Everything In Its Place

Tea time! The little towel is clearly being used as the dog’s “place” marker/mat — a bit of familiar from the Edwardian era.

“Just a Little Off the Side....”

Looking Fabulous With Bull Terrier

A lady and her dog being FAB-ulous. Look at that collar... those gloves... that hat.
About 1900 I think.

Bernard M. Partridge, an illustrator for Punch, in 1910, with his fell terrier before the Kennel Club decided this type was to be called a Border Terrier. The mustache and pipe are an extra bonus.

Happy Dog, Sadsack Man

Have You Been Doing It Wrong?

The Show Ring is Turning Labradors Into Angus

How did Labs go from the dog on the left to the dog on the right?

A simple story: theorists rewarded exaggeration.

The same thing happened in the body building world. The Lab lovers at SlimDoggy have the tale.

Why has a Labrador — America’s most popular AKC breed — never won Westminster? More from the Lab lovers at SlimDoggy.

The good news is that the Labrador Retriever Club recognizes there is a BIG (pun intended) problem with the shows dogs seen in the ring.

Here He Lies Where He Longed To Be

REQUIEM

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

~ Robert Louis Stephenson ~

Market Hunting Madness

I live on the border between Maryland and Virginia, not far from the Chesapeake Bay, one of the great waterfowl gathering places in the US, and the progenitor location of the Chesapeake Bay Retriever.

Back in the late 19th and very early 20th Century, when market hunting was still legal, huge Punt Guns were created and used in this area.

These Punt Guns were all home-made, generally with 9-foot long barrels that were 2-inches in diameter.

The guns were filled with loose shrapnel such as cut up nails or boiler punchings, and a huge load of black powder was used as the propellant.

Basically, this was a huge muzzle-loaded blunderbuss that was firing scrap iron and steel.

The guns were mounted on nearly flat punt boats, sculled or poled up to a flock of birds, and dozens, of birds were killed with a single shot.

Punt Guns generally operated in small fleets, with entire flocks of hundreds of birds wiped out in a split second.

Happily, Punt Guns disappeared with the Lacey Act of 1900, but very occasionally you will find a decaying version at the back of an antique store.

The Continuing National Emergency

It’s been over two months since the start of the “National Emergency” but we are holding out.

When the Tailgate Drops

There’s an old saying among raccoon hunters in the US: “the bullshit stops when the tailgate drops.”

This old Outdoor Life cover is a pretty nice illustration of that magic moment.

Cold Comfort

Terrierman Says...

A Terrier Should Be a Good Finder

Rolling With the Wee Wolves

The Turtles Abide

The turtles are out in force now. These are cooters, painted turtles, and sliders. Believe it or not, they spend all winter underwater in a kind of suspended animation, breathing through their butts. Yes, that last line is correct. Look it up!

Stay Warm in Your Straight Jackets People

This Land Is Your Land

This land is your land, this land is my land.

Public lands. Protect them and never let them be given away or sold.

Two Terriers

Compensating Much?

Terriers Tougher Than Wood

A Terrific Old Dog Show Poster

Charles Dickens with Turk

Charles Dickens wrote "Two Dog Shows" for the August 2, 1862 edition of the journal “All the Year Round”.

This article was instrumental in helping fund what was to become the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.

Three States, Two Rivers, Two Trails

I biked to Harpers Ferry yesterday to where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers come together in a color difference you can see in the picture at bottom.

The tunnel through the mountain is through the escarpment known as the Maryland Heights.

The Appalachian Trail crosses here, and it was good to return to this section, which I have hiked in a previous life.

The Appalachian Trail stretches from south of Springer Mountain Georgia to Mount Katahdin, Maine — 2,000 miles. The C&O Canal Canal crosses here too, stretching from Washington, DC to Cumberland, MD, a distance of 185 miles, where it links up with the 150-mile Great Allegheny Path trail to Pittsburgh.

Three states - West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland come together here, and Pennsylvania is very close.

The Bones of Travel

A creek comes down from the mountains to join the river, passing underneath a low stone railroad trestle and, next to it, an aqueduct carrying a canal that once carried coal boats pulled by horses and mules. 

The canal and the railroad were competing economic interests and fought over every square foot of space in this narrow part of the valley.  In the end, the railroad won, and the canal went out of business as a commercial entity in 1924.

Twisted

A tree next to the Canal. Most people pass it by without even seeing it. I cannot imagine that kind of oblivion

Virginia Bluebells

There were acres and acres of Virginia Bluebells along the bike path through the woods. Mertensia virginica is a spring plant with bell-shaped sky-blue flowers native to eastern North America.

The Road Goes on Forever

Goose on Green

An Ancient Thing

"How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long long time, listening to the warm crackel of the flames."
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Notre Dame: The Fire and the Acorn

NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL is on fire, and the wood structure inside has already been declared a total loss.

The ceiling of Notre Dame contained 13,000 oak trees cut in the 12th century; an entire forest cut and elevated into the air.

In the spirit of education and finding something good amid the ashes, let me recount a story of forests and foresight.

New College, Oxford, England is actually one of the oldest colleges in the word -- founded in 1379.

Like many colleges, it has a great dining hall with massive old-growth oak beams across the top. These beams are 45-feet long and as large as two feet square on their ends.

A century and a half ago, a building inspector went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found they were full of beetle bore.

This news was reported to the College Trustees, who met the news with dismay. Beams this large were very hard, if not impossible, to come by. Where would they ever get beams of this caliber again? One of the younger Trustees suggested there might be some large oaks on distant College lands, and why not consult the College Forester to see if any were available?

And so two of the Trustees went down to see the College Forester who lived very far away and had only once set foot on the college campus himself.

After introducing themselves to the College Forester, the Trustees asked if, perhaps, there might be one or two oaks in the woods that were large enough to be used to sister two or three of the weakest beams in the hall.

The Forester clucked a bit and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

It turned out that when the College was founded thousands of oak trees had been planted to replace building beams when they became beetle-y, because oak beams always become beetle-y in the end.

This plan, set out in 1450, had been passed down from one College Forester to the next for over four hundred years. Each generation of Foresters would tell the next: “You don’t cut them oaks. Them there is for the College Hall.”

And so, when the inevitable attack of time and beetles did show up, an ancient stand of Oaks had already been waiting for more than 200 years.

With the fire at Notre Dame still raging, now is a good time to take stock.

What do we cherish, and what are we doing today to make sure those things continue for the next generation to come?

All of us are truly fortunate.

We stroll through parks, train stations, and libraries financed and built by others who dreamed not only big, but planned for generations to come.

On a hot day we rest in the shade of trees we did not plant.

In times of crisis we may go to a house of worship that waited 100 years or more for us to enter.

When pressed, we all recognize that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

But do we also give full weight to the fact that we also stand on the shoulders of common people who laid train tracks, planted trees, and hewed the pews on which we sit today?

Too many of us wait for a Big Win to "pay it forward," but in truth the great buildings of the world were not created in a day, but laid up one brick at a time, and paid for by common people who paid a penny on every dollar earned just to make it so.

A penny on the dollar.

It is not much.

And yet from such simple gifts flowed Notre Dame and everything we are today as a nation – and will be tomorrow.

As we approach the Easter season, think about the things you value, and make a "penny pledge" to help sustain those things, and pass them on to the next generation in the year ahead.

The absolute size of your contribution does not matter.

For some it will be small, for others massive.

Around the world, charity is not judged by size, but by percent.

If all you can afford this season is a single acorn, then plant that acorn carefully and with an open heart. Try to help the poorest of the poor and those least able to help themselves.

Not every acorn will grow to become an important beam at Oxford, or the new roof of Notre Dame, but every beam at Oxford and Notre Dame began its life as a simple acorn.

Every person at the bottom can climb a little higher with the help of a rung you help put in place.

Game of Bones

When you’re in the bedroom with your significant other and notice the very possessive dog is staring very intently at you...

The Predator at Both Ends of the Leash

There's a lot of attention deficit disorder at both ends of the leash. Here's why.

The Real Lassie Story

Giving a Good First Impression

Painting the bombs.

Might Be Doing Terrier Work

What Fox Kill and Do Not Kill

This grainy video does NOT show sheep predation. It shows scavenging.

In fact, 15-25 percent of lambs dies from exposure shortly after birth

Fox in the U.K. do the job vultures do elsewhere.

As far as I know, there has NEVER been a video of a fox attack showing a killing of either lambs or sheep. I'm not saying it has never happened; just that it's so rare that it's apparently never been filmed.

Game birds? Rabbits? Mice? Rats? Chickens? Ducks?

Yes to all.

The New Models Are Very Life-like

Jack Russell Diversity

Moxie and Misto, as alike as chalk and cheese. A feature, not a problem. 

Jack Russell terriers are among the most generically diverse breed of dog in the world, with a gene variability about as high as you would find in a wild or feral dog population.

From Genetic variation analysis of the Bali street dog using microsatellites come this little note:

While some breeds do have a low HE, such as the Boxer with a HE of 0.320, breeds like the Jack Russell Terrier have a high HE of 0.713 and overall their HE is higher than that of the dingo.

The Parson Russell terrier is NOT the Jack Russell terrier -- it is a dog squeezed into a small, closed, and increasingly less diverse registry with non-work based standards of  "conformation" that will, predictably, lead to greater morphological exaggeration and increased disease.

The Kennel Club has never made a working breed; they have only ruined them.  This is not an accident. Kennel Club rules and values inevitably lead to health and work failure.

Failure is is the only thing the Kennel Club has ever reliably produced.