Westminster & the Death of the Fox Terrier

A repost from July 2004

 

 
I came across an interesting book in the stacks -- "The Dog Show" By William Stifel (2003, Westminster Kennel Club).
 
This is a very well-done coffee table book celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Westminster Kennel Club, the biggest dog show in the U.S.  
 
I did not buy the book, but I read a bit and discovered an amazing thing that helps explains the very rapid degeneration of the fox terrier between 1900 and World War II. 
 

• The first "Best in Show" winner at Westminster in New York City was in 1907. This first "Best in Show" winner was a smooth fox terrier that looked very much like today's Jack Russell.


• Fox terriers won again in 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1931, 1934, 1937 and 1942.


• A Sealyham (another working breed ruined by the show ring) won in 1924, 1927 and 1936.


• Airedales made Best in Show in 1912, 1919, 1920, 1933, and 1936.


• A bull terrier went Best In Show in 1918, and a Welsh Terrier in 1944.

As you can see, almost all the early winners were terriers, and most of them were fox terriers.

It was during this period of time that the face of the fox terrier was elongated and the chest enlarged by show ring breeders.

Prior to World War II, if you were really intent on wining the top award at a dog show, you were into fox terriers.

Probably no breed could have survived such intent attention without being wrecked by fad.

The fox terrier certainly did not. 

The Nonsense of Pull Dogs

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This is a repost from this blog, circa Feb 2005:


In "The Working Jack Russell Terrier," Eddie Chapman writes:

"Something that makes my blood boil is when I hear terrier men talk about dogs they call Caesar dogs. They will show you a Russell type that has been bred too big and say, 'I use him as a Caesar dog'. If I ask what a Caesar dog is, they say it is a dog which will hold the badger, he won't let go,' they say. I have never heard such rubbish in my life. Besides being unnecessary, it is invariably cruel to the dog and more often than not he will be badly bitten for his pains. Besides that, it is unnecessarily cruel to the badger and the sort of behavior that got badger digging banned. I have tried to explain how to remove badgers from a sett without injury to dog or badger. There is nothing clever about getting a hard dog smashed up by a badger. On the contrary, it shows ignorance and a lack of responsibility and feeling. Bravery in a terrier should never be exploited."

I found it quite refreshing to read this passage, as I have often noted that there is is little reason to own a "pull dog" if you actually know how to handle things at the end of a dig. The use of "pull dogs" damages dogs and quarry alike and is wasteful as it often necessitates time out of the field and expensive veterinary work.

In the U.S., the use of pull dogs (what Chapman and some others call "Caesar" dogs) is due to the prevalence of too many over-large terriers that cannot go to ground in a real earth. To say you have a "good pull dog," is to say you do not have a dog capable of actually going to ground.

If you have followed the Kennel Club dictates, and embraced a 14 inch tall dog with a 17" or 18" chest (or larger!), you are forced to rationalize a job for it. No matter that it is a stupid job forged in pain. Most people would rather see their dog injured than swallow their pride and admit they have drunk the Koolaid offered up by the Kennel Club know-nothings who think a fox den is as big around as a go-to-ground tunnel.

Another factor is that many people simply have no idea of how to handle quarry and so use the dog to to do the job. Having gotten to the end of a dig, they do not know how to get the animal out of the pipe, nor do they know how to dispatch it. In such a situation, the use of a "pull dog" is ignorance in motion.

The simplest way for a novice to handle quarry is with a snare. You can make your own for about $5, or else buy a pig snare from a feedstore. An alternative is a "coon tong" available from Bill Boatman's raccoon hunting supply catalogue.

Groundhogs can also be tailed out alive -- it is not hard if the groundhog's tail is presented, as it so often is. If very much of the pipe is remaining, however, you may find yourself in a tug-of-war with the groundhog who can jamb up inside a pipe so tightly that even a large man can have difficulty pulling one free.

Always use a snare for raccoons -- they can twist all the way around on their short fat bodies. They can grab you with their hands and have crushing bites. Rabies is not uncommon in raccoons, especially on the East Coast.

If you have entangled a fox in a net, be carefully when extricating the fox. The best advice is to pin the animal to the ground under your boot while removing the net. Work the net off the fox in sections, and then release it to hunt another day.
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The Last Rat Pit in New York

I'm off to Brooklyn this morning, so it seems fitting to post a little terrier history from that Great City.

The last rat pit in New York City was owned by Christopher "Kit" Burns, and operated as "Sportsman's Hall" at 273 Water Street. The building still stands.

Burns was supposedly a tavern keeper, but in actuality, he was one of the last of the "Dead Rabbit" gang made famous in the Martin Scorcese movie, "The Gangs of New York." The Sportsman's Club was ostensibly a bar, but it derived a large portion of its revenue from rat killing spectacles, and the occasional dog fight.

As James Dabney McCabe, writes in "Secrets of the Great City" (1868):

"Rats are plentiful along the East River, and Burns has no difficulty in procuring as many as he desires. These and his dogs furnish the entertainment, in which he delights. The principal room of the house is arranged as an amphitheatre. The seats are rough wooden benches, and in the centre is a ring or pit, enclosed by a circular wooden fence, several feet high. A number of rats are turned into this pit, and a dog of the best feral stock is thrown in amongst them. The little creature at once falls to work to kill the rats, bets being made that she will destroy so many rats in a given time. The time is generally 'made' by the little animal. . . . "

Kit Burns had two of his favorite dogs stuffed and hanging over the bar. One was called Jack, and was a black and tan terrier that had killed 100 rats in 6 minutes and 40 seconds, an American record. The other dog was Hunky, a dog fighting dog that expired after his last "victory".

Kit Burns's last rat pit fight occurred on November 21, 1870 according to Robert Sullivan's book, Rats, on an occasion when 300 rats were "given away, free of charge, for gentlemen to try their dogs with." Henry Bergh, who founded the SPCA, raided the establishment that night, and Kit Burns was rounded up. Though everyone involved was acquitted, Kit Burns caught cold and died before trial, and the Sportsman's Club was permanently closed.

Kit Burns's widow told a reporter from The Sun newspaper that Mr. Bergh, the SPCA man, was invited to visit her at her new home in Brooklyn "provided the gentleman will have the kindness to bring his coffin with him."
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A History of NYC Rats (with Two Free Chapters)

I will be in New York City tomorrow and for the next few days.

In honor of that, let me offer up a free read from "Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants" by Robert Sullivan.

This is a book about the rats of New York City, including profiles of rat catchers, rat biology, rat history, and other odd bits. A good read, if not quite a complete history of one the world's most important animals.

The first two chapters of the book can be read & here. This is a 12-page PDF.

Order the book new from amazon.com here, or from www.abebooks.com if you are looking for a used edition.

Beryl Markham: Author of the Best Dog Story Ever?

Some things are obviously quite subjective, but if I were asked to name the greatest dog story ever told, I would say that it was written by Kenyan aviatrix Beryl Markham about a cross-bred bull terrier by the name of Buller.

Buller was Beryl's childhood dog, and the story takes place when she is about 12 or 13 and decides to go on a Warthog hunting expedition with two local tribesmen.

Suffice it to say that this is a hunting dog story of the first order. In fact, it is such a good story, and so well told, that when Ernest Hemingway read it, he wrote to his editor and friend Maxwell Perkins:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, 'West with the Night'? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. . . But this girl ... can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true. So, you have to take as truth the early stuff about when she was a child which is absolutely superb. She omits some very fantastic stuff which I know about which would destroy much of the character of the heroine; but what is that anyhow in writing?"

It was years after first reading West with the Night -- and after a fair bit of my touting her as a first-rate female writer -- that I discovered Beryl Markham did not write her memoire at all.

The stories are all true, as Hemmingway noted, and Beryl Markham really did lead an extraordinary life (she was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic).

That said, it now appears the book itself was ghostwritten by Raoul Schuhmacher, her third husband, who was also an accomplished journalist.

But so what?

Whoever wrote the book, the stories are terrific and every bit as well told as Hemingway suggests.

If you have not read West with Night, you have missed a very good thing.

If you are going to the book store to pick up a copy (and if you do, you will thank me later), you might as well pick up a copy of Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa while you are at it.

Both books should be read once every 10 years for your entire life. They really are that good.
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This is a repost from 2007, 

Rien Poortvliet: A Stroke of Genius

The Christian Science Monitor, one of our finest small papers, once wrote that "[Rien Poortvliet's] painting is as skilled and accomplished as any painter, certainly any illustrator in the world today."

That was not an exaggeration.

Poortvliet produced a unique body of truly excellent art that shows a love of land, wildlife, dogs, people and history. He also leaves behind a small museum dedicated to his work.

Poortvliet was entirely self-taught -- a self-conscience act which ensured that his his style was entirely his. Born August 7, 1935, Poortvliet was the son of a Dutch plasterer and began his artistic career as a graphics artist for magazines. His most famous (though certainly not his best!) work is a book called ''Gnomes'' which continues to sell well. Poortvliet was always somewhat flummoxed by the fact that The New York Times Best Seller List included the book in the "non-fiction" category. ''Why?'' he asked, ''Do they think there really are gnomes?''

Poortvliet spent two years in the Dutch navy and, as soon as he was old enough, he visited America. "What I learned about America, was that I wanted to go home."

Home was Soest, a village 30 miles southeast of Amsterdam where he lived with his wife, Corrie Bouman, and their collection of rabbits, dogs, cats, chickens, and farm stock.

Poortvliet worked exclusively in water color -- a medium that allowed him to produce fine works at great speed and with the depth of color and texture needed to capture fur, feather, wood, dirt, and the grinding cogs of history. "Sometimes I work with much water," he said. "Sometimes with a very dry brush. Sometimes with a little spit."

Poortvliet's eye for detail and his intuitive understanding of wildlife, dogs and landscape was without parallel, but he was somewhat deficient at observing the modern world. "I can paint for you any animal you want, including humans," he said. "I can paint an elephant from underneath, as if it were walking on a plate of glass above us. I have never seen this, but I can paint it. But, if you ask me to paint the dashboard of my Volkswagen, I would have to go out and look at it in the yard."

The remarkable Rien Poortvliet died in 1995, but his magnificent art lives on, a gift to us all. Along with his book on dogs, I recommend his book, The Living Forest: A World of Animals available from http://www.abebooks.com/ or http://www.alibris.com/

To see more art from Rien Poortvleit, see >> HERE.

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E.B. White vs ASPCA

Over on the Letters of Note blog, they include this letter from E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and One Man's Meat to the ASPCA, the New York entity charged with collecting "dog taxes."

12 April 1951

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
York Avenue and East 92nd Street, New York, 28, NY

Dear Sirs:

I have your letter, undated, saying that I am harboring an unlicensed dog in violation of the law. If by "harboring" you mean getting up two or three times every night to pull Minnie's blanket up over her, I am harboring a dog all right. The blanket keeps slipping off. I suppose you are wondering by now why I don't get her a sweater instead. That's a joke on you. She has a knitted sweater, but she doesn't like to wear it for sleeping; her legs are so short they work out of a sweater and her toenails get caught in the mesh, and this disturbs her rest. If Minnie doesn't get her rest, she feels it right away. I do myself, and of course with this night duty of mine, the way the blanket slips and all, I haven't had any real rest in years. Minnie is twelve.

In spite of what your inspector reported, she has a license. She is licensed in the State of Maine as an unspayed bitch, or what is more commonly called an "unspaded" bitch. She wears her metal license tag but I must say I don't particularly care for it, as it is in the shape of a hydrant, which seems to me a feeble gag, besides being pointless in the case of a female. It is hard to believe that any state in the Union would circulate a gag like that and make people pay money for it, but Maine is always thinking of something. Maine puts up roadside crosses along the highways to mark the spots where people have lost their lives in motor accidents, so the highways are beginning to take on the appearance of a cemetery, and motoring in Maine has become a solemn experience, when one thinks mostly about death. I was driving along a road near Kittery the other day thinking about death and all of a sudden I heard the spring peepers. That changed me right away and I suddenly thought about life. It was the nicest feeling.

You asked about Minnie's name, sex, breed, and phone number. She doesn't answer the phone. She is a dachshund and can't reach it, but she wouldn't answer it even if she could, as she has no interest in outside calls. I did have a dachshund once, a male, who was interested in the telephone, and who got a great many calls, but Fred was an exceptional dog (his name was Fred) and I can't think of anything offhand that he wasn't interested in. The telephone was only one of a thousand things. He loved life — that is, he loved life if by "life" you mean "trouble," and of course the phone is almost synonymous with trouble. Minnie loves life, too, but her idea of life is a warm bed, preferably with an electric pad, and a friend in bed with her, and plenty of shut-eye, night and days. She's almost twelve. I guess I've already mentioned that. I got her from Dr. Clarence Little in 1939. He was using dachshunds in his cancer-research experiments (that was before Winchell was running the thing) and he had a couple of extra puppies, so I wheedled Minnie out of him. She later had puppies by her own father, at Dr. Little's request. What do you think about that for a scandal? I know what Fred thought about it. He was some put out.

Sincerely yours,

E. B. White

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The World As It Was and Should Be

I downloaded a dozen FREE books to my Kindle Fire last night, one of which was In Africa - Hunting Adventures In Big Game Country (1910) by John T. McCutcheon.

A quick glance through the table of contents found this summary of Chapter Eight:

Meeting Colonel Roosevelt in the Uttermost Outpost of Semi-Civilization. He Talks of Many Things, Hears that he has Been Reported Dead, and Promptly Plans an Elephant Hunt

Nice!

Now to be clear, I am not saluting elephant hunting, but neither would Teddy if he were alive today. This is, after all, the man who almost single-handedly created the National Forest system, the national Wildlife Refuge system, and the National Park system, and who did more to protect wildlife in this country than anyone who came before or who has come along since.

But Roosevelt believed in an active life, well-lived. He did not shrink into his hole, cuddle up next to the fire, and play board games all day. Life was to be lived, and he was out in the world living it. That is the world as it was, and the way it should be today.
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I Watched This on My Kindle

I watched this video on my Kindle Fire which does not need shelving, allows highlighting and margin notes, and sends all my highlighted text to a computer file for easy use if I am writing something ("Look Ma, no typing!").

All Kindle books are searchable, several million books are free, and all new books are cheaper than their printed versions (and most used books are cheaper too if you figure in postage).  If I do not know a particular word, I only have to hover a finger over i, and a definition pops up.

I still have hundreds of paper books, of course (not all books are online yet) but I can see that in the not-too-distant future they are going to be seen as very heavy furniture that collects dust and makes rooms look smaller.  Yes, paper books are very clearly going the way of "long-playing" records....
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Why the Indians Attacked at Dawn

I continue to engage in free reading thank to my Kindle Fire.

From "A Flintlock in the Rain" by Lionel Atwill in The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told, edited by Jay Cassell, comes this little gem about getting ready for deer hunting with flintlocks in the Adirondack wilderness of New York:

Loading a flintlock at five in the morning by the light of a Coleman lantern is a ticklish feat. It is hard to tell if the powder goes down the barrel or down your boots. The temptation is to stand smack next to the light and see what you are doing, until the thought of the lantern igniting the powderhorn in your hand soaks through your coffee-laced brain. Then you step back even farther and forget if you have tossed a charge down the barrel or not.

"This," says Hatfield, "is why Indians attacked at dawn."

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Maxims and Hints for Quite a Lot

I am grooving on my Kindle Fire, reading obscure books for free.

Today's find is in an odd little book entitled Maxims and Hints on Angling, Chess, Shooting, and Other Matters also, Miseries of Fishing by Richard Penn (1784-1863), and published in 1842.

I came across the four maxims below, and thought they applied to quite a lot, but especially to the world of dog training where there are thousands of years of experience, thousands of very excellent trainers alive today, and hundreds of different training techniques, and yet we still have some folks who have yet to bury their first dog, who are quite sure they have all the answers, that there is only one way to do it, and that maybe they themselves invented it all too. 

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• You must not insist upon its being admitted without dispute, that the man who made your gun is the best maker in London. This town is a very large place, and it contains a great many gunmakers. You must also remember that it "stands within the prospect of belief" that there may be other persons who think themselves as competent to select a good gun, and to shoot well with it afterwards as you are.

* * * *

• In like manner, although you may prefer using one kind of wadding to another, or may perhaps like to wear shoes and gaiters rather than trousers and laced boots, you must not suppose that every man who takes the liberty of forming a different opinion from yours on these subjects is a mere bungler.

* * * *

• If you are thought to excel in any particular game or sport, do not too often lead to it as a subject of conversation: your superiority, if real, will be duly felt by all your acquaintance, and acknowledged by some of them; and you may be sure that "a word" in your favour from another person will add more to your reputation than "a whole history" from yourself.

* * * *

• The foundation of good breeding is the absence of selfishness. By acting always on this principle — by showing forbearance and moderation in argument when you feel sure that you are right, and a becoming diffidence when you are in doubt, you will avoid many of the errors which other men are apt to fall into.

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I Love My New Kindle Fire

My new Kindle Fire is quite the tool! Not only is it a good e-book reader, but it also gets my email, the Internet, plays all my music, is a great place to store and show pictures, and streams video and radio too (I have been watching National Geographic's Amazing Planet at Starbucks, which is about as cool a thing as I have done in the last three months). All this for $200, which I find rather amazing!

Some of this can be done with my Samsung "smart" phone, of course, and the Kindle does not replace that, as the Kindle is not a phone and is dependent on a wireless connection for everything but downloaded books and music and movies and photos, while the phone operates off of high-band radio frequencies (that's what a G3 or G4 connection is really all about).

The phone of course, it not a book reader, nor is it very good at reading stuff on the Internet (not even email). The Kindle allows me to download both recently published books and many free older books as well. For example, on my first morning with the Kindle, I downloaded four free old dog books, as well as some Conan Doyle and some obscure Mark Twain for starts. More free book are available at archive.org (2.5 million titles for free), openlibrary.org (1.5 million titles), Project Gutenberg, ManyBooks.net, and Feedbooks and select either Mobi, Text, or Kindle formats for easiest downloads.

Apparently, I can also download audio books too. I will have to try that!

This morning I figured out how to highlight text in a Kindle book, so that I can then rip and strip that text into a blog post. The trick here is to know that Kindle has created a social network which can be accessed at http://kindle.amazon.com/ One you log in, it shows you not only all the books you have downloaded, but also all the passages you have highlighted. For example, this is text I read yesterday:

“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outrageous results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

Kindle can read Word, .txt, .jpg, .pdf, .gif, and HTML files as well as .mobi, .prc, and if you email yourself at your Kindle email  address, it will convert files and even unzip and convert Word folders and documents so they are ready to read.

So what is the Kindle not great for?  Well. it's not a full computer with desk, chair, mouse, and key board.  Nothing really replaces that, not even a laptop or notebook in my opinion (and yes I have those too).  For actual writing, I remain a "box box table unit" man, but for researching, reading, and doing the light communications "tasking" that the world demands of us these days, the Kindle is pretty darn great!

Final two bonus bits:  It fits in the front pocket of my Carrhart pants, and it takes the same charger as my cell phone, which is particularly great in the car.

Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom'

Jonathan Franzen's fourth novel 'Freedom' hits on population growth, mountaintop removal mining, invasive species, conservation, and cats killing birds.  Sounds like my cup of coffee!

In an interview he notes.

It's hard to drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the exurbs of this country and not feel, you know, maybe it would be better to have less people. It is clear that many of our environmental problems, certainly climate change foremost among them, would be scaled down dramatically and perhaps scaled down into solvable range if there were half as many people contributing to the problem.

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American Working Terriers on Kindle and Nook

Price:	$15.00

Download immediately and feel free to Facebook it!
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Practical, common sense, terrier work for the beginner, laid out in a clear no-nonsense style with chapters on the history of working terriers in Europe and America, along with sections on introducing young dogs to work, tools, technique, American terrier quarry, hazards, and veterinary care for working dogs.

The sections on veterinary care and tools alone will save most people more money than the cost of this book, while the tips on digging, locator collars, skunk toxic shock, and handling quarry at the end of a dig, may save you more than money.

This book is about working terriers, but if you show, breed or judge any type of terrier, you will find this book an eye-opener.

275+ pages, with 80 photos and illustrations.  Want the paperback version?  Get that here.  Also available at the Apple I-store for I-PAD and Barnes and Noble for the Nook.

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Hmmmmmm

Ok, it's not just me.

A careful reader of this blog has sent me side-by-side pictures, from this blog, of Border Collie man and author Don McCaig and Mark Twain.

And NO, they have never been seen at the same place at the same time.

Hmmmmm. . . . . I was fooled for a long time by that Superman / Clark Kent thing, but I won't be fooled again!  
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A Canine Book Review

Click to enlarge.  Any questions?


Sent by Jemima Harrison of the rescue dog, Pride.
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Cesar's Dedication

I am going to write about Cesar Millan's dedication, but perhaps not the one you think.

I am not going to talk about Cesar Millan's dedication to the dogs, or the TV show, or the Dog Pyschology Center he founded in Los Angeles.

I am going to talk about the dedication to his new book Cesar's Rules, which came out yesterday.

I was at National Geographic last night, for his first book-signing of the tour, and to see episode one of Season Seven (very funny and smart).

Cesar has the gift of all famous great speakers, which is to come out small, slightly disorganized, and a bit tentative (note that the rules are bit different if you are not famous).

If you are expecting a Massive Ego to enter the room, you do not see it.

If you are expecting to get a shtick you do not get it.

When Millan shows up, it is the opposite of a television evangelist; there is no shiney suit, no carefully orchestrated hand movements, no set stump speech.

Which is not to say he does not have speaking modules.

If you talk a lot, you learn to say your lines and not bump into the furniture too much. The trick is to have several hundred bits in your glad-bag of stories and ideas, and to let those pieces tumble out in a natural and unforced order as people ask questions or raise points that need further illumination.

Millan does it masterfully. There is a reason he is the People Whisperer.

OK, back to the book, but before I get there, let me note that this book was NOT written by Cesar Millan alone any more than his television show is produced as a one-man band. It takes a team.

The team on this book, as in all the others, is Cesar Millan and Melissa Jo Peltier.

Now if I know one thing from writing quite a lot myself over the years, it is that the second name in a lineup is the person who probably did most of the writing and sentence shaping with a blow torch. Been there, done that. So let me give a huge tip of the hat to Melissa Jo Peltier who has, among her many other credits and accomplishments, an Emmy, a Peabody, and a raft of movie production credits, including being co-producer of one of the greatest movies of all time, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. You go girl!

But back to Cesar Millan's dedication.

You see, this book is a controversy between pages... or should I say a small wound carefully bound and anointed with the hope that it will knit up.

The wound, of course, was not inflicted by Millan. As I have noted in the past, Millan has never said a single bad thing about another trainer or dog rehabilitator.

Which is not to say that those who have been a bit less successful have not said a few bad things about him -- often without even taking the time to read his books or see his show!

Most are know-nothings and wannabes, but at least one has a dog training show of her own, and another has a dog training center.   And I have good news: the former finally got her very own dog!

Right. So there you are. No names.  I am a dog man and I will not get catty.  Let the healing begin!

But I am off track.

I started typing this morning to tell you about the book's dedication. Let's get on what that. What's it say?

Here it is, entire:

I dedicate this book to my sons, Andre and Calvin, because I want them to learn that many different people from varying experiences can come together for the common good. As a father, I want to train my kids to know that they can have a meeting of the minds with the people who might come from different belief systems than they do. I want them to always keep their minds open to new ideas and knowledge, because only with an open mind can we change the world for the better. I don't want to leave my boys great material wealth. I want to bequeath them a wealth of knowledge so they can become men of integrity with the power to transform the world.

Geez, that's pretty good.

And it's not artifice either.

It was Millan that reached out to his critics, not the other way around.

It was Millan who walked (can we dare say it?) calmly and assertively up to the barking dogs.

And, oddly enough, it is Millan that clicks and treats, even as he shows there are (pun intended) as many ways to train a dog as there are to skin a cat.

More later, I promise. 

And get the book.  There are surprises inside!

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DogTreasures.com

For those who are interested in canine history, book, photographs, and collectables, I recommend >> DogTreasures.com

I met the owner, Leonard Brook, at an antique sale in Middleburg, Virginia a while back, and it turns out he bought out the entire dog library of one Francis P. Fretwell who, did indeed, have quite a collection!

Mr. Brook does indeed have some hard to get books and the prices are fair enough. Mr. Brook is also a pretty nice and interesting fellow; he used to train dogs for the stage in New York. Check out his site!

Happy Birthday William Shakespeare!

My father said a man could almost pass for educated provided he knew the Bible and had read all of William Shakespeare.

Needless to say, I promptly read the Bible and all of William Shakespeare!

So what do the Bible and Shakespeare have in common?

Among other things, a general contempt and dislike of dogs!

Perhaps this is not too surprising, as dogs carried rabies in ancient times, and were most commonly seen as semi-feral beasts scouring the edges of cities, dumps and waste lands.

Shakespeare mentions dogs 151 times in his plays and sonnets, but only one lap dog appears as a character -- Crab in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

So what is Shakespeare saying about dogs the rest of the time?

Mostly he is comparing dogs to people (with both suffering as a result).

We do find Shakespeare giving the nod to the beginnings of dog classification, however. In Macbeth he writes:

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are 'clept
All by the name of dogs: the valued file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him closed.

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The End of Publishing

The book, above, is a limited edition (1,000 copies printed) edition of the Rev. John Russell's memoirs, written by E.W.L. Davies and printed in 1902, complete with illustrations by N.H.J. Baird, and "coloured by hand."

The cover is embossed in gold.

I brought it along with me to coffee this morning. I took the picture and loaded it from my laptop at Starbucks.

On the way over, National Public Radio had a story about a fellow who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, which was turned down by multiple publishers before it was published by Bellevue Literary Press, which is run out of a couple of rooms at Bellevue Hospital (yes, the place with the nut ward), in New York City.

It seems every other publisher had turned It down. Not commercial enough. The folks at Bellevue thought that was crazy talk. How ironic!

77=88

Last night I stopped at Barnes and Noble to drink more Starbucks coffee and cruise the racks. I got two paperback novels, but not before stopping at the desk of the guy selling the Barnes and Noble version of an e-book reader.

Barnes and Noble is selling e-book readers.

Clearly, you do not need to be a genius to see that paper publishing is not long for this world.

Ten years, tops.

I already get my newspaper from my cell phone and my computer.

And with e-book readers, who needs book stores?

Certainly no writer needs a publisher skimming off $19 out of every $20.

In the Next Economy, books will cost $10, the author will get $9, and the file-sharing site will get a dollar. There will be no publisher at all.

And there will be no loss.

Publishers never sold books anyway; they placed them in stores. In the era of Amazon, book stores are going broke faster than tobacco shops in the 1990s.

Anyone can see the Next Economy is already here.

Look at music. Who goes to record stores anymore? You order online and get your recommendations online, and the music is downloaded to your computer, or your I-pod. No more skipping songs, cascading CDs, and ripped audio tape.

How about movies? First there was video tape, and then cable TV, and now NetFlix. Next will be "online all the time, and on demand."

Some folks already have it.

Books are clearly next.

The market for e-book readers is exploding. In a world in which cheap paperback novels cost $15, the demand for a $150 reader will not be contained for long.

Of course, every new technology has its ups and down. A shakeout in e-book readers has yet to occur; the wave of inflated expectations is still building.



But how deep will the "trough of disillusionment" really be?

Not very, I think.

The current I-Pad is not the machine that will win the race, but the next generation along this same curve will probably be the tipping point.

It's not like an e-reader has to do a lot to beat a paper book.

For one thing, a million great books are already out there for FREE (including the book featured at the top of this post).

E-books do not rot, mold, crowd shelves, or cost a fortune to move across town.

Plus they are cheaper than their paper equivalents; a lot cheaper over time.

And what will e-books do for publishers and book stores?

The fellow at Barnes and Noble selling e-book readers tried to make the case that publishers and books stores will still exist in the future. His thesis: that consumers need publishers and book stores to tell us, the consumer, what to read.

I call bullshit.

In the Next Economy we will not need priests to tell us what to read.

Book titles will be loaded directly up to file servers, the same as i-Tunes.

Consumers themselves will rank them up or down. Blogs and social marketing sites will tell niche communities what's hot and what's not.

Of course, the real choke point will always remain.

Very few people can write well.

Even fewer people have something to say.

Even fewer have something new to say.

Even fewer can leap the hurdles of production; the unending hunt for typos, the sanding of sentences, and the tyranny of pagination.

But paper, printing and publishing priests?

In ten years, we will look back on them as an anachronism, right up there with snail mail and the fax.

Listen up children, when I was a kid, we had printed books. On paper. Can you imagine?
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