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.
Back in 2010, the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) quoted this blogin the cover story of All Animals magazine, which is HSUS's full-color bimonthly magazine which goes out to their members.
In a long, well-written, and fair piece, author Carrie Allan lays out The Purebred Paradox whose strap line is "Is the quest for the 'perfect dog' driving a genetic health crisis?"
Once upon a time, people believed that purebred dogs were naturally healthier than mixed breeds. How have we arrived at a point where it may be safer to presume the opposite? ....
.... The more limited the number of mates, the greater the chance a dog will be bred with a relative who shares similar genes. Genetic diseases are caused by recessive genes, so a good gene from one parent will trump a bad gene from the other. But if both parents have a bad gene—such as one that predisposes them to hip dysplasia or blindness—the likelihood of a sick puppy increases.
“What happens when you have a small and inbreeding population is that the probability of two negative recessive genes finding each other increases as the gene pool chokes down to a smaller and smaller pool,” says Patrick Burns, a Dogs Today columnist who frequently writes about genetic health issues on his blog, Terrierman’s Daily Dose.
A closed registry that allows no “new blood” into the mix exacerbates the problem, he argues: “In many AKC dogs, the founding gene pool was less than 50 dogs. For some breeds, it was less than 20 dogs.”
This year’s Westminster champion, a Scottish terrier named Sadie, hails from one of these tiny gene pools and is “very heavily inbred,” says Burns. The limited ancestry for AKC-registered Scotties, he adds, helps explain why 45 percent die of cancer.
“We do not need to have a closed registry to keep a breed,” Burns says, pointing out that breeds existed long before there was an organization to track them. “We did not create the dogs we love in a closed registry system—we have only ruined them there.”
Read the whole thing. The HTML version (multiple jump pages) is here, and the PDF version (8 pages) is here.
This is one of the longest and best articles done so far on the American "dog mess" that is a confluence between disease, deformity and defect caused by inbreeding and contrived and twisted breed standards, and the sick internacine economic relationships that exist between puppy mills and the AKC.
This article also details what has been going on in the United Kingdom since the advent of Pedigree Dogs Exposed. As Carrie Allan writes:
[I]in the United Kingdom, at least, there seems to be momentum for change. Whether that momentum will gather steam in the U.S. remains to be seen
Spread this article around!
Remember that if you want the Humane Society of the U.S. to move in the right direction, you need to click and treat.
I assure you this is the right direction. They have not taken any gratuitous swipes at pedigree dogs or dog breeders. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Take this line for example. Anyone think this is not fair and well-said?
At The HSUS, we’re big fans of adoption. By going to a local shelter or rescue group, you stand a good chance of both saving a life and finding a purebred — after all, they make up an estimated 25 percent of dogs in shelters.
When you can’t find the dog you’re looking for, however, responsible breeders are another option; they are devoted to their animals’ well-being and committed to placing them in loving homes. And if every shelter dog were adopted and every puppy mill were shuttered, there would still be a need for good breeders to supply dogs to American households.
Full applause to HSUS for this article, and to author Carrie Allan in particular. This is a big subject, and she has done an extraordinarily good job of wrapping herself around it and presenting it in a cogent and fair manner.
The facts are clear: Kennel Club papers prove nothing but inbreeding.
Kennel Club dogs, as a group, are provably LESS healthy than dogs at the pound.
NO breed's health has been improved by being pulled into the Kennel Club. So why do people buy pedigree dogs?
More often than not, people are buying dogs that they hope will convey wealth, position, expertise, knowledge or a special quality that they hope will make them look interesting.
Some call it snobbism, but really it's the same sad vanity that exists in all of us.
Who wants to look into a mirror and see reality?
The very reason we have dogs is that they mirror back to us a lie: that we are smarter, nicer, and more wonderful than we really are.
Dogs make us feel better. That's great, but why do we so often made the dogs feel worse?
Why do we go on hurting the ones we love? Why must German shepherds limp through life and French bulldogs barely breathe? ... Rigid tastes, latent class consciousness, a belief in blood “purity,” naive notions on authenticity — and a tendency to sometimes love dogs for the wrong reasons — override a wealth of information available on the dangers of inbreeding, the downsides to extreme anatomies, and the evils of the pet industry today. Well-intentioned animal lovers with minds open to this broader historical perspective might wake up one morning to a revelation: dogs don’t need to be neatly standardized, packaged, and sealed to be our friends.
No, they don't -- and America, at least, has noticed.
Today, more than half of all dogs (about 54%) are cross-breeds or mongrels and the number of dogs registered by the American Kennel Club has never been lower, falling from over over 1.52 million in 1992, to about 400,000 today.
There are approximately 75 million dogs in the U.S.
Every year about 7 million new dogs are acquired in the U.S. to replace those that die from disease, old age, or accident.
To put it another way, AKC registrations account for only 6 percent of all dogs in the U.S.
What about the other 40 percent of dogs that are purebred but not registered? The vast majority of these are casually-bred Labrador or Golden retrievers, Boxers, Yorkies, Beagles, Toy Poodles, or German Shepherds that had one-off litters, with the unregistered offspring going to family, friends or local acquaintances.
Other dogs are registered in breed specific registries unaffiliated with the AKC, such as the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America, the American Border Collie Association, or the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club.
One registry, American Field, registers a type of dog (bird dogs) rather than one breed or all breeds, and it is the oldest registry in the U.S.
There are two or three more-or-less respectable all breed organizations: the United Kennel Club, the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI), and the Canadian Kennel Club. None of these clubs are paragons of virtue. In reality, they are little more than AKC-lite with all of the same problems.
Finally, we come to an entire file drawer of all- or multi-breed registries such as the American Rare Breed Association, the Continental Kennel Club, the World Wide Kennel Club, the International Progressive Dog Breeders Alliance, the National Kennel Club, and the Animal Research Foundation.
These registries are just cranking out paper.
The AKC will tell you these bottom-feeder registries are awful, but in fact they are only awful because they are competing head-to-head with the AKC and will sell you worthless paper for less.
If the "papers" are actually meaningless (and they are), why would anyone pay anything, much less more?
The puppy mill folks figured it out pretty quickly, and so now the American Kennel Club (which has always be dependent on puppy mill registrations) is now in a "race to the bottom" in registration fees, and is actually given discounts to puppy millers that they are not extending to more reputable breeders. How's that for getting treated special and telling the world your values?
In the not too distance future, robot dogs may replace real canines for certain kinds of work, such as explosive- and drug-detection, and battle field reconnaissance.
The robot, Spot, seen above, is seen as a possible alternative to military dogs, and is being tested by the U.s. Marine Corps just up the road in Quantico, Virginia.
Spot is capable of walking point ahead of troops and poking into houses or around corners where its head-mounted spinning camera gives a full field of vision.
The 160-pound robot is battery-powered and remotely controlled, with the operator as far as 1,600 feet away. After scanning a room, it can crouch down to get out of the way of troops storming in behind it, just like a real dog.
This picture is out of Finland, and I have a hard time believing its not staged, as Amanita muscaria is a powerful hallucinogen and an occasional poison. A fox that ate half a mushroom would be riding a pink unicorn. And yet, fox eat strange stuff, and even poisons, all the time. What do you think?
This is hilarious. Blake Rodriguez runs Dream Come True K9 in New York City, and is a fun guy who uses balanced dog training to great effect. This lady and her dog clearly NEED Blake, but this woman says she "doesn't believe in his methods." Right. And look at the results from her methods!
This lady holds on to failure because, for her, it's not about the dog, but about her own image of self. This poor woman clearly has a leash-reactive dog, but instead of dealing with that issue, she reinforces the behavior by tossing it cookies, picking up the dog, and walking backwards past "the problem." But, of course, she is the problem!
A very good example of the now-rare Manage Shepherd
At the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th Century, a kind of fervent nationalism crept into Europe as nations, regions, and people tried to differentiate themselves.
One way this occurred was in the shattering of broad types of dogs into individual breeds.
We see this with setters, spaniels, terriers, and molossers, but it also occurred with water dogs, which were shivered into Portuguese Water Dogs, Spanish Water Dogs, French Barbets, and two sizes of Poodles (to say nothing of the cord-coated dogs, which are now quite rare).
Shepherd dogs too were split into many breeds, the most famous of which is the German Shepherd.
It should be noted that the "shepherd" moniker is tossed about almost as willy-nilly as the term "terrier." Though there are dogs called Caucasian Shepherds (Ovcharka), Anatolian Shepherds,and Bucovina Shepherds, these dogs should properly be thought of as molosser types.
Along with German Shepherds (which have given us the White Shepherd, the Shiloh Shepherd, and the King Shepherd) there is also the Basque Shepherd (both rough and smooth), the Dutch Shepherd, the Berger Picard, the French Briard, the Beauceron, and five types of Belgian shepherds, the Laekenois, the Malinois, the Tervueren, the Groenendael, and the Manage or Management Shepherd.
The Laekenois is namedfor the Brussels suburb of Laeken, where they were first bred, and they have a rough brown coat with a black overlay.
The Malinois is named for the Belgian city of Malines, and has a short-haired brown coat with black overlay.
The Tervuren is named after a village east of Brussels, where the first Tervuren were bred, and has a long-haired brown coat with black overlay.
The Groenendael (pronounced Groan-en-dahl) is named after the village of Groenendael, where Nicolas Rose first bred these long-haired solid-black dogs.
The Management Shepherd was named after the town of Manage, located just outside of Brussels, and has a short tan coat without a black overlay, but often with a black mask.
It is said that the Management Shepherd is actually the foundation dog of all other Belgian shepherds and is, in fact a direct descendant of the dog owned by Saint Hubert when he cured people of rabies by poking hot nails and keys into their wounds.
The four types of Belgian Shepherds recognized by the AKC. Not shown: the Manage Shepherd.
Over the course of the last 56 years, the Management Shepherd has become increasingly rare, and today there are only a few scattered individuals left, almost all of them in the hands of experienced dog men in and around the town of Manage, Belgium. The Management Shepherd is also the official dog of the management firm McKinsey & Company.
The dog shown here is owned by noted dog trainer and pod cast personality Chad Mackin of Pack to Basics Dog Training near Houston, Texas, and was a gift to him from Robert Van Dam, the twin brother of Belgian actor and martial arts expert Jean-Claude Van Damme (yes, they spell their names differently).
The most famous Management Shepherd was, Ricardo, a dog responsible for saving scores of men during the Battle of the Marnes when it dove into a bunker and disabled a machine gunner -- a story later magnified in the telling by Germans who spoke of the "Teufelshunde" or "devil dogs" being used by the other side.
For his bravery, Ricardo was given the Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold, Belgium's highest military honor.
Yesterday's post about "box checking and pigeon-holing" in the world of Pit Bulls has someone, rather predictably, pointing to a "study" of multi-mixed dogs that has been paired against "breed DNA tests" and compared to some unknown group of "dog experts."
Right. My first click turned up a dog that the DNA tests said was made of 5 breeds, including "Glen of Imaal" terrier, one of the rarest breeds of dogs in the world. I laughed. Next! And next was even more absurd: adog described as 25% Beauceron, 25% Boxer, 15.03% Ibizian Hound, and
12.96% Chinese Crested. Notice the precision! Notice the rarity.
If you cannot smell a massive pile of steaming bullshit when standing neck deep in it, I cannot help you. This is what Maddie's Fund does? Good lord, please tell me they do better work than this!
I am not sure what a dog expert is in this context, but since there are 500 of them, you can be sure they are not Pit Bull experts. In fact, it seems they are a mix of poorly educated and low-paid shelter workers, dog groomers, dog breeders, and vet techs, along with a few vets and perhaps one or two dog trainers. Any of them actually know much about Pit Bulls? Probably not. These are the kind of folks who, if shown a Patterdale Terrier, a Jagd Terrier, or an Italian Greyhound would start typing "Chihuahua". They are "experts" by dint of owning more than one all-breed book.
Jay Jack, over at Three Bad Bullies and Next Level Dogs actually does know about Pit Bulls, and he writes about the "Pit Bull identity crisis," in the no-bullshit manner that someone who smells of dog and sweat, rather than lamp and ink, actually has. Read the whole thing.
This previously mentioned "study" embraces the ridiculous practiceof showing folks a single picture of a dog, devoid of scale.
That's the kind of paper-hanging stuff we see all the time in the world of dogs. I myself sat through an entire lecture of someone showing snapshots of dogs as she told the group what every dog was feeling at the moment the picture was taken. No, she could not remember what was actually going on when the picture was taken. She was "reading their expressions" now. It seems she had culled through thousands of pictures and was now making up the story to fit the picture based on the set of the tail, the lay of the ear, the look in the eye, etc. This was all being done from static pictures, and it was very amusing to me, as I was reminded of those Beyoncé action shots taken at her Super Bowl performance. Let's get Stanley Coren to interpret those!
The part that was most amusing about this "study," however, is that it uses breed identification DNA tests to "tell us" what breed a dog REALLYis.
It is to laugh. Breed identification DNA tests are a sure-fire way to make money for those who sell them, including veterinarians who are paid for product endorsement.
But do they work?
No.
In fact, the results shown below are common: a pure-breed dog comes back as being a vague pastiche of three or four breeds.
Breed DNA tests are not too different from Gypsy Fortune telling, Fortune Cookies, the I-Ching, Numerology and Tarot Card reading: If you give a vague-enough answer, the believers will rationalize whatever result you give them, pounding the square peg into the round hole.
This is especially true for mixed-breed dogs. The folks sending in their dog's DNA for testing here do not care what the answer is, so long as it answers the question. Even an obviously wrong answer gives them a story to tell when someone, inevitably, asks: "What kind of dog is that?"
So what's going on? It's pretty simple: there are hundreds of breeds of dogs, but the DNA tests only definitelyID's a few dozen. The gaps are "filled in" by claiming a dog is a cross of this and that.
But what about the Mars Veterinary WISDOM Panel™ MX or their even newer scam, the WISDOM Panel™ "Professional" that the vets are selling? Surely those veterinarian-administered test works well, right?
Ughh .... NO.
But don't take my word for it.
Mars Veterinary's own web site says the tests are pure crap. Or, to be more precise, they say that if you actually KNOW what AKC breed of dog you have (because you have pedigree papers for your dog going back to the start of the registry more than 120 years ago) then they cannot help you.
But if you don't know what breed of dog you have, then they can positively tell you what you have.
The WISDOM Panel™ MX test was designed to determine the breed makeup of mixed-breed dogs. Its development involved the analyses of more than 19 million DNA markers from more than 13,000 purebred and mixed-breed dogs to best tell breeds in a mixed-breed dog apart.
In order to determine if a dog is a purebred, Mars Veterinary would ideally need DNA samples that cover all family lines for each breed of purebred dog. But since their focus was the development of a test capable of accurately determining the breeds in a mixed-breed dog, they did not focus on collecting such a catalogue of purebred dog DNA samples.
What's that mean? Not a damn thing! It's poppycock. It's typing by a monkey. It's stupid on stilts, with a side-order of bunko and larceny.
It's the get-out-of-jail card the company can point to when their DNA "test" is shown to be inaccurate, pure crap, and a complete fraud.
In fact, the question itself is paired with this question on the MX web site: "Is Mars Veterinary worried about lawsuits?" This is their answer: Our test is so worthless we cannot identify your breed of dog if it is pure-bred. Our test only "works" when you have no idea what breed of dog you have.
So, NO: dog breed DNA tests do not work.
Save your money. Or better yet, donate what you would have spent on this near-worthless test (about $150) to the local no-kill animal shelter. .
"With great canine power, comes great canine responsibility."
A new reader of the blog writes:
With all the guff that is happening with pitbulls/pitbull types...how do you define a pitbull?
Ah! A mine-field of a question, but a good question nonetheless. My answer, to a true dog man, remains the same as for everyone else:
How do you define any dog? It is what it looks like. A dog man knows what it is, and yes there are crosses where discussion takes place, but you and I both know what a Pit Bull is, same as we know what a Greyhound is, or a Patterdale, or a Border Collie.
Some folks want to define the dog away. Always funny, but calling a dog's tail a leg does not make the dog have five legs, does it?
Comedian Trevor Noah, who is biracial (and about to take over The Daily Show from Jon Stewart) has a nice bit when it comes to race and what box to check. There's only audio, but it's a nice bit.
The last part is the hammer. There is a right answer in the real world because people are constantly looking for a hole in which to shove every pigeon, and never mind if things are not always so simple.
Pigeon holes are how we make sense of a complex world. We label everything and lump things into groups that seem to make real-world sense to us. This task is informative, and often a quick way to get it right, but it can also help us get it wrong. Every bird we assign to a pigeon hole may, in fact, not be a pigeon. And of course, not every pigeon, will find its hole.
I am a 56-year-old bald white man who speaks like he comes from Virginia. No one would guess, on first brush, that I was born in Zimbabwe and raised in North Africa. I'm a gun owner, and an immigration restrictionist, which means a lot of people assume I am a Republican. Such people are decidedly confused when they discover I have two Korean kids, and I am a flaming liberal.
Every human being is complicated, and so too are a lot of the dogs. It's a little silly, for us to tell a black person they are not black because they do not live up to our stereotype of that race! Ditto for every other characteristic we can think of: gender, sexual orientation, geographic origin, income, and education.
Now flip that around, and think about the dogs. You see? Generalizations are not always true, are they?
And yet... they often are.
Stereotypes exist for a reason; they are more frequently right than wrong. And so, as a demographer, if I am looking at a neighborhood that is 60% black, 15% Hispanic, 5% Asian, and the remainder white, I can be fairly certain it is not a wealthy neighborhood. That's not prejudice talking; that's evidence, observation, and data. That's the real world as it is, rather than the world as we want it to be. What I have said is true despite the fact that most poor people are not black, and most black people are not poor.
What does this have to do with Pit Bulls? Simple: big block heads are a defining characteristic of pit bulls. It's not their only characteristic, of course, but it's a very strong one. Add in four or five other small but telling features, and a dog man generally knows a pit bull when he sees one, same as the average person can tell the difference between a light skinned black man, and a Turk.
Now, does everyone always get it always right along the trailing edges of mixed race self-identification? No, but 98% of the time we do. Barack Obama may be half white, but most Americans have no trouble assigning him to the same racial box that he checks for himself.
Pit Bulls are different than people, of course.
People have not been bred to have certain inner drives and characteristics.
Dogs have. Please, let us own this.
Retrievers are particularly biddable.
Terriers are high-energy psychotic killers of small furry things.
Border collies live to herd anything.
Bird dogs are birdy.
And Pit Bulls? Like Dobermans, these were, and are, dogs created for a purpose -- to bite. For certain breeds, biting is a very self-rewarding behavior. Dog men know this, and we use this drive in our training.
Does that mean every Doberman is still the tax-collector's dog or that every Pit Bull, Boxer, or Dogo has a massive amount of genetic code ready to explode?
No, of course, not. Doberman's have been bred for decades to lose their code, and the same has occurred for "American Staffordshire Terriers" and Boxers in the AKC.
But Pit Bulls are still being fought illegally, and dogs are still being run, legally, on wild pigs.
And so what is the result when we have so many people acquiring Pit Bulls of pedigree unknown?
The result is a very uneven amount of drive inside the dogs -- and a very predictable lack of understanding, by a lot of new owners, about how to train or channel that drive through exercise, training, and boundaries.
So what does society do?
Society looks at the totality of the breedas it finds them in the real world, attached more often that not to hazy, lazy, and sometimes crazy young adults with unsettled lives and too little discipline.
Even if we concede that backyard swimming pools kill far more people than Pit Bulls (they do), the number of serious maulings inflicted by the dogs is a cause for deep concern. So too is the fact that nearly a million Pit Bulls a year are being killed in our "shelters" because they were bred by people who said they loved Pit Bulls, acquired in haste by people who said they loved Pit Bulls, and were subsequently dumped at the pound when the "cute puppy" grew up to be a large, poorly socialized, and undisciplined dog.
Society thinks that sucks.
Go ahead and set aside the 20-30 people a year who are killed by Pit Bulls -- it's a very low number and not a very impressive number.
But the serious maulings? Those stack up in the many thousands every year.
And the killing of perfectly healthy Pit Bulls whose only crime is that they are no longer puppies? That's in the many, many hundreds of thousands per year.
And so society had made forms with little check boxes on themand, in response, Pit Bull owners have learned to lie about their breed and deny its existence. "That's not a pigeon in a hole," they will tell you, "that's a passerine in a bird house."
I get it. Go ahead andlie on thecheck box, but do us both a favor, and do not lie to yourself or to me. There is such a thing as a Pit Bull, you can recognize them when you see them, and there is a code that bubbles inside a predictably high percentage of the dogs.
Does that mean the dogs are evil? No. It means that with great canine power comes great canine responsibility. If the Pit Bull community does not exercise that responsibility by breeding less, training more, talking about breed specific problems, actively unselling the breed, and even embracing and advocating canine responsibility laws, then society will impose some ham-fisted and imperfect code of responsibility that may range from mandatory insurance to breed bans.
Does that feel unfair, discriminatory, and punitive to Pit Bull owners? It does, but how Pit Bull owners feel is not actually the concern when so many Pit Bulls are paying the ultimate price for human irresponsibility. For the dog's sake, something has to change, and the only real question is whether that change will come from inside the Pit Bull community, or outside of it.
And, for the record, part of that change is the check box. Every person who sees the check box, or lies their way around it, is being sent a powerful denormalization message.
This is actually how you "unsell" a problem product or a behavior. Think cigarettes. We banned them on airplanes. Then we increased health insurance premiums. Then we banned smoking in government buildings. Then there were smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants. Then restaurants simply banned smoking. Then taxes rose, and CVS and other stores stopped selling cigarettes.
Smoking has not been banned, but the social cues we send about smoking have changed. The Marlboro man died of cancer, and what was once seen as cool, during the era of Bogey and Bacall, is now seen as a pathetic and expensive blue-collar addiction.
The result: hundreds of thousands of human lives saved.
Now the question is whether we can do the same for the dogs.
Americans own more dogs now than at any time in history, but they are not buying Kennel Club dogs because they are not buying crap sold by pretenders at inflated prices.
Conformation shows and clubs are struggling with declining entries. Exhibitors and club members seem to be older now than they used to be, purebred registrations are a third of what they were 20 years ago, and there are few newcomers to the scene. These are all clear indicators that our culture has changed.
"Our culture has changed." It has?
In what way? The claim, of course, is pure bunk.
Americans own more dogs now than at any time in history, but as with every other time in history we are not buying crap products at inflated prices.
Of course, blue-blazer rosette chasers that wince around dog show rings, and who do not have the bottle to admit they are little more than preening pretenders desperate for status, cannot admit that the failure is entirely theirs. Every breed of dog that has been brought into the Kennel Club has suffered, and no breed has ever been improved there. It seems the public has noticed!
AKC registrations have fallen by 70%.
I am sorry to inform the sniffing pretenders that it's NOT the "animal rights" folks who are killing dog shows. No and nope. Almost everyone in this country is eating chicken and hamburgers, spraying their kitchens with roach spray, wearing leather-made shoes, and doing so while eating eggs, and drinking milk.
Deciding not to buy an over-priced and sick puppymill dog from a mall pet store does not mean someone is saluting the "animal rights" agenda (whatever that is); it means they are making a simple, smart, and obvious consumer choice.
As I noted in a postsome time back, "It's time we started to think of dogs as breed products."
To that line I would add this one: "And when every breed product you are offering is sliding towards failure due to inbreeding, selection for defect, and failure to perform in the field, don't be surprised if no one is rushing to get into your store."
The core problem is not going to get fixed by the Kennel Club because their leadership has no vision and no courage, and the organization itself has never been about dogs at all
At the Kennel Club it's never about the dog; it's about the ribbon, the show, the judge, the pecking order, the contrived history, the price that can be charged, and the price that is charged.
The AKC does not have a culture of "dogs first," but a long-standing culture of "ego first." That is not going to change, and so the organization is auguring into the ground faster and harder than Buddy Holly's airplane.
Buddy Holly's airplane, Iowa, Feb, 1959
The result is what we see in the current issue of Canine Chronicle -- a chattering class that says "tsk-tsk" even as they cluck about a "changing culture."
How convenient to cast the problem into the great abyss of the vague and unsolvable rather than face the simple mechanical solution of opening up the registries, requiring veterinary inspections of adult dogs before registration, banning certain deformed breeds, and making the championship of working dogs dependent on performance achievement.
But "carry on," I say!
If the Kennel Club will not change its course, they might as well drive faster towards oblivion.
The dogs will survive, even if the Kennel Club does not, and perhaps what comes next will actually be about the dogs rather than the preening pretensions of people.
This cat's NO is not strong enough to overcome this chicken's food drive. Tough chicken, soft cat.
Who wants to bet this chicken has punked this cat many times before?
Who wants to bet he will in the future too?
Is the weak, repeated, clawless "paw correction" more "humane" than one good swipe with claws out? Will it change the chicken's behavior? Will the swipes continue forever?
Now, can you get a chicken to dance left or right with a little feed and a clicker? Absolutely! Wonderful thing. But in that instance there is no reason, other than food, for the chicken to dance. This is not self-rewarding behavior, so the food has to be provided and timed as an externally, and as a meaningful consequence. That works!
But what if the bad behavior -- like stealing food -- is self-rewarding? Will ignoring it stop it? Will hectoring stop it? Probably not.
That does not mean that the penalty has to be terribly harsh. Pressure comes in many form, including body language. Watch the chicken, below, exert nothing more than positional pressure to get the cat to shift and abandon his food. Does the cat swat back? Yes, but the chicken's positional pressure and food drive was apparently stronger than the cat's claw pressure or food drive, and so the chicken wins in the end.
As I said at the IACP conference over the weekend:
About two million dogs a year are
euthanized in shelters – 65 million pounds of dead dogs a year.
Most of these dogs are healthy young adults that were acquired in haste by young people with unstable lives. Too often these dogs have had little or no training.
To put it another way, more healthy dogs are killed for LACK of training every year than are actually trained by all the professional dog trainers in this nation.
The Kennel Club is not same faceless entity; it is run by people with names, and it time those people were brought up on charges for systematic abuse of man's best friend.
In yesterday's post, Cancer at the Kennel Club, I noted that the authors of a new paper on the levels of inbreeding in Kennel Club dogs affirmatively lied in their conclusion by trying to minimizing the damage that closed registries have done to Kennel Club dogs.
I got it right, but there is a price to pay for being first to comment on a new paper. You see, while I got it right, the data is actually worse than I thought.
Carol Beuchat, at the Institute of Canine Biology has looked at individual breed data, and she notes that while some breeds have plateaued at very high levels of inbreeding, others continue to rise to the moon. Read the whole thing.
Bull Terrier
English Cocker
English Springer
When individual breeds are sorted and laid out, in order, by effective population size, we find that ONLY TWO of the 152 Kennel Club breeds have an effective population size of 500, which biologists now say is the minimum necessary to maintain a sustainable breeding population.
Click to enlarge.
Again,read the whole thing. Bottom line: Kennel Club dogs are deeply inbred genetic messes, diseased, deformed, and too often dysfunctional.
Closed gene pools cause the disease, selection for defect cause the deformity, and preening pretenders in the world of working dogs cause the dysfunction.
Have no illusion that ALL of this is due to individual people that run the Kennel Club, and no one else.
It is the Kennel Club that mandates that dogs be bred in a closed registry system in which increasing levels of inbreeding are the inevitable byproduct.
It is the Kennel Club that green lights the standards which select for defect and which means that most members of some breeds suffer their whole lives.
It is the Kennel Club that credentials judges who have no idea of what they are doing because they know nothing about working dogs or even the basics of anatomy.
It is the Kennel Club that gives show dogs zero points for health, zero points for work, and zero points for temperament.
It is the Kennel Club that allows puppy mill dogs to be registered
It is the Kennel Club that refuses to allow any breed club to mandate health tests as a requirement for registration.
It is the Kennel Club that refuses to allow any breed club to mandate working tests as a requirement for registration.
It is the Kennel Club that refuses to allow any breed club to delay registration until a dog is an adult and is actually proven to look like the breed it is supposed to be.
The Kennel Club is not same faceless entity; it is run by people with names, and it time those people were brought up on charges for systematic abuse of man's best friend.
To be clear, what has occurred to dogs is real abuse, and it has not been an "accident" but part of a systematic and regimented plan that has predictably led to millions of dogs in long-term pain, early death, and endless misery.
[Daniel] Tortora began working with dogs again after he completed his doctorate, in 1973. Within about a year he had hung out his shingle as an animal psychologist in Spring Valley, New York, not far from his present home. But he did not immediately understand how relevant his academic training was to the problems that pet owners were bringing him. When he first encountered the electronic dog-training collar, he didn’t even see the connection between it and the shock grids that he had worked with in grad school....
...Tortora began talking with the collar’s manufacturers, who were in the process of transforming their product from a dirty little secret into a rather sophisticated behavior-modification tool. The original Tri-Tronics collar was fairly simple: pushing a button on a hand-held, battery-powered transmitter sent a radio signal to a box on the dog’s collar; two pronglike contacts protruding from the box conducted an electrical charge to the skin of the dog’s neck. The charge was supposed to hurt, just as a jerk on a leash is supposed to hurt; the purpose was punishment, and no one pretended otherwise.
Present models are different. Now the user can set the electrical stimulation at one of five levels, the highest of which corresponds to the single level available previously.
Tortora, who helped the company determine which levels would work best, believes that the change allows the collar to be used as a motivation rather than a punishment. At a low level, he says, the electricity may stimulate the dog’s neck muscles, causing them to tense, without activating the pain nerves, whose response threshhold is higher. Thus the stimulation may be felt not as pain but as a “pressure to perform,” similar perhaps to the pressure that a dog feels when a choke collar binds it in a heeling position. Tortora has some reason to believe that when a dog is naturally motivated to perform—for example, when a retriever is fetching, indulging the instincts bred into it over centuries—the stimulation may even be felt as a form of arousal....
...Two of the three remote-control trainers now available from Tri-Tronics are designed explicitly to serve as escape-avoidance teaching devices. In these models each burst of electrical stimulation is preceded by a conditioning tone audible to the dog—a brief buzz that predicts the onset of stimulation, just as the light does for the rat in the shock box. Like the rat, the dog can learn to avoid the shock by responding quickly to the buzz. A button on the transmitter allows the handler to send the buzz only, without any accompanying electrical stimulation.
In addition, the top-of-the-line Tri-Tronics trainer also produces a second tone, a beep that follows the electrical stimulation. This feature, added at Tortora’s instigation, is based on “relaxation theory,” a concept developed at Michigan State by Tortora’s major professor, M. Ray Denny. The beep serves as a “safety tone,” an indication that the shock is over. It too can be decoupled from the electrical stimulation, and can therefore be used to signal the dog that it has performed well and has avoided the aversive stimulus.
“From half a block away,” Tortora says, “I can say ‘Good dog’ by pushing a button.” Eventually, if the training goes according to plan, the electricity drops out of the system and the dog can be trained entirely through the use of the conditioning tones.
This was written 30 years ago. Today's collars do not come with five levels of stimulation, but 100, and not just with simple tone, but vibration as well. As I said at the IACP conference last weekend, "Anyone who is using the old 'BUSTER' FRAME to talk about MODERN collars is OUT OF DATE, uninformed, and therefore NOT A GOOD TRAINER."
Ryan O'Meara of K9 Magazine in the UK posted this on Facebook:
Just going through K9 Magazine photo archives. We've got hundreds of great photos that haven't made the magazine itself and I'm going to find a way to publish them all online so our members can browse every one of them. Of the hundreds/thousands of shots our photographer takes it's simply a limited space issue that means the majority don't make it in to the magazine in most cases. But sometimes the photo just doesn't quite convey what you (or the human subject) want it to - still makes a great shot though. Like this one of TV presenter Emma Crosby. Personally, I kinda love it. Terriers. I do ADORE them.
This slide was part of Tyler Muto and Josh Moran's (K9 Connection) excellent presentation at the International Association of Canine Professionals last week.
If you are in or near Buffalo, NY, and are looking for a dog trainer, these are the fellows!
As I noted a few weeks back, Amazon sells basic stuff at a good price, and 900 dog poop bags (with dispenser and a leash clip) for only $14.99 (free shipping with Prime) is a very good deal. As you can see, I made the investment myself!
Proof that my dogs are best dog trainers in the world -- they not only have me feeding them, accompanying them, and buying them toys, they have trained me to follow them around picking up their crap. That's good dog training!
I am convinced I could sell "Ethnic Water" with nothing but a fabulous story-label about the rivers of the world ("Zambezi: The Pulsing Heart of Africa," "Shannon: The Bubbling Heart of Eire in every bottle"), and never mind that it would say, in small but legible letters, that the water inside was New York City tap water run through a carbon block.
Out of 152 Kennel Club breeds, 84 (55%) have an effective population size of less than 100 dogs, and 36 (24%) have an effective population size of less than 50 dogs.
What the authors are **trying** to say is that coefficients of inbreeding in some breeds have STOPPED RISING to even higher and more alarming levels.
Though levels of inbreeding remain incredibly high, they no longer share the "ideology of a cancer cell" in that they continue to grow to the point they kill the host.
But is the host actually healthy?
No, not at all.
Labrador Retrievers are in better shape than other breeds.
Let me be blunt here: the authors of this paper have actively lied in their conclusion.
There is nothing in this paper to suggest that current rates of inbreeding in pedigree dogs is "sustainable". In fact, pedigree dogs are sicker than pound dogs, and pedigree dogs are not getting healthier.
To be clear, I do not think for a minute that the authors of this study have accidentally stumbled with some poor phrasing. I believe these authors have chosen to actively lie, which is to say they are laser-focused on the truth, and actively working to steer busy readers away from it.
No doubt the Kennel Club will trumpet this paper as being "peer reviewed," but that too is bunk. In the modern era, "peer review" means nothing.
The data behind this study is not being made available to the public, so what was there for the "peers" to review?
Not a thing. Peer review, in this instance, was little more than looking for typos.
Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group for 13 years, says "peer review" does not mean much even when human health is in the swing:
Robbie Fox, the great 20th century editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of peer review, wondered whether anybody would notice if he were to swap the piles marked `publish' and `reject'. He also joked that the Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. When I was editor of the BMJ I was challenged by two of the cleverest researchers in Britain to publish an issue of the journal comprised only of papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. I wrote back `How do you know I haven't already done it?'
Bingo. The editors at Canine Genetics and Epidemiology ("Published with the support and backing of the Kennel Club") must be in on this little joke, because it really IS a joke to have paid apologists on the payroll of the Kennel Club suggesting that currently levels of inbreeding are "sustainable" in the world of dogs!
That said, buried in this paper is one grizzly little statistic: Out of 152 Kennel Club breeds, 84 (55%) have an effective population size of less than 100 dogs, and 36 (24%) have an effective population size of less than 50 dogs.
Anyone who thinks that's a program for success is either an idiot or a liar, and I do not think the authors of this paper are idiots.
