Information on working terriers, dogs, natural history, hunting, and the environment, with occasional political commentary as I see fit. This web log is associated with the Terrierman.com web site.
This 25-pounder was released after a short spell of puppy schooling. My neighbor has said he has had a big ninja raccoon getting into his trash. I am guessing it is this one. Wild animal schooling is my specialty.
This guy walked away like he was an old man strolling the neighborhood for a smoke. On the bottom picture, for both irony and photography, he is sitting on top of the stone dog house which is next to the puppy pens and the patio where I train the dogs. I released him into the puppy pen so I could get a picture or two of him, before he bolted. He did not bolt! A tough guy, perhaps now a little healthier, as I loaded him up with some Ivermectin inside a boiled egg.
The weirdest thing. I just came outside to check on the pups, who had been released outside to pee just a few minutes earlier. I found Moxie nuzzling this goldfish at the top of the driveway.
WTF? Not one of mine.
I pick it up and, unbelievably, it's still alive.
I rush down to my little pond and troll it through the water to increase the flow of water over its gills. I do this three times, and it swims off.
But it's not my goldfish. I know mine. Plus, the pups are bone dry. This goldfish has to have been dropped by a blue heron fishing someone else's pond nearby. The heron must have dropped it. Has to be... A mystery.
If a fish like this drops from the sky, is it a Goldfish or a Godfish?
Ivermectin sheep drench contains a 0.08 percent solution of Ivermectin and it does not have to be diluted. Given orally to dogs, it provides all the active ingredients you need to "prevent" heartworm or treat mange, ear mites, round worms, and hook worms. Ivermectin has a very broad “margin of error” or safety margin, and so doubling or even tripling the dose given here will do no harm except in certain rare bloodlines of Shelties, Collies, and a few other breeds with an inherited susceptibility to Ivermectin toxicity.
Up to 14 pounds: -- given 0.05 ml or or 1 drop from an eye dropper, assuming 20 drops per ml)
15 to 29 pounds: 0.1 ml (two drops)
30 to 58 pounds: 0.2 ml (four drop)
59 to 88 pounds: 0.3 ml (6 drops)
89 to 117 pounds: 0.4 ml (8 drops)
118 to 147 pounds: 0.5 ml (10 drops)
An 8 oz bottle of Ivermectin sheep drenchcan be bought for $40 and it contains enough Ivermectin to give 4,720 doses to a terrier. To put it another way, if I dosed my dogs every month during warm weather (a maximum of 8 months around here), this bottle would last me 590 years of coverage for one dog.
There is a good business to be made by simply buying $40 worth of Ivermectin sheep drench and repackaging it in 40 eye drop bottles and selling it $15 a bottle. The 118 terrier-sized doses in each $15 bottle would last a person with three terrier-sized dogs 5 years! And the profit for repackaging those 40 bottles, and relabeling them. would be about $500 for just a few minutes work. Ka-Ching!
A Wasp Has Been Named After Harry Potter Dementor's Right idea!
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Planned Economy Makes Largest Empty City
Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, China, was built for a city of 1.3 million, but only 2% of the city is occupied.
The Contrived Fear of Glysophate
The World Health Organization tossed out nearly every bit of reproducible evidence to suggest that Glysophate is carcinogenic. But "... a large and long study of pesticide applicators on American farms did not find any problems." Read the rest of the story of how the WHO tossed out all of the evidence in order to justify their conclusion, and why that conclusion does not mean what it sounds like.
How to Sharpen Your Machete Just because we need something to set up this clip of Danny Trejo.
Cell Phone Texting Fraud
A group of charlatans and con men created a scheme to charge mobile phone customers tens of millions of dollars in monthly fees for unsolicited, recurring text messages about topics such as horoscopes, celebrity gossip, and trivia facts, without the customers’ knowledge or consent -- a practice the defendants referred to as "auto-subscribing".
I found this parked in my regular spot at work. My spot is not reserved, so I just parked next to it, but the car was very small and short, so I noticed. What was it? It turns out it's a Spark EV (electric vehicle) made by Chevrolet. This car is a $140 a month lease with no money down. So far, this car is only available in California, Maryland, and Oregon. The Spark EV qualifies for single-occupant use in the carpool lanes in California and Maryland. The car is made (or assembled) in Brownstown, Michigan. My current Ford SUV is probably my last pure internal-combustion car. I hope to get it to 200,000 miles (80,000 miles more), at which point I expect that my flying car will finally be ready.
The S.S. United States is the largest ocean liner constructed entirely in the U.S., and the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic in either direction.
Built in 1952, at a cost of $78 million, my family were passengers on her to London in 1967.
Her last uninterupted transatlantic passenger service was in 1969.
This massive ship has been docked, abandoned, on Pier 82 in Philadelphia since 1996. She towers over everything around her.
I've delayed bringing on the pups because Moxie is so small (9 pounds) and she is SO amped for bear.
I have been working them both on squirrels in the go-to-ground tunnel in the back yard, and they've been doing great. But the squirrels get wise, and I am stupid, and so while loading a squirrel yesterday I let it go prematurely. What to do?
Never deterred too long, I pulled out a bigger box trap and caught a raccoon! Things progressed nicely, and the raccoon was released safe and sound (and well fed) after a little terrier training. "No animals were harmed in the making of this movie." With any luck, this raccoon will move out of the neighborhood and stop raiding my neighbor's trash can.
Up a mulberry tree next to the pond, just as the night falls.
This is Mountain Girl asleep in her stone dog house. I built this stone dog house back when Trooper was getting so arthritic he could not get up and down the stairs to the always-heated-in-winter, always-cool-in-summer dog houses inside the garage. Now Mountain Girl has gotten deaf enough that I can walk right up to her asleep on a thick pile of straw inside. I've never done that before! This stone dog house has a slightly sloped floor that drains out the front, with thick foam insulation all around, faced with thick stone on the sides and bottom. Ivy coats the ouside sides and top, making for a kind of evergreen stone cave. The door is narrow, but inside three terriers can curl up with plenty of room for all, and 10 inches of dry straw underneath.
Aside from the dog houses inside the garage, and the stone dog house in back, and the sunny spot on top of the the driveway, Mountain also has a special spot on top of two hay bales under the eave of the house, tucked behind a big boxwood, right next to the driveway. Here she is out of the rain, out of the sun, out of the wind, high up and dry and able to hear and see all that come to the house. Or at least that was how it used to be. Her hearing is going, and now I can drive up the driveway and sometimes catch her snuggled in and sawing away. Good dog!
Magic dust found in aisle #3 at Pet Smart. Notice that it works for everything: inappapropriate marking, excessive barking, and chewing! And did you notice that it is "veterinarian formulated?" You pay extra for that!
RSPCA members will vote to fill five of 25 seats on council this month, and there are just eight candidates.
One candidate is dangerous idiotJohn Bryant, who has previously been on the RSPCA board and is a former chief officer of the League Against Cruel Sports. He say he wants all dogs and cats spayed and neutered, and he wants to abolish all pet ownership completely. He has compared owning dogs and cats to owning slaves. Another certifiable loonand budget killer is Peta Watson-Smith, a vegan, who has compared the raising of farm animals to the Nazi holocaust. Speaking to The Times, she said: "I don't think people always appreciate what is the holocaust going on behind closed doors. You talk about the Jews." Also standing for election are Dr Dan Lyons and Angela Roberts who run the Centre for Animals and Social Justice in Sheffield and who have suggested that seats should be reserved in parliament for representatives elected solely to represent animals. However the vote goes, at least one or more of these people are going to be part of the inbred cabal of nut jobs, con men, grifters, liars, and direct mail profiteers ripping off old ladies in order to wage war on those who raise animals for the table and manage wildlife for sustainability.
As I have noted in the past, the national RSCA raises vast sums of money under the pretense of helping homeless dogs and cats, but they spend almost nothing on that mission.
Most of the money raised by the RSPCA goes to fund more dunning notices and solicitation letters.
Bret Michaels? Why the fark is he being paid to endorse a dog tug? Hell, I can't even remember what cross-dressing band he was in. Poison? Yes, this group of transvestites (see below). He's the second one from the left. Someone, somewhere, somehow, presented this as a marketing coup. The mind reels. Money traded hands for this. Why?
This is my mother fishing, somewhere between 70 and 75 years ago. The top picture is with her and a cane pole in the creek at Longton, Kansas. Below is my mother in Minnesota with a stringer of assorted species.
This is a great little group called Show of Hands and these two songs can be found on Centenary: Words And Music Of The Great War which is a 2-CD set at a great price. One CD is music with poems read by Jim Carter (Carson the butler on Downton Abbey) and his wife Imelda Staunton (Dolores Umbridge in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Show of Hands, of course, is Steve Knightley, Phil Beer, and upright-bassist Miranda Sykes.
Knightly, along with being a phenomenal musician (as are Beer and Sykes), has a degree in history and his grandfather, Sergeant Thomas Knightley, served in The Great War. If you have never hear of Show of Hands, plug them into Pandora for a listen!
Brussels' Manneken Pis statue of a urinating baby can be found in gardens and fountains all over the world.
Less well known is Zinneke Pis, the statue of a dog who is forever lifting his leg onto a Brussels street pole. Zinneke Pis was installed in the center of Brussels, on the corner of Rue des Chartreux and Rue de Vieux-Marche, in 1998. The creator of the dog lives in the neighborhood, and he modeled it after his own pet.
Every one in a while a very important article comes along, and I want folks to read it so much that I blast it to the world. This is one of those articles. Written by Jesse H. Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University, it is entitled The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment. Read the whole thing!
A series of “decouplings” is occurring, so that our economy no longer advances in tandem with exploitation of land, forests, water, and minerals. American use of almost everything except information seems to be peaking. This is not because the resources are exhausted, but because consumers have changed consumption, and because producers changed production. These changes in behavior and technology are today liberating the environment.
Agriculture has always been the greatest destroyer of nature, stripping and despoiling it, and reducing acreage left. Then, in about 1940, acreage and yield decoupled in the United States. Since then American farmers have quintupled corn while using the same or even less land. Corn matters because its production towers over other crops, totaling more tons than wheat, soy, rice, and potatoes together.
The average yield of American farmers is nowhere near a ceiling. In 2013, David Hula, a farmer in Virginia, grew a US and probably world record: 454 bushels of corn per acre –– three times the average yield in Iowa. His tractor cab is instrumented like the office of a high-speed Wall Street trader. In 2014, Hula’s harvest rose 5 percent higher to 476 bushels, while Randy Dowdy, who farms near Valdosta, Georgia, busted the 500-bushel wall with a yield of 503 bushels per acre and won the National Corn Growers Contest.
Now, one can ask if Americans need all that corn. We eat only a small fraction of corn creamed or on the cob, or as tortillas or polenta. Most corn becomes beef or pork, and increasingly we feed it to cars. An area the size of Iowa or Alabama grows corn to fuel vehicles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manneken_Pis
Crucially, rising yields have not required more tons of fertilizer or other inputs. The inputs to agriculture have plateaued and then fallen — not just cropland but nitrogen, phosphates, potash, and even water. A recent meta-analysis by Wilhelm Klümper and Matin Qaim of 147 original studies of recent trends in high-yield farming for soy, maize, and cotton, funded by the German government and the European Union, found a 37 percent decline in chemical pesticide use while crop yields rose 22 percent. This is the story of precision agriculture, in which we use more bits, not more kilowatts or gallons.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people think that how much money they have -- and spend -- is an index of their worth as people and sophistication as consumers.
Wine has one function -- to get you drunk, same as beer. Oh, you drink it for the taste? Right. When was the last time you drank a six-pack of diet coke at one sitting, or split a 2-litter bottle of root beer you paid $40 for? Never and never.
The idea that something is better because it is expensive is the oldest con in the world -- made real by constant repetition of the con man's favorite line: "you get what you pay for." That's less often true than not.
Price-gouging the fancy folks with their sniffing pretensions of respectability and "special" knowledge is the oldest game in town. People want the best to show THEY are the best. We see it in veterinary offices, don't we? Spend $130 for a spay or neuter at a local humane society clinic, and you will be told "you get what you pay for." Really? Actually, you will get a better job done at a low-cost spay-neuter clinic simply because they do so many of them and are practiced. And what about a dog with a simple pulled muscle? The vet will charge you a fortune and you will think he is better because of it! Vets know this and load on the charges as a consequence.
The same phenomenon occurs in human health care, where the same medicines, made in the same factories in Puerto Rico, are sold to Americans at three times the price that folks in Mexico, Canada, or Europe pay. We are supposed to think we get better health care because we pay more, but in fact statistics show we get worse health care at twice the price. Some bargain!
How about dog food? Folks who spend too little time with their dogs, till have sniffing pretensions about being "better" owners than other people, and they prove it to themselves by paying too much for dog food, and never mind if no dog food has ever been shown to be better than another.
And how about dogs? The health and working abilities of Kennel Club dogs are demonstrably worse than cross-bred dogs, and almost no one serious about hunting, pulling, or herding, is looking to the show ring for their animals. And yet, here too, folks pay big dollars not for health or performance but because of sniffing pretension and misguided values and the suggestion that if you pay more you will get a better dog. That's rarely true!
So, to come back to it: If you're broke, one question to ask yourself is how big a stupidity tax you are paying. For many folks this is one of their single biggest line-item expenses.
Dog Walking? There's an "App" for That The "Wag" app allows you to order a dog walker on your smartphone up to 30 minutes before you need a walker and dog walkers can also be scheduled regularly. The service launches in New York City today with 75 dog walkers throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, and it’s already operating in Los Angeles and San Francisco.Owners can opt to meet their dog walker ahead of time and can also track their dog via the app. They’ll also receive a “report card” with a photo of their dog, a map of the walk, and a “pee-poop” status update. Each Wag walk costs $20 per half hour per dog and can be ordered either in 30- or 60-minute blocks. An additional dog from the same household is another $5.
Bringing Back the America Chestnut Thanks to GMO There used to be over 3 billion Chestnut trees in eastern North America -- 25% of the Appalachian forest. Beginning in 1907, and spreading quickly, howevever, chestnut blight imported from Asia wiped them all out. Now scientists think they may have the solution to bringing the Chestnut back -- adding wheat genes. Rewriting History Scientists are pushing back the clock, and now they say that dogs have been around for about 30,000 years, and that stone tools predate humans by at least 500,000 years. The Squirrel and Bird Partnership It seems “squirrels understand ‘bird’ and birds understand ‘squirrel” with predator alarm calls spreading through a forest at speeds over 100 miles an hour. Texas Ranches Saved the Scimitar-Horned Oryx The scimitar-horned oryx has been extinct in Africa since the mid 1980’s but thanks to hunter-driven conservation efforts somewhere between 6,000 to 10,000 of the animals can still be found in Texas. Rhino Farms in Texas? The Exotic Wildlife Association is proposing moving as many as one thousand African rhinoceros be moved to Texas in order to conserve and propagate the endangered species. Rather than attempt to build a rhinoceros sanctuary, the organization intends to adopt the animals into private homes. Miracle Weight Loss? The roots, leaves, and flowers of the Thunder God Vine are highly toxic, but new research suggests a compound found in the plants roots could be a brand-new approach to treat obesity. A compound called Celastrol, found in the roots of the Thunder God Vine, may increase the body’s sensitivity to leptin which helps fight obesity. Mice given oral doses of Celastrol lost an average of 45 percent of their body weight – and they lost body fat, not lean mass. The research was published in the journal Cell.
This carving of a hare chasing a greyhound was discovered earlier this year on a building stone at Vindolanda at Hadrian's Wall. This stone probably came from an earlier temple to Diana, the goddess of hunting, constructed around the year 100.
In Australia, PETA tried totake a guy to court for swearing in front of sheep. I kid you not!
The complaint was lodged by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which had apparently obtained footage and testimony from an undercover operative working at the station. For Ken Turner, who operates Boorungie Station, the complaint itself suggests the sheep could at least understand English. "The basis for the concerns was the rights of the animals, that they might have been harassed by viewing things they shouldn't have seen or verbal abuse by people using bad language," he said. "To my knowledge, there was no actual cruelty on the job.
"The allegation was that bad language was used by an employee on the property in front of the sheep, and that they could have been offended by the use of bad language." While describing claims about verbal abuse of animals as "rare", Mr Coleman said the RSPCA took such allegations seriously.
The federal government and the statescreated and encouraged racial segregation which resulted in the creation of ghettos with poor services and high rents. This was not an accident; it was intentional policy. Listen below -- our first radio show embed.
Of course, it was not just in the creation of ghettos that government had a hand. Government also created and backed the financial instruments that underpinned much of the plantation system of slavery. In order for cotton and sugar production to expand, planters just starting out needed loans to buy slaves and land. Louisiana bankers Hugues Lavergne and Edmond Jean Forstall allowed slaveholders to use what few slaves they had as collateral for loans, and then Lavergne and Forstall repackaged these loans into financial instruments backed by the Louisiana state government with public money. Once secured with public money, European financiers confidently bought slave-based securities, which in turn pumped dependable European currency into America’s agricultural economy.
Every one in a while a very important article comes along, and I want folks to read it so much that I blast it to the world. This is one of those articles. Written by Jesse H. Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University, it is entitled The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment. Read the whole thing!
Back in the 1970s, it was thought that America’s growing appetite might exhaust Earth’s crust of just about every metal and mineral. But a surprising thing happened: even as our population kept growing, the intensity of use of the resources began to fall. For each new dollar in the economy, we used less copper and steel than we had used before — not just the relative but also the absolute use of nine basic commodities, flat or falling for about 20 years (Figure 8). By about 1990, Americans even began to use less plastic. America has started to dematerialize.... The reversal in use of some of the materials so surprised me that Iddo Wernick, Paul Waggoner, and I undertook a detailed study of the use of 100 commodities in the United States from 1900 to 2010. One hundred commodities span just about everything from arsenic and asbestos to water and zinc. The soaring use of many resources up to about 1970 makes it easy to understand why Americans started Earth Day that year. Of the 100 commodities, we found that 36 have peaked in absolute use, including the villainous arsenic and asbestos (Figure 9). Another 53 commodities have peaked relative to the size of the economy, though not yet absolutely. Most of them now seem poised to fall (Figure 10). They include not only cropland and nitrogen, but even electricity and water. Only 11 of the 100 commodities are still growing in both relative and absolute use in America. These include chickens, the winning form of meat. Several others are elemental vitamins, like the gallium and indium used to dope or alloy other bulk materials and make them smarter.
Much dematerialization does not surprise us, when a single pocket-size smartphone replaces an alarm clock, flashlight, and various media players, along with all the CDs and DVDs.
But even Californians economizing on water in the midst of a drought may be surprised at what has happened to water withdrawals in America since 1970. Expert projections made in the 1970s showed rising water use to the year 2000, but what actually happened was a leveling off. While America added 80 million people –– the population of Turkey –– American water use stayed flat. In fact, US Geological Survey data through 2010 shows that water use has now declined below the level of 1970, while production of corn, for example, has tripled (Figure 11). More efficient water use in farming and power generation contribute the most to the reduction.
Three wildflowers in a field while out walking the dogs yesterday. The bottom is Queen Anne's Lace or wild carrot, but if anyone knows what the other two are, let me know in the comments.
This 5,000-pound Manta Ray was caught in 1933, about 7 miles off the coast of Brielle, New Jersey. It got tangled in the anchor line and almost sunk the boat. The baby in the Captain's hand was born after the ray was landed with the help of the Coast Guard. Manta Ray's are very slow reproducers, only producing one or two pups every 1-5 years in the wild.
This was me as a little shaver with the house man/gardener and our dog at that time (named "Charlie," I think) who was on a long-term "borrow" from the French lady next door.
My earliest memories are of Mali. I think this gardener was the fellow who used to beat giant "flying fox" bats -- fruit bats with wings spanning 2.5 feet -- -- out of the mango and fig trees in our yard.
A company called DogTilligent has developed an "All-in-One Smart Dog Collar" that has GPS, WiFi capability, an accelerometer, a thermometer, a speaker, LED lights, and a microphone.
Why?
Why? You ask WHY?! Did you ask that when a man climbed Mount Everest? Did you ask that when we sent a man to the moon? Did you ask that when we sent American troops to kill people overseas?
You did? Well O.K. then. Why is always a good question.
The short answer is because they can, and they hope to turn a profit,
The collar is said to "help a dog owner keep track of the dog by warning when the collar has traveled beyond a predetermined location. The Virtual Leash warns the dog when it’s moving away from a human companion by whistling, vibrating, and simulating a tug on the collar."
Awesome. And the dog is supposed to know what this means how?
The DogTelligent app includes pre-programmed commands like sit, stay, down, and come that makes training easier.
Right. A small failure here in common sense.
Pressing a button on a smart phone is not easier, faster, more reliable, or better than a voice command. A voice does not need Wi-Fi and always has battery power.
Training a dog is not about issuing a command -- it's about understanding the command, and that understanding is made through reward, timing, recognition, repetition, and consequence, building towards reliability.
Another point: The fact that this collar vibrates does NOT make this collar an "invisible fence." Stop using that word.
The GPS is great, but as for the "bluetooth technology, WiFi, cellular communication, accelerometer, ambient temperature sensors, ultrasonic micro-speaker, micro-speaker, and microphone" all of that is electronic waste. No one needs any of that. Seriously. And what about the rest of the stuff this company is also developing but which also fails to address a real need and/or is not made for the real world? Scrap it and focus on doing ONE thing right.
For those who wonder, this collar is vapor ware for the moment.
It is not being made by someone who has made a line of ecollars in the past (such as Greg Van Curen, who started Innotek, sold it, and is now developing great new collars at E-Collar Technologies).
Instead, we are invited to an Indiegogo page where we can pre-order the collar for $120 (a $39 savings "off retail value").
If past campaigns of this type are any indication of how fast it will come, expect a wait of about a year, no real cost savings over that "retail value," and some production and operational problems with the first models.
If I sound cynical, it is only because I am used to folks over-hyping new technology and it's been done (a lot) in the e-collar arena, as I have noted in the past. Calling this a "smart phone" for your dog presupposes a dog needs a phone. It doesn't.
Watch the video below and see how attractive this sales pitch is for the dog owner who is not thinking too much, is not very observant, and is a little too quick to pull a credit card.
Watch the dog go into the road and the owner, driving in his car, tell the dog to SIT. In the road.
And why is the dog in the road in the first place? Because the "invisible fence" provides nothing more than tone and vibration.
There's more foolishness wrapped in great graphics and a smooth sales pitch, but see for yourself, below.
My advice is: If you need an invisible fence or a dog training collar, go with a company that has a track record in making those. This is not that company.
This is my grandfather, Ed Dunlop of Augusta and Longton, Kansas with his hunting dog, Duke.
My grandfather again, this time with an earlier dog by the name of Joker. Apparently you wore a tie when you went hunting back then, and boots that laced to your knees. I can't say Joker was conformationally correct. In fact, he looks a bit like a bag of walnuts!
This is my grandfather, wearing a white skimmer hat, white pants, and riding a horse with my mother at the front of the saddle. This would have been on the farm in Longton, Kansas in the late 1930s.
