Victorian Snobbery on the Animal Estate

A book worth reading is The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age by Harriet Ritvo [Harvard University Press, 1989].

Ritvo points out that the Dog Show crowd and the Animal Rights crowd spring from the same root-stock of sentiment and snobbery, and in both cases the animals are the side-show, not the main event.

Ritvo writes that in the Victorian era, and into the 20th Century, dog show folks:

... elevated standards that had no basis in nature or aesethics but reflected the ignorant, self-interested caprices of fanciers who wished to boost the prestige of their own stock in order to associate themselves with people of good breeding.

And, of course, it paid, with show winners being sold for cash -- a quick way for people of low rank to buy themselves up the social ladder. If one had a dog that was "best of breed," then surely the owner must be of similar worth, right??

Ritvo notes that terriers were particularly singled out for attention by the show ring preeners and pretenders, and that:

The Fox Terrier Chronicle, the only 19th Century periodical devoted to a single breed of dogs, covered the terrier elite the way that newspapers and other periodicals covered human high society.

Ritvo notes that dog fanciers projected:

... an obsessively detailed vision of a stratified order, which sorted animals and, by implication, people into snug and appropriate niches" with dog shows offering "a dizzying range of classes and then abstracted from them a carefully calibrated hierarchy of animals, ranging from those who did not place even in their sub-breed category to the best in show.

In short, the attraction of dog shows was that people who themselves were as common as a turnip top could now fancy that they were among the social elite.

They did not have to have real knowledge of animals, or have an important job or title or large estate -- they just had to purchase a dog from a "reputable" show breeder and put on airs.

As one Victorian periodical noted,

Nobody now who is anybody can afford to be followed about by a mongrel dog.

Ritvo notes that:

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.

Even in the Victorian era, almost no one walking into the ring with a "working" breed actually worked their dogs.

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.

All of the above is from the second chapter of Ritvo's book. The third chapter is about the rise of the Animal Rights movement, and here we see the same class issues popping up that we did in the previous chapter.

Just as honest working dogs were labeled "mongrels best for the dustbin," so too were the people that owned them. The analogies made were simple and direct: Course people had course dogs and engaged in course behavior. Show people had "pedigree" dogs and they did not engage in course behavior.

Of course, not everything was quite as simple as this in the real world.

No matter -- the goal of the RSPCA was not entirely about animals anyway -- it was in no small part all about putting down the poor and the rural and castigating them for having "undisciplined" values.

Towards this end, Ritvo notes that the tracts of the RSPCA "implicitly identified the lower classes as the source of brutality," even as this same organization gave "the big wink" to fox hunting and grouse hunting which were common pastimes of the rich and landed.

Today, of course, the people you see at a PETA rally, and the folks that you see trotting their dogs around a show ring are not all that different demographically, and the general sentiment is still toward unalloyed snobbery.

The Strange Fruit of Class Warfare

In The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, author Harriet Ritvo [Harvard University Press, 1989] points out that the Dog Show crowd and the Animal Rights crowd spring from the same root-stock of sentiment, and in both cases the animals are the side-show, not the main event.

Ritvo writes that in the Victorian era and into the 20th Century dog show folks "elevated standards that had no basis in nature or aesthetics but reflected the ignorant, self-interested caprices of fanciers who wished to boost the prestige of their own stock in order to associate themselves with people of good breeding."

And, of course, it paid, with show winners being sold for cash -- a quick way for people of low rank to buy themselves up the social ladder. If one had a dog that was "best of breed," then surely the owner must be of similar worth, right??

Ritvo notes that terriers were particularly singled out for attention by the show ring preeners and pretenders, and that “The Fox Terrier Chronicle, the only 19th Century periodical devoted to a single breed of dogs, covered the terrier elite the way that newspapers and other periodicals covered human high society."

Ritvo notes that dog fanciers projected "an obsessively detailed vision of a stratified order, which sorted animals and, by implication, people into snug and appropriate niches" with dog shows offering "a dizzying range of classes and then abstracted from them a carefully calibrated hierarchy of animals, ranging from those who did not place even in their sub-breed category to the best in show."

In short, the attraction of dog shows was that people who themselves were as common as a turnip top could now fancy that they were among the social elite. They did not have to have real knowledge of animals, or have an important job or title or large estate -- they just had to purchase a dog from a "reputable" show breeder and put on airs.

As one Victorian periodical noted, "nobody now who is anybody can afford to be followed about by a mongrel dog." Ritvo notes that "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."

Even in the Victorian era, almost no one walking into the ring with a "working" breed actually worked their dogs. 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."

All of the above is from the Second chapter of Ritvo's book. The Third chapter is about the rise of the Animal Rights movement, and here we see the same class issues popping up that we did in the previous chapter.

Just as honest working dogs were labeled "mongrels best for the dustbin," so too were the people that owned them. The analogies made were simple and direct: Course people had course dogs and engaged in course behavior. Show people had "pedigree" dogs and they did not engage in course behavior. Of course, not everything was quite as simple as this in the real world. No matter -- the goal of the RSPCA was not entirely about animals anyway -- it was in no small part about putting down the poor and the rural and castigating them for having "undisciplined" values. Towards this end, Ritvo notes that the tracts of the RSPCA "implicitly identified the lower classes as the source of brutality," even as this same organization gave "the big wink" to fox hunting and grouse hunting which were common pastimes of the rich and landed.

Today, of course, the people you see at a PETA rally and the folks that you see trotting their dogs around a show ring are not all that different demographically. In his book "In Defense of Hunting," James A. Swan notes that the Animal Rights crowd is dominated by people that are "white, urban, predominantly female, nicely dressed" and that many of them are "people who have gone through painful divorces or have had traumatic childhoods or have otherwise been hurt by the norms of society."
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Terriers for Sale: Pets, Rosettes and Workers All

Legendary terriermen? Certainly! Were they selling legendary dogs? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

If a dog is excellent at age two and half, you have to wonder why it is being sold. As for puppies, they are more of an optimistic hope than a proven reality.

Both adverts could be offering very good things ... and they could also have been offering something that ended up being a little less than was required or wanted, depending on the throw of the dice and the nature of the homes they were placed in.

What is not in dispute is that both of these ads were placed by legendary terriermen about 45 years ago.

Bert Gripton and Frank Buck were the real deal. They lived to hunt their dogs and bred dogs as a supplement to their hunting activities. That said, both men were known to breed quite a few dogs and sell them off too -- mostly to people who did far less digging than the dogs deserved -- and almost certainly less than these legendary men themselves did.

In fact, dog breeding seems to be a common thread among the "famous" terriermen of the past. If you have heard of almost any terrierman now dead -- John Russell, Arthur Heinemann, Frank Buck, Cyril Breay, Bert Gripton, etc. -- you can be sure they were moving a lot of dogs, and not just a lot of dirt.

To say this is to take away nothing from Gripton or Buck, Breay or Heinemann (and several other good and worthy gentlemen still living and left unnamed). They deserve their excellent reputations. It is simply to say that just as we sing a paean to "foxes yet unseen," so too should we give a nod and pour a dram for the hundreds of unknown working terrier enthusiasts, game keepers and huntsmen who have done at least as much to preserve and protect working terriers over the years. They may be unknown, but they are the core of the cable that is the working terrier tradition.

Today, we commonly see people advertising puppies as being "sired by WHATEVER" and bought directly from So-and-So HIMSELF.

Fair enough, but have you seen the legendary WHATEVER in the field? Has HIMSELF actually dug on a dog any time in the last 20 or 30 years? Or is this just name-dropping and pedigree paper-chasing -- the very same thing we see with show ring breeders?

The situation becomes comical when people order dogs from people they have never met in countries they have never visited. Perhaps they traded a few emails with a Great Man. Perhaps they have even toured the kennel. Excellent.

One has to wonder about those forty terriers barking in the back of the Great Man's place, however. Even if a person digs every week, it's hard to find enough work for four or five terriers. Forty? Impossible. Yes, yes, dogs can be loaned out for work to the hunts, but that's not going on too much, is it? A hunt terrierman wants a dog that is reliable (and small), not a parade of green reeds that do not know their job. And no one in the U.S. is loaning out dogs at all; if the breeder is not working them his or her self, you can be sure they are not being worked at all.

Yet young and foolish dog buyers continue to drive the business of puppy sales, don't they? There has never been a shortage of puppy peddlers. That is true in the world of working dogs as well as the world of pets-and-rosettes.

The working boards are full of people that have never dug on a dog themselves, but who have a kennel full of puppies for sale. "Bred from THIS line out of WHATEVER" they proclaim, as if this line of nonsense tells you anything.

Just ask for pictures of the dam and sire working. "Oh I never thought to take a camera into the field ... I don't share pictures because the Animal Rights people might get a-hold of them."

Right!

Any variation on this nonsense, and it's best to keep moving. People that work their dogs in the modern world have pictures of their dogs working and (in America at least) they can take you out on any given weekend and show you their dogs doing their stuff in the ground. We are a hunting society, and there is nothing unethical about terrier work as we practice it.

As for all this focus on "lines" of working terriers, it is taken to a level of absurdity by the puppy peddlers. Anyone who knows anything about working terriers knows no true working dog is a "pure" anything, and genes are quickly diluted. "Descended from So-and-So" tells you almost nothing, especially if you never saw the dog work yourself. A first generation dog is only half that gene pool, and a second generation dog is a quarter or less. In the end you are buying a pig in a poke.

Yes, a cross between between Mike Tyson and Robin Givens might get you super-model looks with a boxer's hooks, but it is just as likely to give you an ugly, stupid, scrawny and foul-tempered kid who has small hands, a thin frame, and an irritating lisp. Cross Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe and you are just as likely to get Einstein's looks and Marilyn's brains as the other way around!

Breeding, of course, is important. Working dogs are more likely to descend from two working dogs than not, and the best practice remains, as always, to get dogs that have solid working sires and dams.

Just remember, however, that there are two sides to every breeding, and much of what is being crossed from one generation to another is entirely unknown even when someone has had a "line" of terriers for two or three generations. Not every cross is a success.

In any case, a working terrier is not all about genetics is it? How many good dogs have been ruined by young fools that over-matched a dog too young? How many people have heard people proclaim a dog "worthless" when it was only 14 months old? How many people leave their dogs caged and pacing in a kennel for 12 months out of the year and then expect the dog to work like a practiced veteran the three or four times a year it is let out to see forest or field?

If only these examples were rare! Sadly, they are not.

What made the dogs of people like Frank Buck and Bert Gripton exceptional was not just breeding -- it was that these dogs saw a lot of experience in the field and were raised by people who understood how dogs thought. These MEN were as legendary as the dogs. Sadly, their experience and knowledge does not convey with the pedigree.

The ads these genuine digging men men wrote for their dogs should be read. They speak volumes in a few words: "parents small," ; "trial if necessary," ; "parents can be seen at work six days a week."

Compare these small printed advertisements to the folks who now post elaborate graphics-filled web sites offering puppies for sale. Some web sites are all about ribbons and rosettes, while others show pictures of dogs chained out in dirt yards with photos shot through rusting wire mesh.

Different ends of the social spectrum, to be sure, but what both types of web sites have in common is that neither one mentions actual terrier work.

For puppy peddlers, taking dogs out into the field to work, weekend after weekend, is too close to real work. Dogs in the field might get injured and veterinary care and tools cut into profit margins. Field work time is in direct competition with show ring trial dates.

Besides digging on the dogs a couple of times a month is suspiciously like labor. For puppy peddlers, the bottom line is the bottom line, and it is all about cash and ego, not true terrier work.

Compare the size of the genuine earth dogs offered by people like Gripton, with the hulking dogs offered up for barn and brush pile work here in the U.S.

These over-large dogs are not true terriers. Terrier means "earth dog" in French. A terrier is a dog that is capable of going to earth and to which you dig to when you are hunting.

These over-large barn-and-brush pile dogs might be called "grangier" (a possible french world for "barn dogs") or even "arbrier" (a possible french name for "tree dogs") or "bidonier" (a possible french name for "trash-pile dogs") or "batimentiere" (a possible french word for "building crawl-space" dogs), but they are not true terriers if they cannot go to ground in dirt . . . . and do so in most of the settes they encounter in their area.




Bert Gripton used to advertise that his dogs could be seen at work six days a week. Not many can say that now (and, truth be told, not many could say it back then either).

Working six days a week? Think about what that means. Regular work, day in and day out, week after week, is hardly possible with a very hard dog that goes in and gets punch-drunk with bites and rips every time it goes to ground.

Yes, the folks who dig three days a year will tell you they value a hard dog. What they will not tell you, of course, is how little time they actually spend digging.

The more you dig on the dogs, the more you come to value brains, voice, balance, and a touch of discretion in a dog, and the quicker you are to sort things out at the end of a dig. A dog that is laid up for three weeks with a ripped lip is a bad outcome if you really serious about getting out and amassing field time. Not everyone is, of course.




Bert Gripton knew the value of a small dog!
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The Real Threat to Hunting

A repost from this blog, July 2004.

For hunters, fluttering orange tape and popsicle-colored sticks mean only one thing: Doom.

This is the spoor of the tract-home surveyor. This is the end of the game.

The hill where your terrier worked that fine red fox last season will soon be covered by plastic-sided houses and kiddie swing sets.

The hedgerow you counted on for the occasional raccoon and a steady supply of groundhogs will soon be an asphalt ribbon.

Across the country the same story is playing out, again and again. It is not PETA that is hammering hunters, but real estate developers.

Pheasant, quail and bear are long gone from most areas, as are bobcat, cougar and wolf.

Even if deer and geese manage to thrive on 15-acre tracts, the American hunter will not.

When land is cut up into small parcels, acquiring permissions is difficult and firing a gun impossible. More houses means more roads. It does not take too many roads before a man with working dogs no longer feels comfortable letting them off leash.

Most of us know the big picture: forests are falling to farms, and farms are falling to freeway all over the planet. Across the globe wild rivers are being dammed, and increasing numbers of species are being pushed on to the endangered species list. Cars, factories and electricity-generating power plants are spewing forth greenhouse gases contributing to global warming, even as mile-long gill nets decimate fishing grounds, and raw sewage spills untreated into once pristine waters.

The environment is not committing suicide -- we are killing it. As Pogo so aptly put it, "we have met the enemy, and he is us." The common denominator to every clearcut forest and decimated hedgerow is human population growth.

It’s hard to overstate the speed of human population growth. It took perhaps two million years to add the first billion people to the population of the world -- a number reached about 1830. It took only 100 more years to add the second billion people (1930), and just thirty more years to add the third billion (1960). The global population counter clicked past four billion by 1975, five billion by 1987, and six billion by 1999. World population will climb past seven billion within the next 15 years.

It’s hard to get a handle on such numbing numbers. Let's bring it closer to home to gain a little perspective. Surely, we have nothing to worry about here in the United States, right?

Think again.

Consider what has happened in your own lifetime. Take a look at the table below, and find your approximate age in the far left column. The number next to it is the size of the U.S. population when you were born, and the number to the right of that is the relative population growth that has occurred in the U.S. since then.



Of course, the U.S. population growth that has occurred since you were born is only part of the story.

Let’s think for a minute about the U.S. population growth that will happen over the rest of your lifetime. I will use middle-range Census Bureau projections even though these numbers have consistently been too low for over 50 years because Census Bureau demographers habitually under-estimate illegal immigration and over-estimate emigration (people leaving).

In the table below, look in the left column to find your approximate age -- or the age of your children or grandchildren if you prefer. Now look at the next column to see what the population of the U.S. will be when you (or your children or grandchildren) are age 70. The third column gives the percentage population growth that will occur in the intervening years. Again, these are very conservative numbers.



Another way to think about these numbers: over the course of the next 50 years, using the very conservative mid-range projections of the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. will add about 150 million people to its population -- a sum greater than the population of the United States west of the Mississippi River today.

To put it another way, over the course of the next 50 years, the U.S. will add more than twice the current population of the United Kingdom.

Where is all this population growth coming from? Most of it originates overseas.

About 70 percent of all future U.S. population growth will be due to immigration (legal and illegal) and the children and grandchildren of immigrants that have not yet landed on our shores. In a very real sense, America's hunting and angling future is being determined in Karachi, Mexico City, Beijing, Moscow, Dublin and Hanoi.

Most of the organizations that we think of as protecting the environment and sports hunting do not mention the speed of U.S. population growth, not because it is not an issue, but because they are afraid that talking about limits on immigration might harm future membership growth. After all, today's illegal alien is tomorrow's permanent resident alien or U.S. citizen, right? At the top reaches of organizations as divergent as the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association, success is not defined by what is going on in forest and field, but about what can be done to grow out the membership base now and in the future. Association executives are as enamored with population growth as any real estate agent or strip mall developer.

I suspect it will only be in hindsight that we realize what we have lost and what we have gained. Very few people notice the absence of box turtles or make the connection between population growth, habitat change, and Lyme disease.

Only when we are very old and America has changed to the point where we no longer recognize it will we understand the wisdom of Sioux Chief Ben American Horse, who warned Vice President Alben Barkley, "Be careful of your immigrations laws. We were damn careless with ours."
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Clash of Opinions is Actually a Clash of Knowledge

In Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality and Wildness in America, David Peterson notes that back in 1978 Yale University behavioral scientist Stephen Kellert authored a paper entitled "Attitudes and Characteristics of Hunters and Antihunters" in which he summarized his research into the psychology and world-view of these two opposing groups of people.

Kellert breaks hunters down into three core groups:

Utilitarian-meat hunters;
Domination-sport hunters, and;
Naturalist-nature hunters.

Kellert notes that while the groups blur a little at the edges, these three psycho-demographic groups do exist, and represent striking differences of attitude within America's hunting population.

Utilitarian-meat hunters represent about 44 percent of all American hunters. This group tends to talk of "harvesting" game as a renewable resource and many have a "pioneer spirit" forged in self-sufficiency. As a group utilitarian-meat hunters tend to be older, more rural and less educated, but test pretty well when it came to knowledge about wildlife. Few Americans oppose them.

The second group, the domination-hunter, comprise about 38 percent of all hunters. Most domination-hunters are urban men, have served in the military, and see hunting as a way of expressing their manly prowess. Domination hunters know very little about wildlife, and many actually fear it, having an exaggerated "dangerous game" mindset of the kind we often see in pulp hunting magazines ("Mauled by a Grizzly," "When Sharks Attack", "Stalked by a Killer Moose"). Domination hunters showed little interest in wildlife in their youth, and as adults tend to see wild animals as uncontrolled and therefore as "bad" or nuisance animals. The domination hunter is the group non-hunters dislike, and which antihunters try to use to negatively portray ALL hunters.

The third group of hunters -- naturalist hunters -- represent less than 18 percent of all hunters. This group tends to be younger, more educated, and with higher levels of education and income than the other groups. This category also includes more women hunters. Nature hunters tend to backpack, bird watch and camp, as well as hunt. This group also spends more time actually hunting than either of the other two previous groups. Nature hunters have far and away the highest level of knowledge about wildlife and seek an intense involvement with wildlife and do not fear it.

Kellert also goes on to analyze antihunters as a group and finds, not surprisingly, that about 80 percent are women. Most are urban women living on one coast or another.

Antis had very little actual experience with wildlife and, along with domination hunters, had "among the lowest knowledge-of-animals scores of any group included in the study."
In another ironic parallel with domination hunters, "it appeared that antihunters manifested more fear and lack of interest in wildlife" than average Americans.

What was striking to me about reading Kellert's research was how it explains much of the silliness and stupidity we see in the arena of wildlife management today, where antihunters who have never walked a hedgerow clash all with macho-men domination-hunters who would never consider going into the woods without a Bowie Knife as large as medieval falchion.

Neither group seems to have very much knowledge about wildlife. One group does not hunt at all, and the other does not seem to hunt very much.

Left out of the debate -- and too often ignoring it -- are utilitarian-meat hunters and nature-naturalistic hunters which form a majority of the people who actually spend any time in forest or field.

The good news is that in America, unlike in much of Europe, wildlife management decisions tend to be left to an increasingly well-educated groups of professional wildlife managers with degrees in biology, zoology, resource management, forestry, population dynamics, law enforcement and even economics. The watchword in the U.S. is not knee-jerk emotionalism, but sustainability and habitat protection. As a consequence, we have more deer, elk, moose, bear, wolf, fox, alligator, whales, peregrine falcons, bald eagle, osprey, groundhog, raccoon, possum, coyote, bison, beaver and mountain lion today than we have ever had in the last 100 years, and the numbers for all of these species is going up, up, up.
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Darwin at the Westminster Dog Show

Charles Darwin was born 209 years ago today.

One hundred and fifty three years ago, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, one of the most important books in the history of the world. That same year, the first organized dog show was held, and the world of dogs has not been the same since.

Below is a short excerpt from Chapter One of American Working Terriers. The text that precedes this is about the origin of dogs and the rise of the Enclosure Movement, and the text that follows details the rise of animal rights rhetoric, early organized terrier work in the U.K., the RSPCA's new cause, the entry of young wanna-be tough guys into the world of terrierwork in the 1960s and 70s, and the destruction of hedgerows and the push to ban fox hunting in the U.K.

Of course, history never stands still, and the good news is that a push is now on to get the Kennel Club to drop the eugenics theories of Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin) and instead embrace a "Dog First" standard that puts canine health front and center. Let us hope that good things are yet to come!

From American Working Terriers:

.... One of the people who noticed the rapid transformation of British livestock was naturalist Erasmus Darwin who devoted an entire chapter in Zoonomia to the rapid changes he observed being made to British farm animals.

For his part, Erasmus’ son, Charles Darwin, was so besotted with country sport that his father despaired he would ever amount to much of anything.

"You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and your family," Erasmus wrote to Charles.

In fact Charles Darwin turned out all right.

After washing out of medical school and the seminary, and then letting a romantic relationship drift away (due to his being more infatuated with beetles than women), young Charles signed on as naturalist aboard the Beagle, a survey boat on a voyage around the world.

Darwin returned to Britain in 1836, but it was not until 1859 that he wrote The Origin of Species, and then only after reading Reverend Thomas Malthus’s work on the role of "natural" limits to population growth.

Darwin’s ruminations about evolution were greatly influenced by the amazing varieties of livestock being produced by farmers and fanciers in the U.K. at this time. He was especially fascinated by pigeon breeders who were able to rapidly express all kinds of peculiar variation from the common rock dove — rollers, pouters, fantails, barbs, tumblers, and carriers, to name a few.

It was not much of a leap to speculate that the forced selection being done by pigeon breeders might have a parallel in "natural selection" among finches on a remote volcanic island in the Pacific.

Thus was borne the Theory of Evolution.


Jack Russell and the First Working Terriers

It might seem that I have strayed rather far afield in the previous section. What, in God’s name, does the Enclosure Movement, Malthus and Darwin have to do with the rise of working terriers?

Actually, quite a lot.

Mounted fox hunting requires relatively large amounts of open land in the hands of a relatively few number of people.

Squatters and inholders made hunting on common land difficult prior to the Enclosure Movement. Once people had been moved off the land and replaced with sheep and cattle, however, the only real obstacle to the mounted hunts were the stone fences and hedgerows keeping the sheep and cattle in — obstacles that provided excellent sport for competent riders.

Britain’s sheep economy proved less stable than hoped, however. Several busts in the wool business (brought on by cheap imports of wool and cotton from the Continent, Australia, and the U.S.) forced marginal sheep ventures to look for other sources of income.

Rapid improvements in shotguns, combined with relatively easy escape from the city by train, created a new form of leisure sport — the driven bird shoot in which partridge and pheasants were raised in large mesh pens and released "into the wild" a few days prior to the arrival of "the guns".

After the birds acclimated themselves for a few days or weeks, beaters and dogs joined the guns in a long line, flushing birds out of cover. Hundreds of birds — at a set price per bird — were shot over the course of a few hours time.

Both the mounted fox hunts and the organized bird shoots required a certain number of working terriers, but for slightly different reasons.

The mounted hunts employed terriermen to find and "earthstop" fox and badger dens so that fox were forced to run long distances when raised by the hounds. If a fox did manage to go to ground, a terrierman was called to bolt the fox from the earth for another chase, or to dig down for dispatch. In some cases, an animal was bagged in order to replenish fox extirpated from other hunt lands.

Terriers were also used to protect pheasants and partridges being raised in netted enclosures for the shoots.

For gamekeepers, the primary tools for fox eradication were poison and leghold traps (gins), which were fast, efficient and cheap. Secondary tools were low-cost snares, long dogs (lurchers) and long guns used over bait at night. These last methods are still used today in the U.K.

Fox eradication with terrier and spade, while far and away the most humane form of fox control, is slow and inefficient. In addition, because fox rarely lay up in warm weather unless driven to ground by pursuing hounds, terrier work offers a frustratingly short season for a gamekeeper to eradicate fox over a large shooting estate. Gun, snare, traps and poison, however, can be used all year long.

In the early 1800s, the era of stocked bird shoots had not yet begun. Though mounted fox hunting had been spreading across Great Britain for nearly 200 years, the practice was not yet ubiquitous in the British countryside. Terriers used by farmers and mounted hunts alike remained a catch-as-catch can affair.

That was about to change.

At about the time Walter Scott was writing Guy Mannering, a young man by the name of John Russell was attending Exeter College, Oxford.

Looking out the window one day, he spied a bitch terrier tied to a passing milkman’s cart. Something about the dog struck Russell’s fancy, and he bought the dog based on looks alone. The year is variously given as 1815 or 1819.

When Russell bought the dog he could not have known whether the dog would work but, lucky for him, it did. Russell later claimed this bitch, named Trump, was the model for all the terriers that were to follow.

Russell’s story, and the story of Trump, are subject to more myth than fact (see the Appendix for a chronology of Russell’s life). For the moment, it is enough to say that Russell was one of the very first, and certainly one of the most dedicated and longest-riding, fox hunters of the 19th Century.

Though Russell seems to have bought and sold a great number of dogs, he apparently kept a vision of Trump in his mind’s eye — a small, white, wiry-coated terrier with a fierce voice and a strong desire to pursue fox to ground.

It should be remembered that this was an era of free-range poultry. Fox were seen as a threat to sustenance and treated accordingly by farmers. It did not take much effort — or expense — to lace rabbit entrails and chicken heads with strychnine, or set a few foothold traps around a chicken coop, rabbit hutch, or pheasant pen.

In the early 19th Century and through the Victorian Era, traps and poison were so brutally efficient and common that the Reverend Russell spent much of his early years trying to get people to stop killing fox so their populations would increase and he could find a little sport.

Russell was not alone in this endeavor.

In fact, fox protection was so deeply entrenched in the culture of the mounted hunts of the 19th Century that the concept made its way into the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "vulpicide" as "One that kills a fox other than by hunting it with hounds."

The crime of vulpicide was seen as a crime against the aristocracy. God forbid that individual farmers, for the sole purpose of putting food on the table, threaten the weekend pastime of hundreds of wealthy aristocrats!


Classy People and Their Classy Dogs

Beginning in the 1860s, two phenomenon began to take hold in the U.K., 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 The Origin 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 littermates were often shown in different breed categories — a situation that also occurred with the first prize-winning Jack Russell, which had previously been shown 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 became 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 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 dogs was virtually complete.

If you want to read the text that precedes this or the text that follows, order your very own copy of American Working Terriers.

• For more on Darwin, dogs and terriers, see the links below:
  ** The Earthworm Connection to Terrier Work
  ** The Francis Galton Dog Show
  ** The Real Jack Russell Terrier: A Complete History
  ** Inbred Thinking
  ** Rosettes to Ruin
  .

PeTA Hates Women, Trolls for Serial Killers

I read a lot of stuff, and one of the blogs in my Google Reader is the always-edgey and smart PZ Meyers who writes the Pharyngula blog, which is generally devoted to hosing fundy religious prosletyzers, defending aetheism, and supporting Darwin and what used to be called common sense.

Imagine my surprise then to read this wonderful little post:

There is a severe and disturbing disconnect in the minds of the fanatics behind the animal rights groups. First there's NIO, harassing and threatening students. Now look at what PETA is up to: they plan to launch a porn site to benefit their cause.

_ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ 

The nonprofit organization, whose controversial campaigns draw criticism from women's rights groups, said it hopes to raise awareness of veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering.

"We're hoping to reach a whole new audience of people, some of whom will be shocked by graphic images that maybe they didn't anticipate seeing when they went to the PETA triple-X site," said Lindsay Rajt, PETA's associate director of campaigns.

_ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ 

I am trying to visualize the kind of people who would be drawn to a site featuring naked women and tortured animals…and no, those aren't the people I'd want to associate with. It sounds like it might be popular with serial killers, anyway. Is that the audience they want?

And then there's this:

_ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _ 

PETA has been accused of campaigning for animal rights at the cost of exploiting women. A Facebook group, Real Women Against PETA, was launched after the organization paid for a billboard showing an obese woman with the message: "Save the Whales. Lose the Blubber. Go Vegetarian."

_ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _ 

They are sending a consistent message, at least. They love kittens. They hate women.

Perfect! Thanks PZ Meyers! It could not have been said better, which is why you are in my Google Reader.
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The Face of Terrorism

I don't have much tolerance for terrorists of any kind, whether they are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or merely old-fashioned right-wing, racist paranoids.

Not all terrorists are religious zealots, racists, or right-wing paranoids, of course.

The "left" has its share of nut jobs too, and the latest to get nailed is pictured above.

He is Walter Bond, age 34, a self-proclaimed member of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) who was arrested in Colorado last week.

The criminal complaint against Bond outlines the case:

* On July 1st, investigators received a call from a confidential informant wishing to provide information on the Sheepskin Factory and Tandy Leather Factory arsons. The informant stated Bond had told him/her in a telephone call from the Salt Lake City library to refer to Voice of the Voiceless and scroll down to an article on the Sheepskin Factory arson to learn what he'd "been up to lately".

* On July 22nd, the confidential informant arranged a monitored conversation with Walter Bond in a Ramada Inn in Denver, Colorado. Investigators allege Bond was heard admitting to three arsons: Sheepskin Factory, Leather Factory, and Tiburon. Bond was arrested subsequent to the conversation.

Good luck to Mr. Bond in prison. By the look of things, he will fit right in.

As with the lunatics on the right, the actions of this man have nothing to do with core principles or well-founded logic.

This is the feeble-minded acting out of a psychopath with a narcissistic personality disorder.

Left or right, our tolerance for this kind of nonsense should be ZERO.

• Related Links:
  ** Animal Rights Terrorist Added to FBI Top 10
  ** Animal Rights: Terrorists and Clowns Behind Masks
  ** Ireland's Sinn Féin Joins the Animal Rights Loons?
  .

Who Rescued the Beagles and Why?

A beagle rescue story has slowly unfolded in my email box over the last week, but since there seems to be some confusion as to who rescued these beagles, and why, let me see if I can summarize the story in a few simple bullets:

• One hundred and twenty beagles and 40 monkeys were rescued from a bankrupt lab in New York state. Beagles and monkeys are stock animal-research subjects, and they are generally bred specifically for research purposes. Their welfare is supposed to be protected under license and inspection, but when Azopharma, the parent company of research lab AniClin, went bankrupt in April, the 120 dogs and 40 monkeys were put in legal and economic limbo.
  
  
• With bankruptcy of Azopharma, the dogs and monkeys were now owned by Bank of America, along with all other Azopharma assets. Bank of America hired Morris Anderson and Associates to deal with Azopharma in receivership. Morris Anderson tried to sell the animals to another research lab, but could find no buyers. The dogs and monkeys were safe in a locked lab facility with food and water, but they had only a skeleton crew of caretakers to take care of them, and they were moving nowhere and had no real stimulation for over a month.
  
  
• An Animal Rights group called Win Animal Rights (WAR) took the fate of the dogs and the monkeys to court, and on June 30 a judge issued an order putting the animals into the care of two animal rescues that had already been lined up by WAR -- one for the monkeys, and Pet's Alive in Middletown, New York for the beagles.
  
  
• The beagles appear to be healthy and not too poorly socialized, and a lot of adoption applications for them have come in very quickly. All good, and hat's off to Pet's Alive for their good work.
  
  
• Best Friend's Animal Society in Utah has helped raising money for the rescue effort. Their web site initially said they needed $250 per dog per day, but that appears to have been a mistake on the part of their web-tech; it was supposed to be $250 per dog per rehoming. Best Friend's Animal Society is raising the money and passing it on to Pet's Alive -- a sharing of effort, resources, and expertise. The money is being used to spay/neuter the dogs, worm, microchip, vet, house, feed, and handle the adoption paper work and transportation.
  
  
• Some folks are pointing out that Best Friends started out as an offshoot of a bizarre cult, which apparently is true. The founders were Scientologists who broke away from that group in the mid-1960s, and then drifted to California where they dressed in purple capes and called themselves "The Process Church of the Final Judgment." The founders of Best Friends (to their credit) tell the story themselves. They put it all down to confusion, youth, and the kind of spiritual-questing that was going on 30 years ago, but I assure you that not too many people were this confused for this long or in this way. That said, it should also be said that ALL religions start out as bizarre cults, and all have pretty much stayed that way. In a world in which the Pope wears a bizarre hat, winks at pedophilia, and stokes the fires of contempt for women and hate for gays, you will pardon me if I do not heap invective on folks who once wore purple-robes and who now help dogs, but otherwise do not seem to be doing anything quite as strange as eating the blood and body of Christ every Sunday (as so many traditional Christians do).

These are the facts as I understand them, and I do not think they ad up to scandal or concern, though I certainly understand the confusion as it relates to the internet fundraising pitch which appears to have simply been a fumble on the copy-editing end.

Of course, Best Friends and I are on slightly different wave lengths on a few things, but that's OK. These folks seem to be dedicated to "saving every life," but I long ago made my peace with some death, even if I find it regrettable.

Do I salute their "dependency model" of animal rescue? Nope, I do not. Rehousing a bunch of deeply aggressive dogs that cannot be released, while raising money through direct mail and the internet for the upkeep of those dogs, is nuts if you ask me.

But I am just one person, and there's more than one person, one opinion, or one solution in this world. If Best Friends can find people to donate, without lying to folks about what they are actually donating for, more power to them.

And, for the record, they seem to be doing that. I have no evidence they have misrepresented their work. In fact, most of what they seem to be doing is noble, even if some of it is impossibly idealistic.

As for the beagles, they are the real winners here. I suppose someone, somewhere will try to manufacture some contrived outrage that Bank of America lost the "value" of used dogs which no one actually seemed eager to buy.

But since Bank of America is stealing from Americans every day, and these same people do not seem very concerned about that, you will pardon me if I do not send flowers or a note of concern about the Bank's putative economic losses here. I am sure the bank will get over the situation. Without help from a lot of people, however, the beagles probably would not.


..

My Justice Would Be Swift and Done With a Sword

A reader of this blog writes:

I read your blog every day and while I haven't as yet commented on any posts I am always interested in what you have to say. My daughter is a sophomore at The Ohio State University and is majoring in animal science. This is an email she sent me. I hope that you will read this and investigate this story. If what Mercy for Animals did to this dairy farm family is true, I am outraged! I told my daughter that this dairy farm could not stay in business for 80 years if they treated their animals the way you see them treated on this horrible video. I do not for a minute believe it and yet so many people will look at the video and they WILL believe it. Please help. Thank you for your time.

Feeling a little uneasy, I scrolled down to find an email allegedly written by Mariette C. Benage, Coordinator, Student Success, Department of Animal Sciences at Ohio State University. The email reads:

Dear Students,

Here is a story that I just learned about after class today. I'm passing it along to you as an example of both direct pressure and animal activist techniques that you, as young adults, need to be aware of. My personal opinions about this are unprintable!

All:

Ryan Conklin, a senior in our department, has asked me to put out this email to you to make you aware of a situation involving his family farm in Plain City. At 11:00 today there will be a news conference that will show terribly graphic footage their animals being mis-treated on their dairy farm. Ryan told me that a man was hired to work on their dairy last month that turned out to be an under-cover investigator for a group called Mercy For Animals, an affiliate-I believe-of HSUS. Ryan told me that this man from Mercy For Animals coordinated the video footage with another person working at the dairy, and he is the one seen causing the abuse on the video. The person recording the footage is the Mercy For Animals advocate, and he quit his position at the dairy on Sunday. The young man seen in the video was released of his duties at 6 am this morning.

I know some of you in the department know Ryan and his family very well, and I can tell you that they are very honorable people and that they would NEVER condone any of these actions. I believe they’ve been in the dairy business for close to 80 years, and they are certainly people that genuinely care about the well-being of their animals. This appears to be a trap that HSUS has set up to gain voter support in the state at the expense of a well-known dairy. This is a very difficult time for the family, and I know Ryan would appreciate any support that we can offer.

For those of you that are interested, here is the link to the video: http://www.mercyforanimals.org/ohdairy/

I will warn you…it’s not easy to see.

Now I was beginning to really feel uneasy.

You see, here was an employee of Ohio State University writing to students about an explosive and legally actionable issue, and suggesting to them that there was a smear campaign being waged against an "honorable" family farm that had never abused animals.

And yet this Ohio State University employee had quite obviously not taken a minute's time to actually investigate the situation!

"Who are you going to believe, me who has not bothered to investigage anything at all, or your lying eyes," she seems to be asking.

Wow! The stupidity of this email was dizzying.

Bracing myself, I went to the video tape.

When it comes to abuse, I thought I had seen it all. Apparently not.



I wrote back to the regular reader of this blog, trying to measure my words as carefully as possible.

How could anyone see this video tape and frame the story as if the dairy operator was the victim? My mind boggled:

Sorry, but this one does not pass the smell test and I will be going in the opposite direction.

I cannot speak to what the farm management knew or did not know (a court will decide that), but a couple of points need to be made here:

1. No one is going to voluntarily appear in a video showing this kind of abuse. The suggestion that this was a put-up-job is complete nonsense. What is shown in the video is extreme, shocking and totally unnecessary violence to animals, the kind that gets you a prison sentence in a place where your teeth are pounded out with a bar, and your assh*l* is stretched by your bunk mate. No one signs up for that tour. No one. Ever.
   
   
2. This is not just one person doing violence, and this video tape was not shot in one day. This video tape shows at least two people doing criminal violence to animals, and the change in clothing makes clear it was shot over at least six or seven days.
   
   
3. If farm management did not know what was going on here, they are criminally negligent. The employees shown here are overt sadists and sick twisted souls, and this fact would have been self-evident over even a brief period of time. The fact that this farm hired these people and retained them, speaks to negligent omission at best, and criminal comission at worst. They better get a damn good defense lawyer and throw the people on the video tape under the bus!

I do not feel sorry for this farm<; I feel sorry for these cows and the honest and hard-working dairy industry of Ohio which has been tarred by this horror. You want me to defend this farm and suggest Mercy for Animals or HSUS (allegedly, by inference and suggestion) put up some kind of fabrication? Nope. Sorry, but I am not blind or stupid. Very clearly, the managers, owners and administrators of this dairy, however, are. It is a horror. It is a sadness. And YES, someone needs to go to jail.

Put me on the jury and I assure you they will.

Any question of where I stand?

Just because I stand for farmers, do not salute every inanity of the animal rights community, and will not wink at the direct mail pettifoggery of the Humane Society of the U.S., does NOT mean I will ever defend true animal abuse.

Put me on the jury, and make me jury foreman, and I will see to it that the men in this video get the electric chair if that is at all possible.

Sadly, however, it is not.

You see, one of the people on this video tape has already been arrested.

But guess what?

The people beating and stabbing these poor cows and calfs are only going to be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $750.

Outrageous!

If an animal abuse case ever cried out for criminal prosecution with real jail time, this is it.

But in Ohio, farm animals apparently have no real protection even from this kind of wanton and horrific cruelty.

Should that change? Very clearly, YES.

.

Donald McCaig on Pedigrees and Paranoia Politics

Donald McCaig

Donald McCaig is a working sheep dog man from Highland County, Virginia, a noted author of such New York Times best sellers as Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men and Nops Trials, and a true believer in working dogs who has fought tooth and nail to preserve Border Collies as a working breed.

In an earlier post on this blog, I gave a long review of Dog Wars, which detailed the battles he and others fought against the American Kennel Club on behalf of the Border Collie.

Donald has recently sent me two missives (gotta love email!) which he has posted on a Border Collie list-serv, and both are so good, I thought I would post them here.

Enjoy!



Letter One

Dear Trainers,

Forgive me if I don't answer Dan's jibes. God rest ye Merry Gentlemen. Although the BBC tried to reach me during the show's making - probably because of the Dog Wars - we never did connect and I had not seen the show until last night. A friend watching with me was so distressed he had to go home.

I was in the UK a month or so after the show aired and before the show's full consequences had become apparent. The shock and dismay of ordinary Brits was palpable. Now I see why.

Before its airing here, when I spoke with Patrick Burns (aka Terrierman) about the show, I told him I had read breeding books in the Kennel Club library, from the 1930's, that knew perfectly well the dangers of incestuous breeding (though none objected to the worse practice of breeding to a (highly mutable and exaggerated) conformation standard.

"Patrick," I said, "We've known about this for years."

"Yes," he said, "But for the first time ordinary citizens can SEE it."

The KC, and in this country the AKC have, for years depended on an undeserved high reputation. Until the 90's, in this country at least, they were able to quell and/or marginalize dissent. I experienced first hand some of their attempts (which were more articulate than Dan's but boasted similar content). Until a few brave souls - Mark Derr was the first in this country - started exposing the Kennel Clubs, ordinary doggy folk like you and me were afraid of them. People whispered, "The AKC can put you out of dogs."

Well, the climate has changed and the Internet has nourished dissent.

I have some concerns about this expose.

The Dog Fancy Mythos: The Kennel Clubs have produced a web of lies within which most decent, intelligent intensively-doggy people have spent their lives. Many on this list literally grew up inside the Kennel Clubs, have shown in conformation (some still do) and the structure of their doggy lives has been set by the KC's bizarre zoology, submission to ignorant authority and acceptance of dubious quasi-religious beliefs. It is unsurprising many don't rebel - indeed, it is surprising when some do.

The glue that is holding the Dog Fancy together is no longer the claim that pedigreed dogs are somehow better, that AKC breeders are dog experts, that dog show judges are actually judging SOMETHING important. The glue is no longer respect for the AKC.

It is PETA. Without a wildly exaggerated but very real terror of the power, influence and malevolence of Animal Rights adherents, the Dog Fancy would implode tomorrow.

And if it did? If the KC and AKC were to become the remnant organizations they deserve to be? It's easy to picture a future when a few gray haired folk get together to reminisce about the good old days when they could cut off dogs' ears and tails because, by God they WANTED to. A future when dog showers are reduced to the status of today's dog fighters.

Can it happen? In 1956 when I started smoking we called cigarettes "cancer sticks". We kids recited the doggerel: "Pell-Mell, Pell Mell/ the only thing worse than the taste is the smell/ Surely they'll kill you but they won't say when . . ."

So, like Dog Fanciers we knew that our habits were built on lies but we had the tobacco companies resolutely, powerfully and litigaciously feeding us guff: "Eight out of ten doctors agree: smoke Camels" and that lie buttressed us enough to keep on puffing.

Dog Fanciers, those who like Dan disagree with me, are intelligent, dog savvy, dog-dedicated individuals. And they lean on the same sort of reassurance-mantras we smokers needed.

Until 1964 and the surgeon general's report. It took decades and determined litigation for the tobacco company's guff to collapse and when it did, the effects were unpredictable and powerful. Small tobacco farmers once could make a middle class living, magazines depended on cigarette advertising and smokers? They were and are treated like sick pariahs. Next time you're in the Atlanta airport, inspect the "Smoking Areas". Would you walk your dog through that?

As you know, I despise the Kennel Clubs. But when citizens have been fed guff for a hundred sixty years and the guff is revealed as not merely eccentric silly guff (c.f. poodle show cuts), but guff that has caused pain to real dogs and real dog owners, they like to pick up the pitchforks (See tobacco).

I'm not afraid of PETA or the animal rights movement. For the most part I think they are a distraction and the Dog Fancy's final, desperate demonization - "Yeah the AKC's no good but who else have we got to fight PETA".

And I'm not afraid "they're coming to take our dogs". If Mao couldn't sever that ancient connection, PETA certainly can't.

I am afraid of the fallout when the guff is exposed and derided and angry citizens pick up those pitchforks. I'm afraid that careful obedience, agility, sled dog and yes, sheepdog breeders, will be lumped in with the conformation breeders. I'm afraid our more dog savvy passions will be seen as "just like dog shows".

It won't do us much good but we'll know who's to blame.

Letter Two

Dear Fellow Sheepdoggers,

Twenty years ago the entire Border Collie community fought against AKC "recognition" (Aka "stalking"). Like many sheepdoggers I was unfamiliar with the Dog Fancy - the real humans whose dog activities occur entirely within the structures and belief systems of the Kennel Club (UK) and it's American (and slightly worse clone) the AKC.

Under the "know your enemy" theory I studied these organizations and their origins and belief structures. I got to know AKC dissidents and had access to then unavailable AKC board minutes and AKC correspondence with breed clubs.

It puzzled me. How could otherwise rational human beings believe such crap?

Every time they were criticized, the AKC sent a letter to their important members. (Ordinary owners of AKC reg dogs were ignored).

These letters answered criticism with three arguments:

The Wizard of Oz argument: "We are the dog experts. Who knows dogs - or what's good for them - better than anyone."

The Charlie Brown argument: "We just register dogs on little pieces of paper. We have no responsibility for them. Why is everybody always picking on me?"

(You can see both arguments offered in "Pedigreed Dogs Exposed").

A third argument is a native American product. I've never heard it in Britain. For brevity I'll call it the "Niemöller argument" Ms. Joy has been kind enough to reprint it in full.

While the AKC registers lots of dogs, the vast majority of American dogs aren't registered, and most Americans are mildly contemptuous of dog shows (which are, at its core, what the AKC is about). Americans watch Westminster and giggle at it. I don't known if I've ever seen a major newspaper account of that show which wasn't accompanied by a photo of a ridiculous dog - esp a French poodle in show coat. I've never seen an account w/o a pun headline.

That mockery hurts a Dog Fancier's feelings. Here they are: the Dog Experts that everybody is picking on and they they have the only correct and refined canines. So okay, the AKC treats them like petulant children. The AKC doesn't let them have a say in anything.

But the AKC, like every other tyrant in history, will protect them and their dogs.

Against who?

Well, er . . . against anybody. How about Ingrid Newkirk. How about the HSUS. And anybody who criticizes anything the Dog Fancy does - whatever it does, is Ms Newkirk's dupe - a doggy pinko.

Because they're coming to take our dogs.

"Who?"

"They!!!!"

"But what about the 60 million American dogs and their owners."

"Them too. After they've got all the "refined" dogs."

"Oh. And why do you think this is true?"

"Don't you see - it's just like dominoes. First they come for the socialists . . ."

"I've never heard of that breed."

"No, it's like Nazi Germany. 'First they came for the socialists.'"

"But this isn't Nazi Germany. Dogs aren't socialists."

"Never-you-mind: they're coming for our dogs!"

The Niemoller argument (which is a pretty good argument for the ACLU) has become: "If you think the American Kennel Club is autocratic and unresponsive; if you think that show ring breeding has, over time caused immense pain to dogs and dog owners, if indeed, you think the AKC may, at one time, have made a mistake - just one - then you are among those conspiring to take away our show dogs, our working dogs, our fiest dogs, our sled dogs, our police dogs, our sleep-on-the-bed pet dogs, even the old fart dog I saw lounging in the offices of the US House Ag committee.

If you criticize the Dog Fancy, you are anti-dog.

Don McCaig shows a very sophisticated understanding of how the AKC and its parroting lackeys work on canine list-servs and bulletin boards.

"Niemoller arguments" are actually "slippery slope" arguments.

McCaig correctly notes that these arguments are often used by the ACLU to manipulate the left into saluting every extreme rights claim.

It should also be said that they are used by those on the far right trying to rationalize the more extreme claims made by the National Rifle Association.

The problem with the "slippery slope" argument is that it denies the rationality of people and ignores the fact that we carve steps into slippery slopes every day.

Legalization of booze has not meant the legalization of heroin.

Legalized abortion has not led to legalized infanticide.

Legalized guns for self-defense and sport has not meant a push to carry loaded bazookas through airports.

Regulation of cars and swimming pools has not led to a police state.

Of course, everyone knows this.

We all use stairs every day. No one is falling, uncontrolled, out the window or down the mountain.

And yet, contrived crisis is manufactured at every turn.

Paranoia politics is a staple of the American political system.

What's that all about?

The simple answer is that it's about social manipulation.

One way to gain or retain political power, even in the face of obvious immorality, is to suggest a massive "evil" lurks just outside the campfire's light.

And so Joe McCarthy clanged the alarm of communism, and George Bush said weapons of mass destruction were just over the hill.

No one thought to notice that Russia could not even make soft toilet paper.

No one bothered to point out that Al Queda's choice of weapons was box cutters, and that their leadership lived in caves and mud huts without running water or electricity. We are not fighting Lex Luthor!
And so it is with PETA.

This organization has no lobbying presence in Washington, D.C. and is little more than a press release factory.

Like a Hollywood western town, it's one board thick with nothing but the desert behind it.

But you would never know that to listen to the American Kennel Club or some of the professional hysterics in the online world.

Consider this: Don and I both live in Virginia, where PETA is headquartered, and yet in this state we shoot more than 230,000 deer a year, as well as over 1,500 black bear. My name and address is in the phone book, and Don is not too hard to find either. Harassed by PETA? Ha! They are cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown. I have no fear of them, and neither does any dairy man, deer hunter, sheep man, or butcher.

Here in Virginia, we trap red fox, gray fox, and bobcat, have two turkey seasons, and we blast away at duck and geese with abandon.

We have a cash bounty on coyotes, and the state Constitution guarantees a right to hunt and fish.

Dogs? The state dog of Virginia is the fox hound!

PETA? Real power? Not so much.

In fact, the only power PETA has is the power that the American Kennel Club and various fringe hook-and-bullet writers have given it.

What's that all about?

Simple: by fomenting a fake fear of the "Animal Rights lobby," the American Kennel Club and some right-wing hunters seek to turn attention away from genuinely immoral activities.

This is "Wag the Dog" politics, where a contrived crisis is used to take our attention off of real immorality, such as breeding deformed, defective and diseased dogs or winking at "canned hunts" where former petting zoo animals are shot as they step out of a cage and into a 50-acre fenced enclosure.

The bottom line is that the folks who pull the "Animal Rights" fire alarm at every turn are giving us all an IQ test.

If we fall for it, then we have failed.

And who have we failed?

Not just ourselves. We have also failed the dogs.


One of Don's dogs plays in the recent snow..

Public Floggings for Anyone Cruel to Animals!

The great Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA.

In late November of 1880,  a meeting was called at Cooper Union in New York City, with a panel of church leaders to explain that the criminal element were "depraved because they were deprived", and if only people would come to the aid of prisoners, things might get turned around.

Only there was one little problem.

It seems that all the folks who were invited to speak failed to appear. The result was a small audience, but no speaker.

What to do?

Well, after chewing up a little time rehashing the principles of the Gilbert Library Prisoners' Aid Society, the host flapped around for something else to say, when who should he spy in the audience but none other than Henry Bergh -- the great protector of animals who had started the SPCA in America, and who had spent 14 years denouncing the flogging of horses and all cruelty to animals.

Surely this Great Man would have something intelligent and extemporaneous to say about the abuse of men in the prison system?

And so that is how it came about that Henry Bergh was roped on to the stage at Coopers Union to speak about Capital Punishment.

Only one problem: Henry Bergh was all for it!

In fact, as The New York Times makes clear, he thought there should be whipping posts for people on every block, and that only a fool would spare the lash.

Hang people? He was all for it, and he would even supply the rope!

And here's the best part -- the audience, which had ostensibly come to hear a talk about how to give aid to prisoners, actually clapped and cheered his conclusions!

Oh dear!

You can read all about it right here (PDF format of the NYT of December 1, 1880.)

WHAT? How could a man denounce cruelty to animals but at the same time be in favor of a return to public flogging of humans?

Isn't cruelty to humans a type of cruelty to animals?

Well, yes and no.

You see, for Bergh and many other Animal Rights advocates, the cause was never so much about animals as it was about looking down their nose at poor people who had rough manners and a rough way of doing business.

Bergh, you see was a high hat, and very much on the cutting edge of the class wars of the Victorian-era.

In Bergh's mind, the wrong class of people abused animals, and the right class of people did not.

This social perspective came straight out of England, where Bergh lifted his idea of creating an American Society to Prevent Cruelty to Animals.

As I note in American Working Terriers, not only did this distinction make sense to sniffing social reformers like Bergh, but it also made sense for fundraising, and meshed well with the social climbers and status-seekers attracted to early Kennel Club dog shows.

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.