside the funnel and headed in a stampede towards the jump where they would tumble down, breaking legs and necks as they fell.

In Europe, large Deer Parks were created during the Middle Ages as a way of setting off land for aristocratic hunters and managing sustainable game populations for food. The edges of these parks were often edged by massive earthwork moats and mounds which, in turn, were topped by wooden fences. The moats were on the inside and prevented the deer from getting a foothold or a run-up to the top of the mound which was constructed from the earth taken from the moat excavation. Many UK locations with "Park" in their name are, in fact, old Deer Parks and with careful observation in some locations, you can see parts of remnant ditches and mounds.

As with the ancient Buffalo Jumps, hunting in deer parks was accomplished by driving game through funnel fences to archers who were positioned on the ground or in tree stands.

In the 14th Century there were over 3,000 deer parks in England occupying around 650,000 acres of land (over 1,000 squre miles). These deer parks were managed for wild game and for wood. In the larger deer parks streams were dammed to make small lakes and ponds for fishing and ice making.

Most of the large deer parks fell into disrepair in late Medieval times as the feudal system collapsed under the weight of the Plague, and a new form of hunting -- coursing with horses and dogs -- was imported from France.

Another archaeological remnant of hunting to be found in Europe are rabbit warrens. The rabbit is not naive to the UK -- it was introduced (probably from Spain) by the Romans shortly after the First Century AD. Across the UK ancient artificial warrens can be found to this day. These warrens are called "pillow mounds" or buries and are flat topped, 10 to 20 metres long, 5 to 10 metres wide, and up to a metre high, sometimes surrounded by a shallow ditch. About 2,000 of these ancient buries survive in England, and in some of them artificial runs are covered with stone slabs. Some of the very largest artificial warrens had professional staff (a warrener) and buildings.


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Duck and Fish Ponds provide additional archaeological evidence of hunting and angling across the globe. Many of these ponds have artificial islands on them created as spots where ducks and geese can breed free of predators. While the waters of these ponds were stocked with fish, the ponds were often designed with "dog-leg" lagoons, or a narrows on one end, where ducks and geese could be driven and easily netted.

The United States is a very young nation, and much of the Western U.S. was nearly devoid of people only 150 years ago. That said, Americans are industrious and the construction of small ponds and large lakes for water storage and ice-making naturally led to increased still-water angling and duck hunting.

In short order, some people began construction of dams specifically to increase angling and hunting opportunities. One such dam was constructed on the South Fork River near Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The dam itself was a massive earthen affair constructed by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club which counted among its 66 wealthy Pittsburgh residents Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew W. Mellon, and Philander Knox.

At the time of its construction, the South Fork Dam was one of the largest in the world, but it was not well constructed. A flawed design was made worse when the Fishing and Hunting Club put screens across the safety spillway to prevent fish from washing over the dam during heavy rains. The spillway screens were constantly clogged with debris, but despite many warnings about the safety of the dam, the rich aristocrats who owned the hunting club continued on, business as usual.

On May 31, 1889, after a period of heavy rain, the dam finally gave way sending a 45-foot-tall wall of muddy water racing down the Conemaugh Valley. More than 2,209 lives were lost and 27,000 people were made homeless -- one of the greatest single losses of human life in the history of the United States.



Civilian Conservation Corps Tree Planters, 1939


The most notable period of U.S. construction for wildlife benefits began with the advent of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1936. The CCC was created as a Depression-era jobs program which eventually put millions of young men to work on reforestation, soil erosion, flood prevention, and trail construction projects across the United States..

The Corps was badly needed -- America had ruined scores of millions of acres of once-forested lands during the rip-rape-and-ruin robber baron era that lasted from 1850-1900.

Massive tracts of forest in our eastern mountains had been swept clean of trees, and streams were choked with silt. Wildlife had been shot out to the point that deer were nearly extinct, all beaver were gone, and ducks and geese were a rarity in areas where they had once been in dense numbers.

The Lacey act of 1907 and the Weeks Act of 1911 were important for protecting wildlife and conserving land, but wild America had been so severely hammered by unrestrained greed that it was to clear that it would take millions of hours of human labor and a lot of time to begin to set things right.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the ball rolling in 1934 with the appointment of Committee on Wild-Life Restoration whose mandate was to prepare a plan to restore America's dwindling wildlife populations. Among its members were the great wildlife manager Aldo Leopold, and cartoonist Ding Darling.

The Wild-Life Committee recommended far-reaching changes to improve habitat for waterfowl, upland game, mammals, and song birds, including the acquisition of millions of acres of additional sub-marginal lands for habitat improvement, and appropriations of $50 million to restore these lands to some semblance of their natural self.

It did not take a genius to see that the Wildlife Restoration Plan and the Civilian Conservation Corps were ideal partners, and under the tutelage of Darling -- a man who later went on to create the Federal Duck Stamp Program and found the National Wildlife Federation -- significant gains were made in record time.

By the end of 1942, national wildlife refuges, national forests, and other public lands across the U.S. had been improved by CCC workers who constructed dams, dikes and fish hatcheries, planted millions of trees to stabilize stream banks and cover over ruined land, and erected numerous buildings, fire towers, telephone lines and support facilities for camping grounds, and improved backcountry-access for hunters and hikers.

Civilian Conservation Corps construction projects remain a significant addition to our National Parks, National Forests and Wildlife Refuge System to this day, and are too-little heralded part of our American wildlife heritage.
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A Quote of Note

"A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact."
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Castratos and Their Dogs

In 1794 composer Joseph Haydn visited the Italian "castrato casanova" singer Venanzio Rauzzini at Bath in the U.K. In the garden of Rauzzini’s villa was a monument to his much-loved dog named Turk, with the inscription TURK WAS A FAITHFUL DOG AND NOT A MAN. As a tribute to the dog, Hadyn turned the text into a canon which Rauzzini like so much he had it added to the stone.

Turk is in the lower right.

Watch What Happens to This Tree

This was filmed in Zaandam, Netherlands.

These are almost certainly Starlings. What, exactly, should we call such a massive flock?

After all, almost every other group of animals has a poetic phrase attached to it.

• It's a paddle of ducks and a flock of seagulls.
• It's a skulk of foxes and a cry of hounds.
• It's a lamentation of swans and a charm of hummingbirds.
• It's an unkindness of ravens and a murder of crows.
• It's a mob of kangaroos and a pride of lions.
• It's a school of fish and a pod of whales.
• It's an aerie of eagles and a wake of buzzards.
• It's a flight of cormorants and a mob of emus.
• It's a mischief of rats and a clutter of cats.
• It's a charm of finches and a hedge of herons.
• It's a husk of hares and a trip of goats.
• It's a band of gorillas and a troop of monkeys.
• It's a deceit of lapwings and an ascension of meadow larks.
• It's a burden of mules and a drove of ox.
• It's a descent of woodpeckers and a kettle of hawks.
• It's an ambush of tigers and a gang of weasels.
• It's a bale of turtles and a knot of toads.
• It's a dray of squirrels and a surfeit of skunks.
• It's a business of ferrets and an array of hedgehogs.
• It's a rookery of albatrosses and a tiding of magpies.
• It's a coalition of cheetahs and a leap of leopards.
• It's a route of coyotes and a packs of wolves.
• It's a cast of merlins and a scold of blue jays.
• It's a ridicule of mockingbirds and an ostentation of peacocks.
• It's a labor of moles and a richness of martens.
• It's a raft of pelicans and a covey of pheasants.
• It's a bloat of hippopotamus a crash of rhinoceros.
• It's a cackle of hyenas and a shiver of sharks.
• It's a flight of pigeons and a wing of plovers.
• It's a clan of badgers and a nursery of raccoons.
• It's a cloud of flies and a swarm of bees.
• It's a circus of puffins and a flush of quail.
• It's a regiment of flamingos and a huddle of penguins.
• It's a sounder of boar and an army of frogs.
• It's a congregation of plovers and a walk of snipes.
• It's an intrusion of cockroaches and smack of jellyfish.
• It's a piteousness of doves and an exaltation of larks.
  

So what is a huge group of Starlings called?

I would propose a vulgarity of starlings -- a term lifted wholecloth from their Latin name -- Sturnus vulgaris. 

Of course, we could also call it a constellation of starlings, working off of their more common name, which references the spotted iridescence of their summer plumage.

Wishing the Damn Dog Was Dead Already?

Then the Boxer may be for you!

From The Onion:

Known as loyal purebreds susceptible to genetic diseases and shorter lifespans, many boxers have nevertheless been known to live way too long, hanging in there for as many as five years after all the kids moved out. Though many are afflicted with hereditary degenerative myelopathy or stomach bloat, some just keep on going, for Christ’s sake, even after A.J. headed off to college and despite the fact that you and your wife have earned a little peace and quiet. But nope, they go on needing food and walks and someone to watch them every goddamn time you want to leave for a day or longer. Jesus.

Mazda MX5 Sports Car vs. Greyhound

A Mazda MX5 sports car races a greyhound at Shelbourne Park in Ireland. Greyhounds are faster than horses too.

The Monster Ivan Pavlov

A nice article on Ivan Pavlov in The New Yorker notes that Pavlov was a bit of a monster:

Pavlov’s research originally had little to do with psychology; it focussed on the ways in which eating excited salivary, gastric, and pancreatic secretions. To do that, he developed a system of “sham” feeding. Pavlov would remove a dog’s esophagus and create an opening, a fistula, in the animal’s throat, so that, no matter how much the dog ate, the food would fall out and never make it to the stomach. By creating additional fistulas along the digestive system and collecting the various secretions, he could measure their quantity and chemical properties in great detail. That research won him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine...

... Pavlov was constantly stymied by the difficulty of keeping his subjects alive after operating on them. One particularly productive dog had evidently set a record by producing active pancreatic juice for ten days before dying.

Pavlovian Markets in Saliva

A nice article on Ivan Pavlov in The New Yorker notes that Pavlov funded his lab by selling dog drool to folks looking for a "treatment" for upset stomach:

For more than thirty years, Pavlov’s physiology factory turned out papers, new research techniques, and, of course, gastric juice—a lot of it. On a good day, a hungry dog could produce a thousand cubic centimetres, more than a quart. Although this was a sideline for Pavlov, the gastric fluids of a dog became a popular treatment for dyspepsia, and not just in Russia. A “gastric juice factory” was set up for the purpose. “An assistant was hired and paid thirty rubles a month to oversee the facility,” Todes writes. “Five large young dogs, weighing sixty to seventy pounds and selected for their voracious appetites, stood on a long table harnessed to the wooden crossbeam directly above their heads. Each was equipped with an esophagotomy and fistula from which a tube led to the collection vessel. Each ‘factory dog’ faced a short wooden stand tilted to display a large bowl of minced meat.” By 1904, the venture was selling more than three thousand flagons of gastric juice annually, Todes writes, and the profits helped increase the lab budget by about seventy per cent.

How Skinner Got Pavlov Wrong

A nice article on Ivan Pavlov in The New Yorker notes that B.F.Skinner got Pavlov wrong:

As a college student, B. F. Skinner gave little thought to psychology. He had hoped to become a novelist, and majored in English. Then, in 1927, when he was twenty-three, he read an essay by H. G. Wells about the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. The piece, which appeared in the Times Magazine, was ostensibly a review of the English translation of Pavlov’s “Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex.” But, as Wells pointed out, it was “not an easy book to read,” and he didn’t spend much time on it. Instead, Wells described Pavlov, whose systematic approach to physiology had revolutionized the study of medicine, as “a star which lights the world, shining down a vista hitherto unexplored.”

That unexplored world was the mechanics of the human brain. Pavlov had noticed, in his research on the digestive system of dogs, that they drooled as soon as they saw the white lab coats of the people who fed them. They didn’t need to see, let alone taste, the food in order to react physically. Dogs naturally drooled when fed: that was, in Pavlov’s terms, an “unconditional” reflex. When they drooled in response to a sight or sound that was associated with food by mere happenstance, a “conditional reflex” (to a “conditional stimulus”) had been created. Pavlov had formulated a basic psychological principle—one that also applied to human beings—and discovered an objective way to measure how it worked.

Skinner was enthralled. Two years after reading the Times Magazine piece, he attended a lecture that Pavlov delivered at Harvard and obtained a signed picture, which adorned his office wall for the rest of his life. Skinner and other behaviorists often spoke of their debt to Pavlov, particularly to his view that free will was an illusion, and that the study of human behavior could be reduced to the analysis of observable, quantifiable events and actions.

But Pavlov never held such views, according to “Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science” (Oxford), an exhaustive new biography by Daniel P. Todes, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In fact, much of what we thought we knew about Pavlov has been based on bad translations and basic misconceptions. That begins with the popular image of a dog slavering at the ringing of a bell. Pavlov “never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell,” Todes writes. “Indeed, the iconic bell would have proven totally useless to his real goal, which required precise control over the quality and duration of stimuli (he most frequently employed a metronome, a harmonium, a buzzer, and electric shock).”

Pavlov is perhaps best known for introducing the idea of the conditioned reflex, although Todes notes that he never used that term. It was a bad translation of the Russian uslovnyi, or “conditional,” reflex. For Pavlov, the emphasis fell on the contingent, provisional nature of the association — which enlisted other reflexes he believed to be natural and unvarying. Drawing upon the brain science of the day, Pavlov understood conditional reflexes to involve a connection between a point in the brain’s subcortex, which supported instincts, and a point in its cortex, where associations were built. Such conjectures about brain circuitry were anathema to the behaviorists, who were inclined to view the mind as a black box. Nothing mattered, in their view, that could not be observed and measured. Pavlov never subscribed to that theory, or shared their disregard for subjective experience. He considered human psychology to be “one of the last secrets of life,” and hoped that rigorous scientific inquiry could illuminate “the mechanism and vital meaning of that which most occupied Man—our consciousness and its torments.” Of course, the inquiry had to start somewhere. Pavlov believed that it started with data, and he found that data in the saliva of dogs.

These People Have Access to the Internet

Remember these people are in college, can vote, and they have opinions on all kinds of subjects and they will tell you that their opinions are just as valid as yours!

Don't believe that? Just ask them!

Nescience in the World of Dogs

You know the word science.  It's a "discipline or study concerned with facts or truths systematically arranged and operating by general laws."

You know word omniscience.  It's "the capacity to know everything there is to know."

You know the word prescience.  It's "knowledge or awareness of the future" or "knowledge about something that has not yet happened."

But have you ever heard of the word NESCIENCE?

Nescience is more than ignorance -- it's the opposite of prescience, which is to say it's ignorance about things which cannot be known.

Some years ago David Dunning used the word "clueless" to describe why people so often think weird things and he drew a set of circles showing denial, self-deception and cluelessness

A while back, recalling Dunning's diagram, I drew a slightly modified version on a napkin, with an added circle to show what people might actually know about dogs, and a second circle to encompass ignorance, which I think is quite different from cluelessness.

The smallest circle, in yellow, is denial. This is the stuff about dogs that is too painful for us to confront for whatever reason. Sometimes this is about dogs in general or a breed in particular, but often as not it is about the owner and his or her own need to work out his or her own psychological issues through a canine surrogate.

The next largest circle, in white, is actual knowledge about dogs. Here we have the sum total of what an owner may have read about dogs, been told about dogs, or actually experienced or seen with their own eyes with their own dog.

This is a surprisingly small circle with most people, and it is probably way over-represented in this drawing.

The next largest circle, the one in orange, is self-deception or what Dunning describes as "rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning."

This is the circle that encompasses all the falsities we tenaciously hang on to, or refuse to reexamine because re-examining them is not very convenient.

How many people position their dog food or dog training choices as the only ones that work, and never mind the evidence to the contrary?

How many people blame the dog for their failure to be clear and consistent?

How many people are breed or kennel blind?

How many think they exercise their dog when they walk it around the block?

How many people think they know all about dogs even though they have never read a book or bothered to teach a dog a simple trick?

The next ring is ignorance. These are the things we know we do not know. We may not know how to teach a dog how to climb a ladder, for example, or how to close a barbed wire flesh wound, but we know it can be done and it can be learned.

Finally, on the very outside, and encircling all, in purple, we have cluelessness. This is the stuff that we do not know that we do not know.

This is the eternal mystery of dogs.

Humans do not smell the world as dogs do, nor do we see the world in the same visual spectrum, nor do we see the world from the same angle.

We do not hear what a dog hears, and we do not have the same internal drives or all of the same motivations.

When a dog throws a sign, we generally do not know how to read it, or even that it is being given, much less how to send it back (or that we should) with a wag of our tail or a slight movement of our ears, or a curve in our gait.

We have no idea. 

In the world of the dog, we humans seem to bump around blind, deaf, loud, incoherent, manic and stupid.

Look at what is in white versus the sum of what is colored, and remember that knowledge is probably over-represented here!

Now is there really any wonder why so many people think strange things about dogs?

Self-deception alone has made us blind to the large numbers of deformed dogs paraded around Kennel Club rings.

Self-deception is what enables us to call a place a "shelter" when 75 percent of the dogs admitted are summarily killed.

Denial is what enables English Bull Dog owners to claim their dogs are "fit for function" and Pit Bull owners to tell each other that their dogs are exactly the same as all the others.

And as for knowledge, it is not that easy to get, is it?

The all-breed books are packed with invented stories from dog dealers, or are filled with  prattling nonsense copied from one autodidact to another.  So many of the dog training books are either autobiographies about the author or are tips on how to train a dog to do a nearly-useless trick.

And, of course, book learning will only take you part way.

You cannot really know dogs until you have spent a lot of time in action with them and observing them, and not just one dog but many.

If you truly want to know about dogs, you have to take them out into the elements for which they were created. And even then, there will be mysteries.

While you may be able to shrink the denial circle, and expand the knowledge circle, there will always be the vast land of Clueless lying just over the horizon.

This is the Unexplored Country which the dog inhabits alone -- the vast veldt call NESCIENCE. 

• Related Links:
  ** The Real Work of Modern Dogs Is Psychotherapy
  ** Empty Vessels Makes the Most Noise
  ** The Tribe of the Dog
  ** Cutting Sign in the World of Dogs
  ** Who Speaks for the Dogs?

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The Circle of Dysfunction

From Wikipedia comes this summary of the Dunning–Kruger Effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast, the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

The Dunning-Kruger effect can be seen all around us all the time.

For example, look at the folks running for Congress. 

Most of the time, it's the ego-besotted and barely-competent who put their name out for that job. 

The folks who actually understand the intricacies of energy policy, foreign policy, and economics, are pretty sure they are not the right sort for public office -- or they have better jobs to start with.  

Of course, the Dunning-Kruger effect is also at work in the world of dogs.

Look at most of the breed clubs, for example.

In the world of Border Collies, you can find instant-experts breeding dogs left and right, and never mind that their own animals have yet to even see a sheep!  No problem there, they will tell you.  

Then, you have the retriever experts who do not hunt, and whose own dogs will not return a tennis ball, much less a bird.    They have strong opinions on the proper color, however!

And then, of course, you have the Border Terrier and "Parson" Russell Terrier breeders who do not own a locator collar, and have never sunk a hole. But do they have puppies to sell? Yes they do!

Of course, it does not stop with the breeders and the dog dealers, does it?

There are the instant experts on electronic training collars who have never owed one, used one, or even seen a dog being trained with one.

There are the instant experts who decry chain slip collars, and who do not even know how to put one on.

And then, of course, there are the 23-year old  experts.  Here's a hint:  If you are 23 years old, you are probably not a real expert in anything.

But of course, there is no stopping folks.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect means the least competent and least experienced are often the most certain they are right, and that they are also quite certain they doing a better-than-average job at most of the tasks they are doing.

What's that mean for dogs?

Well, for one, it means the least competent breeders are often the ones who are most certain they are quite excellent.

On the reverse, the most competent and most knowledgeable dog men and dog women are often filled with self-doubt to the point they may go a lifetime without breeding a litter.

And so it goes, round and round, in an almost never-ending circle of dysfunction. 

Is it any wonder we are in the mess we are in?

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Ten Years After the "Ban"

Over Horse and Hound they give a short look back at "the ban" on hunting fox with dogs that passed 10 years ago in the U.K.

It was not, of course, an actual ban on hunting fox with terriers or hounds, nor did it prevent the killing of fox with snare or gun.

So what was it about? 

Students of history and fox hunting will tell you it was little more than nattering nannyism based on vestigial elements of class warfare left over from the last throes of the Enclosure Movement some 120 years earlier.

Horse and Hound notes that "Since the ban was enforced on 18 February 2005, registered hunts in England and Wales have carried out more than 150,000 days hunting."

Over the course of the first nine years of the law, only 341 people were convicted of Hunting Act offences, and just 21 of those people involved with registered hunts; the others were, for the most part, folks poaching or engaging in offenses that were illegal under the law that existed prior to the Hunting Act (i.e. disturbing a badger sette or hunting badger).

German Raccoon-Dog, Badger and Raccoon Hunting

Frank, badger and dachshunds.

Frank Joisten, from Germany, sent in some terrific pictures of his dachshunds working everything from badger and raccoon-dog (Tankuki) to American raccoon and fox. One of my favorite pictures is below, showing not only his take this eventful day, but also some very well-disciplined dogs!


Dog, dog, badger, dog, badger, dog, dog.


Frank lives in the northeast corner of Germany, near the Polish border, and is blessed with both badger and red fox, but also raccoon-dog, which were imported to the Ukraine from Korea and Japan, and which have now migrated into Finland, Poland and parts of Germany.


An amazing take of raccoon-dog!



American raccoon have also been imported to Germany.

Frank also has some American raccoon in his area -- a legacy of animals brought to Germany in the 1930s in the hope of expanding the domestic fur industry.



Digging to raccoon-dog (aka Tanuki)

Frank reports that his dachshunds have a chest of 35 cm (13.78 inches). The Germans are very precise about chest measurements, as they understand that for a dog to be a "gebrauchshund" (i.e. a "useful" hunting dog), it cannot be too big to fit into a tight den, nor can it be so nose-dead as to be unable to find in the field. Along with size and nose and gameness, a German working dachshund has to show that it is also not gun shy.

For those interested in the various chest size standards for the teckel or hunting dachshund, see >> http://www.taksid.ee/index.php/en/bstandard  As the FCI standard makes clear, the ideal chest size of a the largest working dachshund is just under 14 inches in circumference (35 cm). This 14 inch chest measurement is the same size cited as ideal for working terriers by Barry Jones in the UK (see http://www.terrierman.com/barryjones.htm and Ken James in the U.S. (see http://www.terrierman.com/hunting.htm ), and is about the size of the average red fox chest found the world over (see http://www.terrierman.com/foxsize.htm).

For those interested in working dachshunds in North America, see: http://www.teckelclub.org/hunting-with-dachs.htm



One of the great things about terrier work all over the world is that while it is a bit different all over, it is also quite a bit the same. The picture, above, could have been taken in the U.S., Germany, Finland, England, Canada or France -- the hunched over walk of a man with a locator box is the same all over!

Repost from 2006.