"Darwin" Nonsense Engraved on the Floor

source

Engraved into the floor of the Academy of Natural Sciences in San Francisco is this line:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Darwin NEVER said this.

And he never would say this because it's actually not true.

You see, a lot of the species that have survived have barely changed at all for a very, very long time (ferns, sharks, alligators, turtles), while a lot of the species that appear to be changing all the time (primates for example), are being quickly pushed into extinction.

Survival of a species is not about adaptation, but about successfully breeding and surviving to the age of breeding. Sometimes adaptation is favored, but often it is not. And once a lot of adaptation has occurred, can it be really be said that a "species" has survived? Show me the wild progenitor of the cow. They are extinct. As a species they are no more, and yet the modern cow is one of the most common animals on earth.

In fact, the sentence engraved into the floor of the Academy of Natural Sciences is actually a corruption of a bit of nonsense reductionism done by Leon Megginson, a professor of marketing at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, who died in 2010.

This fake quote is so deeply embedded in the sphere of nonsense that the people who designed and manage the Academy of Natural Sciences in San Francisco let it get engraved into the floor of their entry way.

No, they never bothered to actually read Darwin to see that this sentence is not actually there.

In recent years, the Darwin attribution has been cut away, but apparently the "quote" itself is too big a remodel to easily fix.

Teach? Get it right?  Apparently, not at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

• Related Posts:

** From Bassets to Auschwitz in 50 Years

** Charles Galton Darwin

** Evolution of Darwinian Evolution Cartoons

** Darwin Drives a Hybrid Animal

** Happy Darwin Day! 

** Howard Galton's Bloodhounds

** Ten Things Darwin Ate

** The Earthworm Connection to Terrier Work

** Mis-Read Title: Thought It Was "Origin of Feces"

** Kennel Club Dogs: Unnatural Selection for Defect

** Jesus Celebrates Darwin's 200th Birthday

** Darwin Approved, and As Natural As It Gets

** The Francis Galton Dog Show

** Inbred Thinking  

.

George Bernard Shaw at the Pound

George Bernard Shaw made his own blinders.

There is a general tendency for those on the political left to assume eugenics is an expression of right-wing fanaticism.  In fact, eugenics is an apolitical idea and it was embraced by such diverse names as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, Konrad Lorenz, Oliver Wendell Homes, Margaret Sanger, Luther Burbank, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Leland Stanford, and H. G. Wells, among others. 

To say there was widespread support for eugenics in the first few decades before and after the turn of the 20th Century is not to say there were not some controversies!

Hitler, for example, was bent on sterilizing and killing Jews, but many opposed this plan, not because they were against forced sterilization or state-sponsored murder, but because they thought the Jews were absolutely the wrong group.  A lot of Jews were smart and industrious!  Keep them!   The folks you wanted to round up to sterilize kill were the lazy, the crazy, the "unfit", and the old, sick and broken.

And who pushed this school of thought?  One vocal advocate was none other than liberal Fabian George Bernard Shaw, author of both Pygmalion and Man and Superman fame, and winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature.







What most people do not know about G. B. Shaw is that he was not only a writer, but also an economist who was a co-founder of the London School of Economics. 

Shaw was also a vocal proponent of eugenics.  At the back of Man and Superman, he penned a section on "Good Breeding" and "Property and Marriage" where he synthesized and homogenized a new form of eugenic socialism in which he advocated all production as being put forward for the collective good.

Shaw was in the thick of the eugenics movement, and a leading thinker and vocal advocate.  At a meeting of the Eugenic Education Society on March 3, 1910, Shaw suggested the need to create  a "lethal chamber" to solve "the problem" of poor producers dragging down society, and he also called for the creation of a "deadly" but "humane" gas for the purpose of killing many "unfit" people at a time.  Sound familiar? 

This kind of talk was not idle chatter or ironic polemicism or satire -- sterilization and gas chambers were put forth by Shaw as very serious "solutions" to the "quality of people" problem and were seen as the inevitable way forward by many others.

Where did this idea come from? 

Why from the animal breeders of course, and the dog breeders in particular.  To this day, sterilization, gas chambers and closed canine breeding pools are the back bone of the Kennel Club systems in the U.S., the U.K., and around the world.

Which is not to say that the Kennel Club invented all this.  The push to "improve" animals through selective breeding at the hand of man can be traced back to Robert Bakewell and earlier.

No less a luminary than Charles Darwin noted that with humans, the healing hand of natural selection was being interfered with by medicine and social institutions that protected the weak, and it was thought that not much good could come from that!   As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man (1882):

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Of course, this was all pseudo-science to justify social position, and to monumentalize the selfish desire to avoid taxation to help the poor. Why spend money feeding and housing poor people (or abandoned dogs) when for less than the price of a bullet, you could "humanely" gas them wholesale?

Today, of course, to note that the Kennel Club and the eugenics movement spring from common roots and were self-reinforcing, is a heresy. Simple history is omitted, redacted or swept under the rug. As author Micheal Crichton has noted:

After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all.

Right. The Kennel Club practice eugenics with sterilization, gas chambers, and closed breeding pools? Well yes, but that's not eugenics -- that's dog breeding! 

As for George Bernard Shaw, many of his supporters have attempted to suggest his support for eugenics was a kind of Irish irony, along the lines of Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal.  Perhaps.  There is no question Shaw was a kind of linguistic Lady Gaga, willing to say anything to get attention and in love with his own voice and self-fanning fame.  That said, Shaw did attend meetings of the Eugenic Education society, did praise Adolph Hitler, and did it all without too much irony being in self-evidence. 

• Related Links:
  ** Inbred Thinking
  ** The Eugenics Man and the Kennel Club
  ** From Bassetts to Auschwitz in 50 Years
  ** The Francis Galton Dog Show
  ** A Fear of Foreign Blood
  ** Stonehenge:  The Roots of the Inbreeding Problem
  ** On Eugenics and Dogs, Circa 1942
  ** Gas Chambers, Dog Breeders and "Shelters" .

.

Lincoln and Darwin: Right on the Money

Today is the 219th birthday of two remarkable men: Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Darwin.

What do they have in common?

1. Exact same birthday.
2. Both had beards.
3. Both appear on money.
4. They each changed the world.
5. Both were terriermen in their fashion.

Darwin, of course, was a fox-hunter in his youth, and a dedicated ratter as well. His father said of him:

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

Later, Darwin would write of the evolution of dogs into types for specific purposes, and he used his own Pointer to note the genetic basis of coat color.

The Origin of Species, of course, was published in 1859, the same year as the first dog show in the U.K., and it was Darwin's work -- and that of his cousin, Sir Francis Galton -- that shaped so much of the theoretical underpinnings of the modern Kennel Club's closed registry system.

Darwin's life work did not end with The Origin of Species, however. For his entire adult life Darwin had a series of white foxing terriers, all by the name of Polly, and it was one of these dogs which was instrumental in the production of his last great work, on the activity of earthworms.

Over here in America, a young Abraham Lincoln is the first President to write a poem about a terrier.

Written in 1844 for his friend Andrew Johnston, The Bear Hunt is an allegory about those who claim benefits which they have not won for themselves.

A humorous poem, it is the small terrier -- not the hounds that did the work, or the men who pulled the trigger -- that at the end of the day claims the prize of the bear's skin.

With grinning teeth, and up-turned hair--
Brim full of spunk and wrath,
He growls, and seizes on dead bear,
And shakes for life and death.

And swells as if his skin would tear,
And growls and shakes again;
And swears, as plain as dog can swear,
That he has won the skin.

Lincoln's only known dog was named Fido and was a lab-mix type yellow-coated dog that would accompany Lincoln around Springfield, Illinois.

When Lincoln was elected President of the United States in 1860, he decided to leave Fido in Springfield as the dog was around age five and was thought to be "too old" to travel.

Ironically, Fido outlived Lincoln, and was at the Springfield house, in 1865, when his master's body was brought back from Washington. D.C.

Maladaptive Pigeons at the Hand of Man

The Rock Dove or Rock Pigeon, from which all domestic pigeons derive.

Dogs are not the only animals that have been selected for function and dysfunction at the hand of man.

For more than a thousand years, pigeons have been bred to express an amazing amount of genetic variation, from beautiful to grotesque, and from whimsical to functional.

The litany of pigeon breeds is truly jaw-dropping and reflects a global fraternity of breeders.

There are Aachen Lacquer Shield Owl pigeons, Aachen Pouter pigeons, and Aargau Peak Crested pigeons.

There is the Absy Egyptian Swift, the Afghan Sherazi, African Owl pigeon, Agaran Boinije, Ahmar Gohzar, Alpine Swift, Altenburger Trumpeter, American Bohemian Pouter, American Flying Baldhead, American Flying Flight, American Flying Tumbler, American Giant Homer, American Giant Rumbler, and the American Giant Runt (love that name!).

We have the Anatolian Ringbeater, the American Strasser, Anbary Asmar Egyptian Swift, Ancient Tumbler, Antwerp Pigeon, Antwerp Smerle, Arabian Trumpeter, Arad Barred Highflier, Archangel, Armenian Tumbler, and Asiatic Crack Tumbler.

We have Australian Saddleback Tumbler, the Barb, Bavarian Pouter, Beak-Crested Jacobin, Belgian Ringbeater, and the Berlin Medium Face Tumbler (which also comes in Long Face and Short Face varieties).

We have the Bernburg pigeon, the Berne Half Beak, Berne Peak Crested, Bernhardin Magpie, Birmingham Roller, and the Blondinette.

We have the Blue Tumbler of Cluj, Bohemian Pouter, the Bohmentaub, the Bokhara Trumpeter, the Bolk Egyptian Swift, Boston Blue Tumbler, Bremen Tumbler, British Show Racer, and Brunner Pouter.

We have the Bucharest Ciung Highflier, the Bucharest Show Tumbler, the Buda Grizzle, Budapest Short Face Tumbler, and the Budapest Highflier (to say nothing of the Budapest Muffed Tumbler and Budapest Muffled Stork).

We have the Cassel Tumbler, the Catalonian Head and Neck Tumbler, the Central Asiatic Roller, Chinese Nasal Tuft, Chinese Owl, Clean Legged Fullhead, Clean Legged Spot Swallow, Coburg Lark, Colillano Pouter and Cologne Tumbler.

We have the Czech Ice Pouter, Czech Muffed Tumbler, Czech Trumpeter, the Dragoon, and the Damascene.

We have the Danish Suabian, Danish Tumbler, the Danzig Highflyer, the Escompadissa Tumbler, the Dewlap, the Donek, the Double Crested Priest, the Duchess, the Egyptian Swift, the Eichbuhl, the Elster Pouter, and the Elster Purzler, to say nothing of the English Carrier, English Fantail, English Longface Muff Tumbler, English Magpie, and English Owl.

We have the Exhibition Flying Tippler, the Fat Shan Blue, Felegyhazer Tumbler, and the Fish Eye Roller.

We have the Florentine pigeon, Flying Oriental Roller, Flying Saddle Homer, Flying Tippler, Fork-Tailed pigeon, Franconian Heart Magpie, Franconian Toy Self, and the Franconian Velvet Shield, to say nothing of the French Bagdad, French Mondain, Frillback, Gaditano Pouter, Galaţi roller, German Beak-Crested, the German Modena, German Nun, and German Shield Owl.

We have the Ghent Cropper, Giant American Crest, Giant Mallorquina Runt, Giant Show Runt, the Gier pigeon, the Gorguero Pouter, Groninger Slenke, the Hamburg Sticken, Hana Pouter, Hanover Tumbler, Helmet pigeon, Hindi Fantail, Hollander pigeon, Hungarian Buga Pigeon, the Hungarian Giant House Pigeon, Hungarian Giant Pouter, and the Hungarian Short.

We have the Huppé Picard, the Hyacinth pigeon, Ice pigeon, Indian Fantail, Indian Gola, Indian Mondain, Iran Roller, Italian Owl Jacobin, and the Jiennense Pouterm as well as the Indian Fantasy pigeon (love that name!),

There is the Kaluga Turmani pigeon, the Karakand Fantail, Karakandy Egyptian Swift, Kazan Tumbler, Kelebek, Kiev Tumbler, King pigeon, Kiskunfelegyhaza Tumbler, Kojook Egyptian Swift, Konigsberg Moorhead, Lucerne Gold Collar, and the Lebanon pigeon.

There is the Lucerne Gold Collar, the black Magpie, Macedonian Turbit, Majorcan Bort Runt, Maltese pigeon, Mariola pigeon, Martham pigeon, and the Memel Highflier.

We have the Mesawed Egyptian Swift, Micholaiyvski Shield Tumbler, Miniature American Crested, Mookee, Montauben, Moravian White Head, Moscat, Moscovite Tumbler, Moulter, New York Danish Flying Tumbler, Norwegian Tumbler, Norwich Cropper, and the Novi Sad Short Face Tumbler (what a name!).

We have the Nun pigeon, Nuremberg Lark, Old Dutch Capuchine, Old Fashioned Oriental Frill, Old German Cropper, Old German Owl, Ostrava Bagdad, Pakistani Highflier, Parlor Roller, Pheasant Pigeon, and the Ukrainian Skycutter (love that name!).

We have the Pomeranian Show Crest, Posen Colored Head Tumbler, Poster pigeon, Prague Medium Face Tumbler, Oriental Frill, Quet Roller, Racing Homer, Rhine Ringbeater, Roller Pigeon, Romanian Argintiu Tumbler, Romanian Blind Tumbler, Romanian Blue Barred Whitetail, Romanian Naked-Neck Tumbler, Russian Martini, Saddle Homer, Saint Louis Arch Crested Fantail, Saxon Breast pigeon, Saxon Monk, Saxon Stork, and Silky Fantail.

We have the Single Crested Priest, South German Charcoal Lark, Spaniard pigeon, Spanish Flamenca Runt, Spanish Frillback Bagadette, Spanish Owl Pouter, and Spanish Thief Pouter.

We have the Sverdlovsk blue-gray mottle-headed pigeon, Swiss Crescent, Swiss Mondain, Syrian Bagdad, Syrian Coop Tumbler, Syrian Swift pigeon, Syrian Turbiteen, Texan Pioneer, Thai Fantail, Thai Laugher, Thuringian Breast Pigeon, Thuringian Spot, Thuringian Wingpigeon, Tiger Swallow, Tippler, and the Transylvanian Double-Crested Tumbler (love that name!).

We have the Ural Striped Maned pigeon, the Tung Koon Paak, Valencian Giant Tenant pigeon, Valencian Magany Homer, Vogtland pigeon, Volga Russian Tumbler, Warsaw Schmetterling, the West of England Tumbler and the Zurich White Tail.

And yes, this is just a partial list!





As I noted some years back, there is a breed of pigeon called a "roller" where flocks go into a kind of synchronized neurological fit causing them to roll over and tumble in mid-air -- the kind of activity that tends to attract hawks. Talk about maladaptive!

In addition to rollers, there are racing or homing pigeons which look very much like natural rock doves (i.e. wild pigeons), but which may have a little more speed and slightly better orienteering skills.




Of course, as with dogs, many of these breeds are only slighty different variations from others of a very similar type, while others look suspiciously like odd-looking versions of the common feral form you might see in any city park, while still others look like diseased mutants.

But isn't that true of dog breeds as well?!



Some of the pigeons that have been crafted by the hand of man are truely beautiful and fly very well, while others are bizarre looking and fly less successfully.

In the bizarre catagory is the Blue Pouter, pictured below, which is an ornamental breed with long legs, an extruded body, and an amazing inflatable crop.




There are quite a few types of Pouters, and the function of one type, the "Horseman" Pouter is to serve as a "thief" bird. It turns out that a swollen crop is a bit of a turn on to female pigeons, and so female pigeons can sometimes be seduced to follow the Horseman Pouter back to his coop.



Charles Darwin was quick to notice the amazing varieties of livestock being produced by breeders in his day, and he was especially attentive to chicken and pigeon breeders as he himself had first noticed wide variation from an intermediate type when observing finches on the Galapagos Islands.

When Darwin came back to Britain in 1836, he began to correspond with dog, chicken, sheep, cattle and pigeon breeders from around the world as he worked out his theories of speciation through natural selection.

In 1855, he built his own pigeon loft and began raising a wide variety of pigeons himself.

For the rest of that story I recommend a lengthy tour through the excellent web site, Darwin's Pigeons.





A final note: the beautiful pigeon illustrations shown here are the work of Gary Romig, and are for sale at his web site.

They are redone versions of illustrations which first appeared in Robert Fulton's The Illustrated Book of Pigeons, published in 1878. A companion volume, by Lewis Wright, was called The Illustrated Book of Poultry.
,

Howard Galton's Bloodhounds

I have written before about the intellectual history behind the the Kennel Club's theories, tracing them from Robert Bakewell to Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin and finally to Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's nephew) who was the father of eugenics.

Along the way, and without interruption, the talk was of dogs as well as other breeds of animals, including humans.

One of the more interesting notes is a letter from W.D. Fox to Charles Darwin about the effects of inbreeding in blood hounds owned by Howard Galton, who was Sir Francis Galton's uncle.

W.D. Fox quotes Howard Galton as saying:

"I have found from breeding in & in that there is considerable difficulty in keeping up the breed. Many of the females have never exhibited any sexual appetite & those which do so at all, very rarely.

The Knot in the tail appeared by accident in one of the finest Dog puppies I had, so fine that I kept it, notwithstanding this imperfection, and all his descendants had it until at last I got a cross with one of Lord Aylesfords' Bloodhounds, since which time it has disappeared.

The knot was always in the same part of the tail. Another consequence of breeding in and in is that the animals become prematurely old."

There is nothing new here, of course.

The deleterious effects of inbreeding have been known for as long as man has been alive, which is why there is a ban on it in all religions (one of the very few commonalities across the religious spectrum).

What is only notable here is the provenance of the observation: Darwin's inquiry into the effects of inbreeding in Howard Galton's blood hound pack dates back to 1838, more than 20 years before the first formal dog show in the U.K., and 35 years before the start of the Kennel Club.
.

The Kennel Club is Darwin's Nightmare T-Shirt!

Steal this art! Permission granted. Click pic for bigger.

Wouldn't you just love to walk around Crufts with this very cool T-shirt honoring our hero, Charles Darwin?

Well guess what? You can! And so can your dog!

Through the miracle of the Internet, I have produced a T-shirt (and a dog shirt too!) which it is now available at the DarwinDogs store front. Just click here and pick the color and style of your choice.

These T-shirts are being sold for ZERO markup, as the message is the thing!

Want to produce a truck full of them (and maybe stickers and posters too)?

You can!

Just click on the picture for super-sized art, available for ripping off to your heart's desire.

Plaster them around Crufts.

Make stickers and tack one to Caroline Kisko's forehead!

And if anyone asks, tell them you got them from Terrierman.com!


Like the art above? Not mine, but available here. Nice!.

Ten Things Darwin Ate

1. An Agouti (while on the Beagle voyage). Darwin remarked that the Agouti was just about the best thing he had ever tasted.


2. An Owl (while a member of the "Gourmet Club" at Cambridge University)


3. A Hawk (while a member of the "Gourmet Club" at Cambridge University)


4. A Bittern (while a member of the "Gourmet Club" at Cambridge University)


5. An Armadillo (while on the Beagle voyage), which he said tasted and looked like duck when served in the kitchen.


6. A Puma (while on the Beagle voyage). He said it tasted like veal.


7. Giant tortoises (in the Galapagos while on the Beagle voyage). Darwin liked the taste of giant tortoise so much, he loaded up 48 to be eaten on the voyage back.
   .
8. A Lesser Rhea (while on the Beagle voyage). While consuming the bird at dinner, he realized this was the smaller specimen of Rhea he had been looking for, and he sent the uneaten parts of the bird back to the Zoological Society. They named the new species Rhea darwinii.


9. Land Iguana (in the Galapagos, while on the Beagle voyage).


10. Greater Rhea (while on the Beagle voyage).

Source

.

Darwin's Little Lesson on Inbreeding

From New Scientist:

Widespread inbreeding between the Darwin and Wedgwood families was probably to blame for Charles Darwin's ill health, and the childhood tragedies and infertility that blighted his family.

That's the conclusion of an analysis examining links between ill health over four generations of the Darwin-Wedgwood dynasty and the degree of inbreeding between the families.

The analysis supports Darwin's fears that inbreeding was damaging his health and that of his children, following his ground-breaking studies demonstrating that cross-bred plants are far fitter and more vigorous than self-fertilised plants. "This caused him to reflect on his own condition," says Tim Berra of Ohio State University in Mansfield.

After Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, they had 10 children, three of whom died as children. Three of the others married but remained childless, suggesting infertility problems. And Darwin himself, who suffered unremitting ill health following his epic trip on The Beagle, was the product of an "inter-Wedgwood" union, his maternal grandparents being third cousins to each another.

Nothing too new here. I told the tale, relating it to dogs of course, in an earlier post on this blog entitled Inbred Thinking. That said, it's nice to see the story getting out to a wider audience.



This is the pedigree of the Darwin/Wedgwood dynasty.

From Scientific American:

The analysis, led by Tim Berra, professor emeritus in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at the Ohio State University in Mansfield, found that Darwin's kids did have "a moderate level of inbreeding" and in the family's children, there was "a significant positive association between child mortality and inbreeding."

When two individuals mate, genetic material from both parents is passed on to the progeny. So even if one parent carries a harmful recessive trait, the other parent is likely to have a healthier version, which will manifest itself in the offspring. If both parents, however, carry a recessive allele—which is more likely to happen if they share much of their genetic material, as close relatives do—then they raise the chances that their child will have only the bad genes.

A first cousin marriage does not, of course, mean instant problems. In fact, across the world, first-cousin marriages represent about 10% of all marriages.

That said, first cousin marriages do increase the chance for genetic defect.

How much?

A first-cousin marriage raises the risk of birth defect and mortality about as much as giving birth at age 41 instead of age 30.

Of course, if a society has a history of marrying first-cousins, Coefficients of Inbreeding can rise rapidly, and with it genetic defect

In Pakistan, where this kind of thing still occurs, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins versus 5.1 percent for the progeny of unrelated parents.
.

The Tribe of the Dog

Lakota woman with dog travois, Rosebud reservation.

This piece is from the July 2009 issue of Dogs Today.

From a great distance the indigenous people of the U.S. appear be "American Indian," but as you travel west, you discover it's not one people, but many tribes, and by the time you get to North Datoka, the question is not whether you are Sioux, but what type of Sioux -- Lakota, Yankton, or Santee?

Much the same goes on in the world of angling where we also find tribalism at work. From a distance, it's all "fishing," but in fact the 12-year old bait-baller with a cane pole on the bank has a different world view than the 60-year old man with a deep sea rod trolling for shark off-shore.

In the world of dogs, it is much the same. People obsessed with dogs may fall into any one of dozens of over-lapping categories, and move from one tribe to another over the years.

To an outsider, it is all rather confusing, and the cacophony of bitter voices and conflicting perspectives is a bit overwhelming.

Pit Bull rescuers damn the lunatics at PETA who say the only good Pit Bull is a dead one.

Vegan cucumber crunchers curse dog show matrons and their pedigree pooches, arguing that with so many dogs in shelters, “Every dog bred is another one dead.”

The small hobby breeder, only 10 years in dogs, parrots a potted history made up whole cloth 100 years ago by a dog dealer. The problem is the “backyard breeder” he says, never defining the term, but speaking in the confident tone of one who is certain he is not one. He points to a classified ad for retriever pups, $250 apiece, and a phone number.

On the telephone the woman describes her dogs as “fur babies,” and says she is not one of “those horrible commercial breeders.” Does she have hip scores for the sire and dam? No, but she has papers, she says hopefully.

The commercial breeder has hip scores – at least for some dogs. He is rather vague. What breed do you want? He has 200 dogs and raises 15 breeds, most of them lap dogs raised in battery cages similar to those used for chickens. He points out that the floors of his cages are made of plastic mesh, not chicken wire, and he says his waste management system is “state of the art.” All 200 of the dogs are taken care of by his wife and himself alone. And are there papers? Oh sure! Kennel Club papers for one price, another registry for a bit less – whichever you prefer.

In a telephone conversation, the breed club President waves off the commercial breeder. Only a fool would look there for a dog he says, oblivious to the fact that the head of the American Kennel Club says he started in dogs this way, and that he thinks the financial future of the AKC lies in more puppy mill registrations.

And so it goes, in a round-robin of blame and questions, challenged ethics, and sniffing aesthetics.

The people roar, but is anyone listening to the dog?

And what is it that we should be listening for? How do we read signs that are not written in pen? How do we translate language that is not written in words? How can we tell if we are doing good or doing bad?

One small idea is to look to original design. It is not hard to see what God intended. Left to their own devices, dogs devolve quickly to “pye-dogs” or pariah dogs weighing 30-45 pounds with short yellow coats and pointed faces.

This animal is not a Wolf, but it can breed with wolves and produce fertile young, same as it can breed with a Coyote, Golden Jackal, or Dingo and produce a fertile cross.

What can we say about these natural dogs? Well, for one thing, none have the kind of crooked or “benched” legs common to anchondroplastic breeds such as Bassets, Dachshunds, Bulldogs, and the like.

None have the smashed-in faces common to brachycelphalic breeds, such as Pugs, Toy Spaniels, French Bulldogs, Boston Terriers, and the like.

None have long coats with wild hair cascading down their sides. All have erect ears.

Most of the wild canids are sized between 10 pounds (a small red fox) and 150 pounds (a massive wolf).

In all cases, inbreeding is sharply discouraged. The “lone wolf,” after all, not a myth – it is a very young or old male driven out of the pack to find a harem of its own or die trying. The same occurs with coyote, fox, dingo, and jackal. Mother Nature prefers an out-cross.

What do we hear if we listen to pedigree dogs?

The data here is not deeply hidden. Canine pet insurance companies keep vast data sets on breeds and cross-breeds alike, and they will tell you that mutts are healthier than Kennel Club dogs, and they price their premiums accordingly.

Not only is there less inbreeding among cross-bred dogs than among their Kennel Club analogs, there is also less morphological exaggeration.

With mixed breeds you are less likely to get teacup dogs with serious teeth and neurological issues, and you are less likely to get giant dogs with torsion, cancer, and heart issues.

A mixed breed is less likely to have the skin problems found in deeply wrinkled dogs, and more likely to have the kind of muzzle that prevents eye damage and predictable respiratory and palette problems.

With Kennel Club dogs, there is not only a tendency to select for morphologies unseen in nature, but there is also the requirement that these exaggeration be maintained in a closed registry system in which coefficients of inbreeding tend to drift upward due to popular sire selection.

Of course, what I have said here is not new. Biologists, canine genetic experts, and working dog people have been making these points for decades. But their quiet message has been drowned out by the foot-stomping of those with economic and political interests.

Much the same has occurred with indigenous people the world over.

Their concerns too have been blotted out by issues of money, power, and prestige.

"The native tribes? Who cares about them? The natives don't vote and they don't pay taxes."

And of course neither do the dogs.

But does that mean we should not be listening to them?

Does the welfare of dogs not matter at the top?

Who will speak for the tribe called Dog?

.

Eggs Past and Eggs Future

The picture above is a shot of a Victorian-era museum collection of wild bird eggs. These kinds of fantastic collections began around the time of Darwin, with egg collection an outgrowth of egg collections gathered for scientific purposes and a spontaneous outgrowth of curiosity about the diversity of the natural world coupled with the kind of relative (and conspicuous) wealth that allows people to travel to collect, buy and display curiosities that otherwise have no useful and practical purpose.

Bird egg collecting proved to be such a fad that collection of rare bird eggs threatened to tip certain rare birds over the abyss into extinction. In 1954, the Wild Birds Protection Act in the U.K. made it illegal to posses or own any wild birds' eggs taken since that time, and today it is illegal to sell any wild bird's egg, irrespective of their age -- a fact that is now true in the U.S. as well.

Ironically, old bird egg collections are an important resource for scientists studying bird biology, enabling them to track the rise of pesticides and other contaminants in the food chain.




The eggs, above, are a couple of odd ones I had around the house.

The dark one is an emu, the largest eggs is an ostrich, and the other two are chicken eggs that I had for breakfast.

I include the chickens eggs to show the scale of the other two, but also to show the diversity of what eggs can look like. Egg identification, without benefit of a nest or provenance, can be pretty hard, as bird eggs can change shape to some extent. Coloration and markings may also shift from bird to bird as well. Egg identification is an in-egg-zact science, especially where speciation is not complete (a surprisingly large number of birds) and the number of look-alike eggs are quite numbing.

Another small thought: We have pushed a lot of birds over the edge to extinction and near-extinction, but I am always struck by the fact that we never give credit to the fact that a lot of species (or what we would call species if they were wild) are now being created by man.

Chickens alone present a startling array of expressed diversity, to say nothing of cattle, roses, corn, broccoli, etc. We are already creating new species of birds (falcon and parrot hybrids are examples) and fish (hybrid trout, salmon, pan fish, etc.). to say nothing of the many odd things being done with recombinant DNA to make animals and plants grow larger, be more resistant to disease, and ship better.

We stand in the door of one of the largest booms in species creation ever, and yet when was the last time anyone gave that idea a nod? And yet, take a look at the two chicken eggs, pictured above. Would any birder claim these eggs were from the same species?

The Earthworm Connection to Terrier Work

What do worms have to do with terrier work? Ah! If you have to ask then ... well I guess you have to ask.

The great fierce badger of European folklore -- the animal that is reported to be the hardest nut to crack in the terrier world -- does not slay deer for a meal; it does not even chase rabbits.

No, the mighty badger is mostly a worm eater, with wasps, beetles and beetle larvae, roadkill and plant material supplying much of the rest.

Fox in the U.K. (and to an unknown extent in the U.S.) also derive a surprising amount of nutrition from worms. The mythical chicken-killer is much more likely to be sucking down a worm on a spring or summer night than he is to be raiding a chicken coop.

According to David MacDonald, the foremost fox biologist in the world and the author of the excellent book "Running with the Foxes," earthworms comprise 20 to 35 percent of fox diet in many pasture-rich areas where worms come up in high densities on moist nights with little wind.

Previous studies of fox diet have missed earthworms as a key component of fox fiet because observers did not have night-visions goggles and did not do microscopic analysis of fox scat to find the thousands of tiny chatae which are the scale-like growths that worms use to move through the soil.

Believe it or not, a great deal of the United States was earth-worm free prior to the arrival of Europeans. No native earthworms occured in the northern portion of the continental United States or anywhere in Canada except for a small section along the coast near the U.S. border. This absence of earthworms is believed to be due to Pleistocene glaciations -- probably the same force that limited the range of the American groundhog to the same eastern region earthworms were once limited to.

Approximately 70 species of native earthworms have been described from the eastern United States and another 28 species from the Pacific region. Another 45 imported species of earthworms are now commonly found in various parts of the U.S.-- mostly on the East Coast and in the Midwest and concentrated in areas with disturbed soils (i.e. regularly plowed fields)..

The native range of American earthworms.

Charles Darwin was the first scientist to show that earthworms had a huge impact on soils and postulated that it was the actions of earthworms which explained why so many ancient ruins were now found buried under layers of rich soil.

Darwin's own intererest in worms was sparked by a very long period of observation -- he noticed the flinty rocks found on the plowed surface of an abandoned field he often walked had been sinking into the ground over many years, and that some large stones had even disappeared from view. Studying the phenomenon, he found that the stones had not been moved -- they had simply sunk below the surface of the soil. How did this happen? Darwin decided that the action was due to worms feeding in the dirt below the stones. Stones on the surface had slowly settled into the thousands of worm tunnels that had been dug beneath the stones over time, while millions of loamy earthworm casts had helped bury the stones from the top.

Darwin's last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, was published in 1881, just one year before his death. Initially published for specialists, the book has achieved some notoriety due to it's emphasis on the the fact that major changes on earth are often the cumulative action of seemingly small things occuring over a very long period of time.

In fact, we now now that soil, if scene through very rapid time-lapse photography, can be seen to virtually boil under the stirring action of worms.

Worms are not the only thing that turn over the soil, of course. Badger, fox and groundhogs often turn over large amounts of soil during their den building as well. In fact, the typical groundhog burrow represents over 700 pounds of removed dirt!

Added to these faunal excavations are prairie dog colonies (once numbering in the millions of individual animals) and ground squirrel colonies (still vast). In Europe and Australia rabbit warrens represent a significant amount of soil tillage.

To read more about how terrier work, terrier breeds and Charles Darwin are interconnected see >> A Pictorial History of Terriers

.

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
  .

Best After-dinner Speech at a Specialty Dog Show

The Kerry Blue Terrier Foundation has a wonderful bit about a judge's speech at a Kerry Blue Terrier Club of Northern California Specialty Show dinner, in 1967. Here's the spiel, lifed from the Kerry Blue Terrier site:

"Ellsworth Gamble was one of the most identifiable judges in the ring. He was not overly tall, but stood ramrod straight. Thin and almost 'hatchet faced,' waves of white hair topped fierce eyes. This year he had judged, for the second time in ten years, the Kerry Blue Terrier Club of Northern California Specialty.

"In those days, a sit-down Club dinner finished off the festivities. The highlight of the dinner was always Judge's remarks on how he enjoyed and was honored to judge such magnificent animals. Well, most judges said things like that - but not Ells Gamble.

"Mr. Gamble rose, his icy stare sweeping the group. "'Ten years ago, when I judged the Kerries here I said that I felt that the quality had declined. Now, ten years later, I can honestly say that the quality of Kerries is even worse.'

"Mr. Gamble sat down, to absolute silence. Even after that, Ells Gamble was a frequent guest and speaker at KBTCNC meeting and dinners."

This is a terrific story, but I wonder how often folks in the AKC have ever wondered why their dogs are not improving? Why are more genetic problems cropping up in the dogs? Why are so few Kennel Club dogs found working in the field today?

There is an answer, and it can be found in the family tree of Charles Darwin himself. To read more >> See Here

.

A Brief History of Terriers: Part 3

Robert Bakewell

MALTHUS, DARWIN, AND THE ENCLOSURE MOVEMENT

The great Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was the first person to write about fox-hunting as a social phenomenon. He was also the first person to talk about terrier work as part of the mounted hunts in Great Britain.

It should be said that, to this day, terrier work is divided between those who pursue fox with horse and hounds, and those who pursue fox on foot with terrier and spade.

Fouilloux, writing in 1560, was of the latter school. Though he wrote of a well-to-do landlord going out into the countryside with a cart of tools, a team of diggers, and a young maiden to stroke his brow, his terrier work had nothing to do with packs of hounds and a field of well-dressed riders.

In Guy Mannering, we find the other kind of fox hunting. Here Scott is writing about High Society and fox hunting as social event. The juxtaposition between "the haves" and the "have nots" is a core part of the story.

It is not an accident that the first substantive mention of fox hunting in English literature was written in 1815 and set in the 1760s. This period of time coincides with the great expansion of the Enclosure Movement which was to sweep through the United Kingdom and transform every facet of the British countryside.

It is impossible to overstate the economic violence of the Enclosure Movement which has been described as "a revolution of the rich against the poor."

In England some 6 million acres, or one-quarter of the cultivated acreage, was enclosed by direct act of Parliament. Another 4 to 7 million acres are estimated to have been enclosed privately. Most of the large woods were cut down and the land was hemmed in by stone walls and thick hedges — not only to keep sheep in, but also to keep peasants and their livestock out.

Every part of the United Kingdom was effected by this "rich man’s land grab". Poor peasants poured into towns and cities, most without jobs, skills, money, or entertainment.

One of the Great Questions facing the well-fed and well-bred in Great Britain at this time was what to do with the now inconvenient riffraff that were jungling up in cities and towns. This seething population seemed to breathe resentment and insurrection. At the very least they were discomforting and depressing.

In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Malthus published his tract on human population growth, which was written as a defense of the Enclosure Movement.

Malthus argued that the poor were morally incapable of abstaining from sex and that all other forms of birth control were clearly a Sin. The dilemma was what to do with the growing (and inevitable) number of poor which threatened Britain’s social fabric. Malthus argued that rather than help the poor, society should push them towards the grave so that the lives of the rich (and presumably moral and abstentious) could be better enjoyed and poor taxes reduced:

"Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases: and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders. If by these and similar means the annual mortality were increased ... we might probably every one of us [moral, rich and abstinent] marry at the age of puberty and yet few be absolutely starved."

In fact, increasing the level of misery was very much on the menu in early 19th Century England.

With the Enclosure Movement, came restrictions on hunting on lands that had once been part of the Commons.

The Game Laws of 1816, for example, limited the hunting of small game — such as pheasant, partridge, hares and rabbits — to landowners. The penalty for poaching was "transportation" overseas for seven years. If convicted a second time you were never to be allowed to return.

The Poor Law Amendments Act of 1834 started the work house system later made famous by Charles Dickens. Across England hundreds of thousands of people died premature deaths from diseases that flourished in the squalor of cities where sewage, water and trash systems were incapable of keeping up with rural-to-urban migration pressures.

Brown rats, which first arrived in England around 1720, found the cities of England a delightfully accommodating place, and they soon drove out the Black Rat, thereby ending the Black Plague carried by the black rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis).

Brown rats had another use. At harvest time rural threshers often kept terriers to kill rats that buried themselves in wheat and oats waiting to be separated. "Threshing parties," held at harvest time, often pitted several local terriers against the scores of rats seething through a now-greatly reduced pile of straw and grain.

Rat pit with square corners -- the simplest kind to work.

A variant of this sport was recreated in the cities, with terriers competing to see who could most rapidly kill their weight in rats. Thus were born the Victorian rat pits, a kind of reduced version of the arena animal-baiting made famous by the Romans and still evident in the bull rings of Spain today.

Out in the countryside livestock of both sexes were still kept together in the fields and allowed to breed at random, but that was about to change. A farmer by the name of Robert Bakewell realized that simply by separating males from females — made easy by the rising number of enclosed fields — a farmer could choose which stock was allowed to breed. By deliberately inbreeding livestock, and selecting for desirable traits, Bakewell rapidly created new and "improved" breeds of sheep and transformed modern agriculture forever.

Bakewell’s experiments with sheep quickly spilled over into other farm stock, such as cattle, pigs, and chickens, and eventually into pet stock such as dogs and pigeons.

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.

>> Continue to:  A Brief History of Terriers: Part 4

• Related Links:
  ** A Brief History of Terriers: Part 1
  ** A Brief History of Terriers: Part 2.

.