Robots Rising

Back when I wrote a lot about U.S. immigration policy, I noted that the hardest crop to automate was strawberries, but that doing so would be a very high value automation as it cost so much to pick the soft fruit, each of which ripens at a different time.

Now comes word that it has been done:

Harnessing high-powered computing, color sensors and small metal baskets attached to the robotic arms, the machine gently plucked ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, while mostly ignoring unripe fruit nearby.

Such tasks have long required the trained discernment and backbreaking effort of tens of thousands of relatively low-paid workers. But technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the job, just as a shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive.

Machines are doing more than picking produce. Altman Specialty Plants Inc., one of the country’s largest nurseries, has been using eight, squat robots for the past two years to ferry more than 1.2 million potted roses and other plants to new rows as they grow larger. The $25,000, self-driving machines have occasionally gotten stuck in mud, but they freed eight workers for other jobs and ultimately paid for themselves in 18 months, said Becky Drumright, Altman’s marketing director.

The world of robots and artificial intelligence is making fantastic leaps, and I have already predicted that we will have robot dog trainers in the not-too-distant future. Robot drivers are already here, and also robotic flying cameras.

How about tiny robotic window washers? Not a problem. We already have tiny 9-gram robots that can pull a 2.2-pound load vertically up glass, which is equivalent to a human climbing a skyscraper while carrying an elephant. The strongest micro robots can pull 2,000 times their own weight — the equivalent of a human dragging a blue whale around the beach.

Rather than be scared of the robots rising, we should celebrate them.

Automated farm production will mean perfect watering and fertilizing, less waste, and more integrated pest management as beneficial bugs and fertilizers and sprays are spot-delivered by drones that power themselves up from solar grids.




And, as I wrote a few years back, farm mechanization has been pretty good for wildlife:

I do not begrudge farmers their air-conditioned cabs from which they can now plow, harvest and spray their fields to kill weevils and worms.

Nor do I beat my breast in anguish because genetically modified crops may soon make spraying pesticides a thing of the past.

I do not romanticize hoeing long rows by hand, nor do I worry too much about the impact that glyphosate (RoundUp) has on wildlife.

You see, America's farms now have more deer on them that at any time in the last 100 years.

They also have more turkey, fox, raccoon, duck and geese.

And the farms are strong.

They produce more hay, corn, soybean, wheat, chicken, pigs, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk and beef than ever before.

And because they produce so much, more land is now allowed to lie fallow.

In another post I noted that the single greatest obstacle to us all eating better was a shortage of farm labor.

If we get rid of all our corn and soy bean fields, and replace them with locally-grown truck gardens, who is going to pick the lettuce, cabbage, string beans, onions, tomatoes, pumpkins, and zucchini?

A "hobby garden" is a fine thing, but you cannot feed New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, and Las Vegas on hobby gardens or hobby farms. You need massive plots and you need a heck of a lot of them....

If you have food crops that cannot be mechanized (and many crops cannot), then you need a massive labor force that will show up on call and without fail to work in the heat and bugs for 12 hour-days, and for as many days as it takes to bring in the crops.

And then, when the crops are in, you need those people to disappear until they are needed again at a moment's notice (i.e. during that magical three-day window when your fruits and vegetables are ready for harvest at maximum value).

But will it really by impossible to mechanize all crops? I once thought so, but I have changed my mind based on evidence.  If you can automation strawberry picking, you can automate anything. Now it's just a price point function.

Do I fear that the rise of robots and artificial intelligence will make us stupider? I do not. So far, technology has almost always made us smarter, more productive, and richer. Just look at the telephone, the automobile, and the camera.

And the iPhone? It will soon be smarter than we are:

Within seven years — about when the iPhone 11 is likely to be released — the smartphones in our pockets will be as computationally intelligent as we are. It doesn’t stop there, though. These devices will continue to advance, exponentially, until they exceed the combined intelligence of the human race. Already, our computers have a big advantage over us: they are connected via the Internet and share information with each other billions of times faster than we can. It is hard to even imagine what becomes possible with these advances and what the implications are.

I do not fear our robot overlords; I welcome them.

Sticks Are So 1990

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Just like a stick. Made of wood, and it even smells like wood! $9.49.  Found at Target.

Read this. About the Baltimore Police Department

David Simon worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” (1991) and with former homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997) which Simon adapted into an HBO miniseries called The Wire.

He knows Baltimore, and he knows the history of the Baltimore Police Department and the politicians that encouraged the Big Wink even as civil liberties were kicked to the curb and gratuitous busts and police violence against impoverished citizens became standard operating procedure.

From the Marshall Project interview (read the whole thing!):

David Simom: "... It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did.

“If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.”

"Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing... Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.

"Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn't even need probable cause.

"The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted....

"This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure and law. And the city willingly and legally gave itself over to that, beginning with the drug-free zones and with the misuse of what are known on the street in the previous generation as ‘humbles.’ A humble is a cheap, inconsequential arrest that nonetheless gives the guy a night or two in jail before he sees a court commissioner. You can arrest people on “failure to obey,” it’s a humble. Loitering is a humble. These things were used by police officers going back to the ‘60s in Baltimore. It’s the ultimate recourse for a cop who doesn't like somebody who's looking at him the wrong way....

“The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley.... [T]he crime rate fell dramatically. On paper.How? There were two initiatives. First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form.

“Now, the mass arrests made clear, we can lock up anybody, we don't have to figure out who's committing crimes, we don't have to investigate anything.”

"...The city eventually got sued by the ACLU and had to settle, but O’Malley defends the wholesale denigration of black civil rights to this day. Never mind what it did to your jury pool: now every single person of color in Baltimore knows the police will lie — and that's your jury pool for when you really need them for when you have, say, a felony murder case.

"But what it taught the police department was that they could go a step beyond the manufactured probable caus.... Now, the mass arrests made clear, we can lock up anybody, we don't have to figure out who's committing crimes, we don't have to investigate anything, we just gather all the bodies — everybody goes to jail.

.... Do you have a sense of why the Freddie Gray death has been such a catalyst for the response we’ve seen in the last 48 hours?  Because the documented litany of police violence is now out in the open. There’s an actual theme here that’s being made evident by the digital revolution. It used to be our word against yours. It used to be said — correctly — that the patrolman on the beat on any American police force was the last perfect tyranny. Absent a herd of reliable witnesses, there were things he could do to deny you your freedom or kick your ass that were between him, you, and the street. The smartphone with its small, digital camera, is a revolution in civil liberties."

... In these drug-saturated neighborhoods... they were just dragging the sidewalks, hunting stats, and these inner-city neighborhoods — which were indeed drug-saturated because that's the only industry left — become just hunting grounds. They weren’t protecting anything. They weren’t serving anyone. They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat the West Bank, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy....

How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That's what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who’s going to court 7 or 8 days a month — and court is always overtime pay — you're going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who's burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he’s made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he's going to court one day and he's out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work. But worse, it’s time to make new sergeants or lieutenants, and so you look at the computer and say: Who's doing the most work? And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy’s only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work?

.... The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything. It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone’s pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court. You sit in the district court in Baltimore and you hear, ‘Your Honor, he was walking out of the alley and I saw him lift up the glassine bag and tap it lightly.’ No fucking dope fiend in Baltimore has ever walked out of an alley displaying a glassine bag for all the world to see. But it keeps happening over and over in the Western District court. The drug war gives everybody permission. And if it were draconian and we were fixing anything that would be one thing, but it’s draconian and it's a disaster....

[I]f a Baltimore State’s Attorney told all his assistant state’s attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone, for loitering, for failure to obey, we’re not signing slips for that: Nobody gets paid for that bullshit, go out and do real police work. If that were to happen, then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve. Take away the actual incentive to do bad or useless police work, which is what the drug war has become.

Allright Mr. Demille, I'm Ready for My Closeup

Click to embiggen.

Terrier Work, Part 10 -- Bulldozers and Bullshit

The 1980s saw rapid changes in the British countryside. Large numbers of city people began to buy mini-estates in areas which had once been dominated by working farms, and these mini-estate owners sometimes clashed with fox hunters who trespassed onto their property.

During this same period, increasing numbers of farmers began to adopt the massive machines needed to make a go of it in the world of modern agriculture. Large combines, harvesters, and loaders required large fields and wide entrances. Ancient hedges were often leveled to accommodate the new machines, and even more destruction occurred when road widening was done to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of people and cars.

During a single 10-year period (1984-1993), more than one-third of all of the hedgerows in the United Kingdom were lost — a whopping 121,875 miles of destruction. Another 96,000 miles of hedgerow had been lost in England in the previous 40 years (1945-1984).

Ironically, the hedges of the Enclosure Movement were now falling under the onslaught of population growth. It was not quite as Malthus had predicted, but people were indeed having an impact on the land.

In 1997 the final push to ban fox hunting in Great Britain was launched when the Labour Party won the general election with a promise that it would advocate "new measures to promote animal welfare, including a free vote in Parliament on whether hunting with hounds should be banned."

In fact several "free votes" were had in Parliament, but though the House of Commons passed a fox hunting ban several times, the ban was routinely defeated in the House of Lords.

A "free vote in Parliament," it turned out, would not result in a ban on fox hunting in the U.K. A non-free vote would have to be gerrymandered.

In September of 2004, Prime Minister Tony Blair grew tired of the inconvenience of a two-house parliamentary system and decided to use the little-used Parliament Act to overrule the House of Lords. The "ban" on fox hunting thus became law in October of 2004.

"The Ban" took effect in February of 2005, but so far has been somewhat less successful than its supporters had hoped. During the first month mounted hunts in the U.K. killed about 800 fox, most of them legally shot as they bolted for cover.

The fact that fox could still be legally killed by the hunts came as a surprise to many poorly-informed anti-hunt proponents. In fact, under the "ban" terrier work is still allowed, but only two dogs can be employed at a dig, and the fox must be shot after it bolts. The fox cannot be allowed to bolt free and unharmed, nor can it be terminated with a straight shot to the brainpan while it is still in the earth.

In short, the ban did nothing but mandate death, replacing the safest and most humane form of fox control with one that is less safe and less humane. Such is progress when the ignorant craft laws.

Meanwhile, the biggest threat to wildlife in the U.K. -- habitat loss -- remains unaddressed by the animal rights movement. Wild bird populations are in decline as habitat is degraded and eliminated. Fox once humanely dispatched by hunters are now "saved" to be struck by cars and die broken and starving in ditches. Still others succumb to long-term debilitating diseases, such as mange and distemper.

It comes as news to most animal rights proponents that in the wild animals do not expire in hospital beds with morphine drips. Nature is violent, and natural death is almost always an extended misery and not a short one.

In the wild it is a lucky animal that makes it to adulthood to meet a competent and humane hunter on its last day. It is a truth that nonhunters never seem to consider.

The question then is not whether an animal will die, but how it will die and what can be done to make sure a species is maintained in optimum balance with the environment.

In this regard, mounted hunts and terrier work are ideal, as they are the most humane form of fox control and also the least efficient.

What this means is that extirpation of fox over a wide area is quite impossible with horse and hound, terrier and spade, while elimination of the occasional "problem fox" is still possible without having to resort to poisoning, traps and shooting over bait,

In his masterful book, Running With the Fox [Guild Publishing, 1987], fox biologist David MacDonald notes that "fox hunting is of minor significance to foxes" in terms of reducing their numbers.

Of greater importance, argues MacDonald, is that fact that fox hunters routinely stand up for the kind of habitat protection essential to healthy fox populations.

When a history of irony is written, surely a few paragraphs will be devoted to this: that noting has benefited fox more than fox hunting, while nothing has harmed working dogs more than admiration by the Kennel Club.

To order American Working Terriers

• Terrier Work , Part 1
• Terrier Work, Part 2
• Terrier Work, Part 3
• Terrier Work, Part 4
• Terrier Work, Part 5
• Terrier Work, Part 6
• Terrier Work, Part 7
• Terrier Work, Part 8
• Terrier Work, Part 9
• Terrier Work, Part 10

New Baby? Get the Crib Dribbler!

It's never too soon to put your kid in a Skinner Box.

The great thing about today is that with a click of your mouse you can access all the tools you need to run a high-volume baby farm.

One of my favorite tools is the Crib Dribbler which comes in 2 sizes, the “Weekender," and the “Over-Nighter“. Perfect for Kindex Infant Energy Drink, Water, Juice, Stew, Cocoa, Formula, or Milk!

Here's a pro tip: If you put wire mesh in the bottom of the crib, the poop and pee goes right through to your worm farm.

Stop Resisting: Baltimore, the Police State, the Second Amendment, and White Hegemony

Cropped version of larger picture.

A few sporadic incidents of looting in Baltimore has CNN, Fox News, and every white person in suburban America hyperventilating.

They decry the looting, as if property is the underlying issue. It's not, and they know it.

As Atlantic magazine notes:

What's crucial to understand, as Baltimore residents take to the streets in long-simmering frustration, is that their general grievances are valid regardless of how this case plays out. For as in Ferguson, where residents suffered through years of misconduct so egregious that most Americans could scarcely conceive of what was going on, the people of Baltimore are policed by an entity that perpetrates stunning abuses. The difference is that this time we needn't wait for a DOJ report to tell us so. Harrowing evidence has been presented. Yet America hasn't looked.

Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson. Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.

The Baltimore police are racist thugs and have been for a long time.

No not all of them. Some just tolerate racist thugs and actually aren't racist thugs themselves.

Let us find honor in the cowards who remain suited, stand silent, and engage in the Big Wink.

How crooked and twisted is the Baltimore Police Department?

This is a police department where the FBI caught 51 officers engaged in extortion.

This is a police department where people violate civil rights and seriously beat people every week and pay settlements for the same every month.

And we are supposed to have our panties in a twist about a little light looting and rock throwing from the victims?

These folks remind me of nothing so much as the police themselves who, having stopped someone for no reason, slam them to the ground for protesting, and then begin screaming "stop resisting" as they beat them around the head while handcuffing them behind their backs.

Stop resisting!

It's the rallying cry of every racist cop, and every apologist for the same.

And let me tell you, it's unpatriotic as hell.

Our Founding Fathers resisted, and when they wrote the Constitution they added the Second Amendment to make sure we would keep resisting.

It was not foreign powers our Founding Father feared, but the insidious creep of a police state that did not respect basic civil rights.

Stop resisting say they white folks now.

Comply. 

Shuffle along.

It's not big thing.  

It's just black folks getting arrested for dope, and never mind that legal drugs dispensed by white doctors in white coats are the number one drug killer in the nation.

After cigarettes and alcohol, of course.

Can't take those away.

White people have rights, you know.

The white folks in the suburbs say they object to the looting.

Not the looting by Wall Street, you understand. "That's  just business." No, they object to black folks looting a single CVS.

These same people have nothing but praise -- or stony silence -- for the corporate suits at CVS ripping off Medicare and Medicaid for scores of millions of dollars.

That's the Big Wink -- the little omission and the slight smile that keeps the whole thing rolling.

Of course, not all of the omissions are little. A lot of the folks outraged that 100 black folks rioted in Baltimore last night have no idea that thousands of  black people marched peacefully the day before. They did? That wasn't on the news!

No, that was not on the news.

The white producers that decide what's news were not impressed with 5,000 peaceful black folks. That was not news. Set a car on fire and loot a CVS at a strip mall, however, and it's "the city is engulfed in flames."

Except, of course, it was not. This is not 1968. This was pretty light stuff.

You want a serious riot? Go watch the white kids riot after a college coach loses his job after sexually abusing kids, or when a few of them lose a surfing competition. You don't remember that? No, of course you don't. And how rude of me to bring it up!

Now here's the funny thing.... Have you ever noticed that the same folks tut-tutting about "those people" looting and burning police cars and throwing rocks at the police ("stop resisting") are the same one who are always quick to beat their chest about the Second Amendment and their right to carry?

So let me say it clear and plain:  I support the right to carry. For black people.

I support open carry for the folks most likely to have their civil rights violated by a police state.

I support black folks and Hispanics and women and recent immigrants who want to "Open Carry" handguns to their State Capitols and loiter near the parking lots where state and federal legislators and their staffs park their cars.

You want to support the Second Amendment and give folks a Constitutional lesson? That's how you do it.

And it's been done before.

As The Atlantic notes, on May 2, 1967:

The eighth-grade students gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols. 

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must:

take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way....

... The Panthers’ methods provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions... Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.

Notice that the Black Panthers were not standing up to federal soldiers. 

It was not the federal government, but local and state police that participated in the lynchings of black men and women in the south.

It was not the federal government, but local and state police that routinely arrested young black men on trumped up charges.

It was not the federal government, but local and state police that bashed men and women in gay bars, and called Mexicans "tonks" because of the sound their heads allegedly made when slammed with the butt of a rifle.

And yet, with the NRA today, notice that no one is "AR-15 rattling" about the REAL (and continuing) civil rights abuse done by local and state police against blacks, Hispanics, gays, and others. 

And why not? 

Simple: the average NRA member is more than OK with blacks, Hispanics and gays getting beat up by cops.  That's what police are for, they think: to protect white, male, heterosexual hegemony.

Stop resisting.

Terrier Work, Part 9 -- Foolish Youth

The 1960s saw a wage rise in the UK and an increase in leisure time as well.

More young people had easy access to cars, and as a result more young men were able to get out into the countryside.

Impatient young men eager for experience, and with a "dominance" attitude towards all thing wild and natural, found badger earths easier to locate than fox dens, especially in the summer and early fall when fox were rarely found to ground.

Many of these same young men sought "pull cord terriers" that would start right out of the box, but which too often ended up too hard for sensible badger work.

With the entry of hundreds of young men into the terrier world, a kind of culture war seems to have occurred. On one side were the older diggers who knew more about wild animals and places and tended to be more conservation-minded. These older diggers stressed the value of bagging and moving badgers rather than killing them. This was the generation that had seen poison and traps sharply reduce fox and badger numbers in many areas.

On the other side were young men who wanted to "prove" their dogs and who considered a scarred-up terrier as possessing the only true "red badge of courage" — never mind that it was more often the scarlet letter of inexperience or the wreckage of over-heated canine aggression.

Too many young men with too many over-hard dogs chasing too few badgers created a situation which fell right into the hands of animal rights advocates.

As Eddie Chapman writes in his excellent book, The Working Jack Russell Terrier [Dorset Press, 1985]:

"The macho terrier men ... with the image that they portrayed, gave the antis all the fuel they needed to persuade the general public that with literally hundreds of new people suddenly joining the sport, too much pressure was being put on the Badger population, so that it was in danger of being extinct, and ‘bang’ a Law was passed that protected them from being dug."

Along with the first restrictions on badger digging, the 1970s saw the first use of terrier locator collars and telemetry boxes.

Terrier transmitters and receivers made by Deben Industries were relatively simple affairs. A very small transmitter, about the size of the first two joints of your little finger, was attached to a terrier’s collar. This transmitter sent a very weak radio-signal to a handheld receiver which was about the size of a thick cigarette pack or portable AM pocket radio. Inside the receiver was a small directional antennae. By turning a volume dial on the side of the receiver box, the location and depth of the dog could be ascertained (though not always with perfect accuracy, and never under a power line).

No invention has done more to save terrier lives than the locator collar, and today no one with an ounce of common sense would allow a dog to go to ground without one.

Locator collar technology did have a downside, however. Prior to the invention of locator collars, mute dogs were considered nearly worthless as they could not be dug to unless you were willing to trench an entire earth. With the new locator collars, however, mute dogs found a place in the field and this trend has, unfortunately, proliferated, degrading the quality of the terrier gene pool by encouraging the use of over-hard mute dogs.

To order American Working Terriers

• Terrier Work , Part 1
• Terrier Work, Part 2
• Terrier Work, Part 3
• Terrier Work, Part 4
• Terrier Work, Part 5
• Terrier Work, Part 6
• Terrier Work, Part 7
• Terrier Work, Part 8
• Terrier Work, Part 9
• Terrier Work, Part 10

A Cup of Coffee Against Twenty Blue Devils

A cup of coffee — real coffee — home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Training Killer Whales With the Law of the Tongue

Beginning around 1840 whalers in in Twofold Bay near the town of Eden, Australia hunted whales for meat, blubber, baleen, and oil. A big problem, however was that land-based sailors never knew if the whales were near by. Until "Old Tom," the Orca showed up.

No one knows how it started but the best guess is that the Orca learned that whalers in the bay tossed unused parts of baleen whales overboard -- ready snacks for the Orcas.

In any case, one Orca, who was named "Old Tom," began to swim up the Kiah River and tailslap and breach in front of the whaler's cottages whenever a baleen whale was about -- his signal to the humans that there was a baleen whale in the bay.

In reward for providing notification, Old Tom was always given the baleen whale's tongue, an arraignment which became known as “the law of the tongue.”

Old Tom worked as the Cetacean version of a Judas Goat for more than 50 years until one greedy whaler fought Tom off a small whale and cost Tom several of his teeth.  Infection soon set in, and Tom was no more.

Terrier Work, Part 8 -- The RSPCA’s New Cause

With the end of World War II, the RSPCA found it needed a new cause. Cart horses and buggy whips had simply disappeared.

Though genuine cases of animal abuse still occurred, these were local problems and not the kind of expansive issues needed to sustain a national fundraising campaign.

As the nation was new, so would the RSPCA have to think anew.

Earlier RSPCA campaigns had attacked the sport and livelihood of the poor. Now was the time to take the battle to the other half.

The battle to ban fox hunting was enjoined in 1949. That year Britain banned the use of leghold traps and poison against any animal larger than a rat.

That same year two private member’s bills to ban or restrict fox hunting were introduced. Both bills failed to make it onto the statute books. One was withdrawn, the other defeated on its second reading in the House of Commons.

No matter. The animal rights movement settled in for the long fight, content they had found a controversy robust enough to serve as a fundraising vehicle for the next 50 years.

Out in the countryside, of course, animals continued to reproduce. Rabbits were seen as a particularly noxious problem not only because of significant crop loss in some areas, but also because very large rabbit warrens cut into the side of railroad embankments, occasionally weakening track beds.

In the early 1950s, the British purposefully imported a rabbit disease called myxomatosis from South America (via France). The hope was that the disease would help "control" the U.K.’s rabbit population.

The myxoma virus was a frightfully efficient killer, wiping out 98 percent of all rabbits in Great Britain within a decade of its introduction. One result of this unhappy turn of events was that the ancient rabbit warrens that had once served as natal dens and sources of food for fox simply vanished.

In order to help out Mother Nature, and improve the chance that a fox would take up residence on hunt land, many hunts constructed artificial dens out of brick, slate and clay drainage pipe. If well-sited these artificial earths could be counted on to house a fox and, thanks to straight and smooth sides, a larger terrier could be used to force a bolt.

To order American Working Terriers

• Terrier Work , Part 1
• Terrier Work, Part 2
• Terrier Work, Part 3
• Terrier Work, Part 4
• Terrier Work, Part 5
• Terrier Work, Part 6
• Terrier Work, Part 7
• Terrier Work, Part 8
• Terrier Work, Part 9
• Terrier Work, Part 10

The History of the World

Dr. Oz and Other Peddlers of Scam and Woo

Maybe the name "Oz" should have been a clue?

Terrier Work, Part 7 -- Early Organized Terrier Work

As the 19th Century closed, more terrier breeds were added to the Kennel Club roster

The Bedlington Terrier, the Fox Terrier and the Dandie Dinmont had been recognized by the Kennel Club since 1873. The Yorkshire Terrier was designated a breed by the Kennel Club in 1886 (formerly it was a type of Scotch Terrier), as was the Welsh Terrier.

The West Highland White Terrier was recognized by the Kennel Club in 1907, the Sealyham Terrier in 1910, the Cairn Terrier in 1912. In 1920 the Border Terrier was accepted at Kennel Club shows, the same year as the Kerry Blue. The Lakeland was embraced in 1931, the Norwich in 1932. The Staffordshire Bull Terrier joined the growing rank of Kennel Club terriers in 1935, the Bull Terrier in 1939.

In 1902, Arthur Heinemann, a young journalist born in America and of Jewish extraction, found the Devon and Summerset Badger Club. Heinemann claimed his dogs were directly descended from John Russell’s kennel, but there is considerable reason to doubt the assertion.

Heinemann was born in 1871, the year Russell gave up his hounds for the last time, and he was just 12 when Russell died. At the time of his death, Russell had just four ancient terriers left — "Rags", "Sly", "Fuss" and "Tinker".

No matter. The dogs Heinemann did acquire seem to have served him well. He worked his terriers almost exclusively to badger, bred those that worked well, and sold many terriers in the U.K. as well as overseas. In time, the badger digging club he founded would become the Jack Russell Terrier Club of Great Britain.

In 1931 Sir Jocelyn Lucas published Hunt and Working Terriers. Lucas’ book provided a global snapshot of terrier work, from England to the U.S., and from India to South Africa. The main focus was on terriers used by the mounted hunts. More than 100 hunts in the U.K. were surveyed about the types of dog they preferred, and the kinds of earths they encountered. Useful advice on the construction of artificial earths was given, as well as a review of basic tools and techniques.

Lucas was a bit of a showman, and often hunted his own pack of Sealyham Terriers with a full retinue of onlookers in tow — many in their finest "just to be seen" sporting clothes. Advertisements and articles claimed his Sealyhams were "the only working Sealyham Terrier pack in Britain" — an honest brag, but also a caution. If Sealyhams were such great working dogs, where were the others?

Like Heinemann, Lucas was a dog breeder, but unlike Heinemann he participated in Kennel Club shows where he tried to promote the Sealyham as both a worker and a show dog.

It was a noble effort, but it was a doomed endeavor, and in the end, Lucas and his kennel partner, Mrs. Enid Plummer, found it almost impossible to carry on their own kennel in the face of show-ring demands for ever-larger Sealyham Terriers with elongated faces and softer coats.

Today the small compact Sealyham Terrier of Lucas’s day is essentially extinct — as are whatever working antecedents might once have existed for other Kennel Club terrier breeds. The names may live on, but something is surely missing, for none are commonly found in the hunt field today.

The principle problem Lucas encountered with the Sealyham was chest size — a problem that stalked the Fox Terrier and the Border Terrier as well. Lucas tried to get around it by crossing a small working Sealyham with a Norfolk Terrier. He called the result a "Lucas Terrier" but the new breed never caught on.

The central question remained: Why did working terrier breeds get too big in the chest after being enlisted on to Kennel Club roles?

The answer is to be found in an inherent defect of the show ring, and a basic understanding of canine anatomy.

As noted earlier, when cattle, sheep and chickens were judged in the show ring, there was no way to determine the veracity of production claims as they related to the quality or quantity of beef, milk or eggs produced.

Unable to judge the veracity of production claims, livestock judges tended to award ribbons and trophies based on size and appearance alone.

A variation of the problem occurred when terriers were evaluated in the ring.

The essential elements of a working terrier are small chest size, strong prey-drive, a loud voice, a sensitive nose, and a clever kind of problem-solving intelligence. Aside from size, none of these attributes can be judged at ringside.

In a judging field of 20 or 30 dogs, a selection filter of size alone does not provide the gradients required to articulate a reason for choosing a single dog or bitch as a winner. The breed club solution has been to generate pages of cosmetic criteria which effectively devalue the only important attribute of working terriers that can be judged in the ring — a small chest.

Head size and shape were deemed to be very important and assigned the greatest number of points. It was the head shape, after all, that gave each breed its distinctive look. It was the head that faced the quarry in the hole. Surely the shape of the head was important?

In fact, when it comes to working terriers, head shape is only important to the extent it leaves space for brains, produces a jaw strong enough to grip, and allows for unobstructed breathing. Most crossbred mongrel terriers have heads shaped well enough to do the job.

Unfortunately, Kennel Club shows require a very fine point be put on every attribute. With the advent of the Kennel Club, a continuous morphological spectrum was disallowed. Now every breed had to be distinct. A Fox Terrier could not look too much like a Lakeland, which could not look too much like a Welsh Terrier, which could not look too much like a Border.

In the world of working terriers, a bigger head is not necessarily better. Larger heads tend to be attached to larger chests — the latter being necessary to support the former. Instead of putting primacy on head size and shape, breeders should have focused on chest size.

Unfortunately, Kennel Club breed standards have rarely (if ever) been drafted by people who actually worked their dogs. As author Harriet Ritvo writes in her excellent book, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age [Harvard University Press, 1989]:

"Specialist clubs were supposed to defend their breeds against the vicissitudes of fashion, but they had few other guides in their attempts to establish standards for breeds and judges."

The results were predictable: Fox Terriers with chests like keel boats and Yorkshire terriers reduced, in time, to the size of teacup poodles.

With some breeds, such as Border Terriers, the morphological changes were less dramatic but still inexorable. Fourteen inch chests on 12- and 13-pound dogs gave way to 16- and 17-inch chests on 20-pound dogs. As better nutrition maximized genetic potential for size, an 18- or even 19-inch chest was forgiven provided the dog otherwise looked well enough. A Kennel Club terrier, after all, was not likely to have to crawl down a tight pipe to actually face a fox, was it?

In fact, most Kennel Club judges had never even seen a fox den. Even fewer had dug on one, or run their hands along the slim warm chest of a living vixen.

A fox is not what it appears to be. Though a fox may stand 14 inches tall, it is mostly bone and fur. It is built more like a cat than a well-muscled dog. The average adult vixen weighs just 12 or 13 pounds.

This comes as news to most show ring fanciers who assume reductum ad absurdum, that a fox is a type of dog, and therefore a 14-inch tall fox will have a chest size similar to that of a 14-inch tall terrier.

But a fox is not Canis familiaris, but Vulpes vulpes. A dog is not a fox.

A 14-inch tall terrier will have a chest circumference that is two to five inches bigger than that of a fox. As a consequence, the average 14-inch tall dog will not be able to follow a fox to ground in a truly tight earth.

Again, this has never been too much of a concern for show ring terrier enthusiasts. The quarry they are pursuing are ribbons in a ring, not a fox in the ground. That said, it does explain one reason why show ring varieties of working terrier breeds are rarely found in the hunt field today.

To order American Working Terriers

• Terrier Work , Part 1
• Terrier Work, Part 2
• Terrier Work, Part 3
• Terrier Work, Part 4
• Terrier Work, Part 5
• Terrier Work, Part 6
• Terrier Work, Part 7
• Terrier Work, Part 8
• Terrier Work, Part 9
• Terrier Work, Part 10

Terrier Work, Part 6 --The Rise of Animal Rights Rhetoric

At the same time that dog shows were roaring into fashion in Victorian England, another movement was beginning to take hold. This movement began with a push to improve the plight of farm stock and cart horses, but was quickly overtaken by those eager to push past the concerns of basic animal welfare in order to strike a blow at the less educated masses coming into cities and towns.

From the beginning the animal rights movement blurred the line between animal welfare and class warfare. Sensible concerns about the plight of animals kept by the poor were mixed with disdain for the rural poor themselves.

As the Chairman of the SPCA noted in 1824, the objective of the Society was not only "to prevent the exercise of cruelty towards animals, but to spread amongst the lower orders of the people ... a degree of moral feeling which would compel them to think and act like those of a superior class."

The first animal welfare law in Great Britain was passed in 1822 and was designed to "prevent the cruel and improper treatment of Cattle." This law — the Martins Act — was interpreted broadly to include all farm animals, but not bulls or pets.

In 1824 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) had its first meeting in a London tavern, with the goal of expanding the 1822 Act to encompass nonfarm animals such as racing and hunting horses, draft horses, and cart dogs. The Society also sought to end dog fighting and the fighting of exotic animals such as monkeys.

Despite having a focused agenda, the Society failed to move legislation for the first 10 years of its existence. In 1835, however, they managed to get a ban on bull baiting, badger baiting and cock fighting through Parliament. The same law also outlawed the rat pits.

In 1839 dog carts were banned in London — a major blow to the economic livelihood of small street vendors.

In 1840, Queen Victoria — a fanatical dog collector — associated herself with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and allowed Royal to be attached to its name. The Royal imprint attracted social and political cache to the SPCA, and strengthened its funding base as well. From the beginning, the SPCA chose its political battles carefully, going after the sport, entertainment and livelihood of those with little political power. The SPCA (now RSPCA) was careful not to go after the field sports of the wealthy and middle class. Coursing deer, hare and rabbit was given a pass. It was not seen as the least bit ironic for an RSPCA supporter to be seen fox hunting. Angling and bird shooting did not raise an eyebrow. The goal, after all, was not to save wildlife or end hunting per se, but to change the base morality of the poor who were "undisciplined" and of "low breeding".

A moral and disciplined child might hunt animals, but he did not bait them.

A rich man might spur a horse or whip it with a riding crop, but he did not hit a dust cart horse with a stick.

A quality person might own a dog, but it would not be a crossbred mongrel, but an animal with an established pedigree.

And so it went.

At the top of the RSPCA this kind of highbrow reasoning was focused on the bottom line. The RSPCA needed the support of wealthy patrons to underwrite their literature and campaigns. Only a fool would bite the sporting hand that fed it.

Organizers at the RSPCA were quick to realize that the people who attended dog shows had good educations, nice clothes and steady incomes. These were "the right sort of people" who not only cared about animals, but also understood the importance of social rank, moral discipline and Old Money.

In fact, the dog show world attracted the very kind of social climbers that the RSPCA encouraged — people who were trying to emulate the aristocracy. When people attended dog shows, they wore their finest clothes and talked about the value of Good Breeding. Could anything be more perfect?

Dog show attendees and RSPCA supporters often seemed more focused on the plight of turnspit dogs and cart horses than on the plight of scullery workers and drovers’ children. One was a defenseless animal, after all, the other the progeny of illiteracy and an implied moral weakness.

Show ring terrier owners might brag that their dog or breed was descended from "certified fox killers," but in fact they did not really understand or feel comfortable around shepherds or the rough men who did pest control in the countryside.

This kind of social stratification was a natural element of the aristocracy and the rapidly growing middle class. Gamekeepers and terriermen were required, of course, but they were not the sort of people you had over for dinner, were they?

In the end, the goals of the Kennel Club and the RSPCA were essentially the same — to improve rough stock by setting new standards. For one, the rough stock included dogs. For both, it included men.

To order >> American Working Terriers 

• Terrier Work, Part 1
• Terrier Work, Part 2
• Terrier Work, Part 3
• Terrier Work , Part 4
• Terrier Work, Part 5
• Terrier Work, Part 6
• Terrier Work, Part 7
• Terrier Work, Part 8
• Terrier Work, Part 9
• Terrier Work, Part 10

The Armenian Genocide by Turks - 100 Years Ago

This is the day the Armenian community marks as the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the first genocide of the twentieth century.

As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and Turkey began to form as a nation, Turks killed off between a million and a million and a half Armenians.

The genocide was accomplished through the organized wholesale killing of able-bodied men and boys, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches to the Syrian desert. During the drive, deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre.

The term genocide was first coined, by Raphael Lemkin, not to describe the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, but the extermination of the Armenians by the Turks.

Fish On Friday

Brown pelicans hammer a school of fish.

This is an Ocean Sunfish or Mola Mola. These slow-moving giants weighover a ton, on average, and lay more eggs than any other fish in the world -- up to 300,000,000 at a time.

The Proclaimers :: 'Let’s Hear It For The Dogs’

The Proclaimers release their 10th studio album on April 27th.  It's entitled 'Let’s Hear It For The Dogs’ (Cooking Vinyl).  An oldy, but a goody, is appended below.

Terrier Work, Part 5 -- Classy People and Their Classy Dogs

Beginning in the 1860s, two phenomenon began to take hold in the UK, both of which were to have long-term ramifications for working terriers. 

The first was the rise of dog shows.
In 1800, there were only 15 designated breeds of dogs, but by 1865 that number had grown to more than 50 and was due to expand a great deal more.

The growth in breeds was partly due to the desire, during the Victorian era, to sort out the natural world. The kind of taxonomic classification that young Darwin had been doing with beetles and birds, others were now doing with fish, mammals, and every manner of domestic stock, including dogs.

In addition, the animal husbandry theories of Robert Bakewell and others had taken hold. Record keeping and the careful selection of sires produced variety and improvement at startling speeds.

With the development of new breeds of sheep, cattle, and chickens came livestock shows to display these wondrous new animals and market their services. A particularly spectacular tup (male sheep) might rent for 1,000 guineas a season, a bull 25 guineas per covered cow.

It was not all about meat, however. Stock shows became great social occasions, and were frequently sponsored by the aristocracy which, quite conveniently, also had the money to buy the best breeding stock for their own programs.

A problem developed, however. While Bakewell’s goal had been to breed better sheep and cattle for greater production and profit, stock show prizes were often awarded on the basis of size alone, regardless of the animal’s value as a meat or milk producer.

Show breeders defended this practice, noting that size alone could be judged honestly and easily in the ring. Feed-to-weight ratios could not be proven, nor could the quality of the meat, the amount of milk produced, or the number of eggs laid.

The size of an animal does not speak to the end product of steaks, milk and eggs, of course — a defect that became readily apparent when production was tracked on the farm. After a brief flurry of interest in the show ring, utility-minded farmers returned to longitudinal "pounds-and-pence" evaluation of animals.

For dogs, the deficiencies of show ring evaluation were not so obvious. Most dogs produced little more than excrement and amusement. For nonworking dogs, the social and economic value of ribbons remained unencumbered by any requirement that the dog produce a product of value or perform a specialized task.

Dogs were occasionally displayed and sold at farm shows in the 1830s and 40s, but the first dedicated dog show was held in Newcastle in 1859, the year Darwin’s Origins of Species was published.

In 1863 the first really big dog show — with more than 1,000 entries — was held in Chelsea, and that same year the first international dog show was held in London.

As noted earlier, this was a period of rapid "speciation" within the world of dogs. The rapid creation — or assertion — of new dog breeds created some confusion, especially when breeds were not yet distinct, or several breeds were lumped into one, or when true breeds were known by several different names.

In 1851, for example, the Yorkshire Terrier was also known as "the Broken-haired Scotch Terrier." It was not until 1870 that the Yorkshire Terrier was firmly designated as both a breed and a breed name. Before then litter mates were often shown in different breed categories — a situation that also occurred with the first prize-winning Jack Russell, which had previously been show as a prize-winning "white Lakeland."

In the manic days of early dog shows, such confusions were common. Some were intentional.

The "Old English Black and Tan Terrier," for example, was simply a ploy by English breeders attempting to appropriate Welsh Terriers (a show ring version of the Fell Terrier). The dog was "correctly" labeled after the Kennel Club intervened, but by then the "Black and Tan" had already been featured in a catalogue compiled by Vero Shaw.

A similar story can be told for the "English White Terrier," also featured by Shaw, which was nothing more that a smooth, white, foxing terrier crossbred with a lap dog.

The dog show world of the late Victorian era quickly outgrew and overwhelmed the much smaller, less flamboyant, world of the working terrier. Dog shows becoming social scenes, with middle class matrons insinuating themselves into Society by purchasing "purebred" puppies. As one Victorian periodical noted, "nobody now who is anybody can afford to be followed about by a mongrel dog."

It is hard to imagine what Reverend John Russell thought of all this.

When the first dog show was held in 1859, Russell was 64 years old. He was 78 when the Kennel Club was formed in 1873 — an old man who, due to poverty and age, had given up his beloved hounds for the last time two years earlier.

Though quite old, the Reverend was famous for his knowledge of hounds and terriers, and his ability, in former years, to ride 12 hours at a stretch. This was the Grand Old Man of Fox Hunting, and everyone knew he had been at it since the beginning.

With terriers front and center in the show ring world, it was a natural for the newly-forming Kennel Club to ask Russell if he would be a founding member. He agreed, no doubt flattered by a position of status, but also because it offered an opportunity to keep up with the dogs.

Russell was a judge at the Crystal Palace dog show in 1874 — one of the first large Kennel Club shows. He admired the look of the dogs, but alarm bells were apparently clanging in his head, for he somewhat humorously described his own dogs as "true terriers ... but differing from the present show dogs as the wild eglantine differs from a garden rose."

Russell never did allow his own terriers to be registered, noting that the qualities selected for in the show ring were of little use in the field.

No matter. The show ring was not interested in working dogs except as a theory untested by experience. The raison d’etre of dog shows was not dogs but people — people who, it turned out, were ready, willing and able to spend significant sums of money chasing ribbons.

By 1883 a magazine entitled The Fox Terrier Chronicle was being produced which covered the terrier elite the way other periodicals covered High Society. By 1886, Charles Cruft — a dog food salesman who never owned a dog himself — had taken over the Allied Terrier Show as a money-making vehicle.

The rapid differentiation between show dogs and working dogs, which the Reverend John Russell had already observed, became more pronounced as time went by. Increasing numbers of people bought terriers, bred terriers, wrote standards, or changed them. Points were given for the set of a dog’s tail, colorful markings on coats, the color of the eye, and even a dog’s "expression." By 1893 Rawdon Lee Briggs was writing in his book, "Modern Dogs," that:

"I have known a man act as a judge of fox terriers who had never bred one in his life, had never seen a fox in front of hounds, had never seen a terrier go to ground ... had not even seen a terrier chase a rabbit."

After almost half a century of formal shows, the author of a manual for dog owners noted that "the sportsman will as a rule have nothing to do with the fancier’s production."

The split between working terriers and show dog was virtually complete.

To order >> American Working Terriers 

• Terrier Work, Part 1
• Terrier Work, Part 2
• Terrier Work, Part 3
• Terrier Work, Part 4
• Terrier Work, Part 5
• Terrier Work, Part 6
• Terrier Work, Part 7
• Terrier Work, Part 8
• Terrier Work, Part 9
• Terrier Work, Part 10

Robert Nesta Marley Gets an Israeli Salute

This wonderful acapella version of Bob Marley's 'Could You Be Loved' was made by Israeli musicians in honor of what would have been the late Marley's 70th Birthday, on February 6th.

Stewart Brand on Why Extinction Is Not the Issue

Over at Aeon, the great Stewart Brand has a very nice piece on extinction that parallels what I have written on this blog.

Brand writes:

Many now assume that we are in the midst of a human-caused ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ to rival the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But we’re not. The five historic mass extinctions eliminated 70 per cent or more of all species in a relatively short time. That is not going on now. ‘If all currently threatened species were to go extinct in a few centuries and that rate continued,’ began a recent Nature magazine introduction to a survey of wildlife losses, ‘the sixth mass extinction could come in a couple of centuries or a few millennia.’

The range of dates in that statement reflects profound uncertainty about the current rate of extinction. Estimates vary a hundred-fold – from 0.01 per cent to 1 per cent of species being lost per decade. The phrase ‘all currently threatened species’ comes from the indispensable IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), which maintains the Red List of endangered species. Its most recent report shows that of the 1.5 million identified species, and 76,199 studied by IUCN scientists, some 23,214 are deemed threatened with extinction. So, if all of those went extinct in the next few centuries, and the rate of extinction that killed them kept right on for hundreds or thousands of years more, then we might be at the beginning of a human-caused Sixth Mass Extinction.

An all-too-standard case of extinction mislabeling occurred this January on the front page of The New York Times Magazine. ‘Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Shows,’ read the headline. But the article by Carl Zimmer described no such thing. Instead it was a relatively good-news piece pointing out that while much of sea life is in trouble, it is far less so than continental wildlife, and there is time to avoid the mistakes made on land. The article noted that, in the centuries since 1500, some 514 species have gone extinct on land but only 15 in the oceans, and none at all in the past 50 years....

The best summation I have seen of the current situation comes from John C Briggs, biogeographer at the University of South Florida, in a letter to Science magazine last November:

Most extinctions have occurred on oceanic islands or in restricted freshwater locations, with very few occurring on Earth’s continents or in the oceans. The world’s greatest conservation problem is not species extinction, but rather the precarious state of thousands of populations that are the remnants of once widespread and productive species.

...The frightening extinction statistics that we hear are largely an island story, and largely a story of the past, because most island species that were especially vulnerable to extinction are already gone...

But the main news from ocean islands is that new methods have been found to protect the vulnerable endemic species from their worst threat, the invasive predators, thus dramatically lowering the extinction rate for the future....

More than 800 islands worldwide have now been cleansed of their worst extinction threat, with more coming....

Throughout 3.8 billion years of evolution on Earth, the inexorable trend has been toward an ever greater variety of species. With the past two mass extinction events there were soon many more species alive after each catastrophe than there were before it....

Part of the problem is in the way we classify degrees of endangerment. The Red List categories read, in order: extinct; extinct in the wild; critically endangered; endangered; vulnerable (that goes for Atlantic cod); near-threatened; and least concern. ‘Least concern’ is strange language. What it means is ‘doing fine’. It applies to most of the 76,000 species researched by the IUCN, most of the 1.5 million species so far discovered, and most of the estimated 4 million or so species yet to be discovered. In the medical analogy, labelling a healthy species as ‘least concern’ is like labelling every healthy person ‘not dead yet’. It’s true, but what a way to think....

Of the several million species yet to be discovered, there is a reasonable argument that many are very rare and thus extra-vulnerable to extinction, but the common statement that ‘Species are going extinct faster than we can discover them’ does not hold up to scrutiny. According to the paper in Science ‘Can We Name Earth’s Species Before They Go Extinct?’ (2013) by the marine ecologist Mark J Costello at the University of Auckland and colleagues, the rate of documenting new species was 17,500 a year over the past decade, rising above 18,000 a year since 2006. There are ever more professional taxonomists (currently about 47,000) doing the work, along with burgeoning crowds of amateur taxonomists newly enabled by the internet. With a realistic current extinction rate of less than 1 per cent of species per decade and a discovery rate of something like 3 per cent a decade, the authors conclude: ‘the rate of species description greatly outpaces extinction rates’.