Loopy Lupus Heard by Deaf Man

A Jack Russell terrier was trapped for three days in a warren at Perranporth when a hunt for Easter bunnies took a turn for the worse. 

Eight-year-old Lupus ran away from his owner to investigate the dunes during a walk at Penhale Dunes. He became trapped face down in the corridors of a warren beneath a huge blackthorn bush near The Lost Church. A poster campaign appealing for information about Lupus' whereabouts began. Meanwhile, owner Donna Jones enlisted family and friends to help search for Lupus - which means wolf. The team used a petrol chainsaw to hack through brambles to find the dog. 

Oddly enough, a man who is deaf in one ear heard Lupus whimpering first, because his deaf ear blocked out sounds from the surrounding natural environment. The team called the RSPCA, who then called the Fire Brigade. Crews from Perranporth, Newquay and Redruth used their hands, and shovels to free Lupus from his ordeal. 

 Speaking to the West Briton this week, Mrs Jones said: "Lupus is a very lucky dog. The RSPCA said three days was about all he could survive. "He is a very inquisitive dog and quite a character but this is the first, and last time Lupus will explore the dunes. "He was very subdued afterwards and we had to leave a light on for him for the next few days, when he slept." 

Mrs Jones added that a friend had bought Lupus a chocolate Easter bunny as a present, following his ordeal. Spokesman for the RSPCA Jo Barr said: "This rescue was made possible due to the great team effort with the fire brigade." "Due to their compact size, Jack Russells are well-known for getting themselves into tight fixes."  

From The West Briton, March 31, 2005 

Not said:  whether the chocolate Easter Bunny killed the dog.

The Wolf in the Dog House

A re-post from January 2012.

A reader writes to ask about the putative origin of dogs.

It seems she was listening to Science Friday and they referenced this story from PlosOne: Evidence of the Earliest Domestication Disrupted by the Last Glacial Maximum

She wonders how the transformation from wolf to dog could have occurred in so many diverse geographical areas. If one wolf pup was taken in by humans in Nome, Alaska another in Brittany, France, and another in the Fertile Crescent of Iraq, wouldn't they have a lot of genetic differences?

Here's an interesting question!

Let's start with a simple point: DNA and mDNA are not as good as a license plate. DNA can tell you if this blood or hair came from that animal, but population DNA is a little more complex and a little less clear, and that is especially true for animals that routinely make 1,000 mile migrations and which can jump human-constructed taxonomic fences as if they were little more than chalk lines on a black board.

So what are all these papers about that are proclaiming some scientist or another has just discovered "the first dog"?

Mostly, nonsense.

What is going on here, is that some underfunded and overlooked dirt scraper in some God-forsaken location has come across a canid skull in a cave.

That's it.

But, of course, there has to be more, and so measurements are taken, tests are run, and speculation runs rampant as people desperate for more funding look for a headline, a first, a discovery, a whole new way of looking at the world.

Carbon dating will be done, of course, and in the paper they will note the presence of a possible fire pit nearby, the bones of dozens of other animals, and maybe a few cut marks on a few bones. The scientists will measure the teeth and claim the animal they found has teeth ever so slightly different from some putative "norm" for wolves, and they may also say the muzzle was ever so slightly shorter than some other putative norm.

This "study" has been done again and again, all over the world, with only slightly different wording. So far scientists have boldly proclaimed that the first dogs came from China, the Middle East, France, Ethiopia, Oregon, and ... wherever.

It is all nonsense. They have no idea, and in fact the folks making these claims have no real understanding of wolves, dogs, species or even evolution. Hard to believe, but absolutely true.

Let's start with the basics: The differences between wolves, dogs, Coyotes, and Golden Jackals are so slight that they can ALL interbreed and produce fertile young.

Let's take a look at a few pictures:

Coyote

Tibetan wolf

New Guinea Singing Dog

Red Wolf

Negev Desert wolf

Italian wolf

Arctic wolf

Australian Dingo

Golden Jackal

Egyptian stray dogs

Greenland sled dogs

Ethopian wolf

Romanian wolf

Chinese village dog

Philippines Village Dog

Coyote

French wolves

Shave these animals down to account for coat differences due to climate variance, and color them all the same, and there is not a biologist in the world that can reliably say which is dog, wolf, jackal or coyote based on simply looking at them. There are differences in size, but those differences are arrayed on a continuum and there is no obvious break moving from one animal to another.

This is not to say dogs, Coyotes, Golden Jackals, and wolves are not different.

Wolves and coyotes howl and almost never bark, while dogs bark and almost never howl.

Male and female alpha wolves lift their legs to pee, while all other wolf pack members squat to pee. With dogs, almost all males lift their legs, and almost all females squat.

With wolves, estrus occurs only once a year in January or February, while with most non-primitive dogs, estrus occurs twice a year, and can occur at any time.

There are other differences too -- physical differences. Wolves have a pre-caudal gland while dogs do not, and there is also a very small bone difference in the feet of one wolf sub-species.

But can a scientist, anywhere, pick up the skull of an ancient canid and definitely and reliably say this one is a coyote, and this one is a red wolf, and this one is an Arabian wolf, and this one is a dog, and this one is a Golden Jackal and nothing has ever been crossed?

No.

The morphology and biology of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and Golden Jackals is simply too plastic for that kind of facile work based on single skull samples.

In fact, the very nature of the claim being made is flawed at its core.

The assumption is that dogs were created from wolves. It's far more accurate to say dogs ARE being created from wolves. The world of canids is one in which speciation is occurring and has not yet fully occurred. It is still a process, not an event.

And it is a process in which man is still very much stirring the pot.

In Alaska, Kazakhstan, Spain and Romania, there are still wolf pups being snatched from the wild and raised as dogs. These animals are so unreliable as pets that there are laws in almost every country prohibiting their ownership, but their ownership is so common that there's also a entire lexicon of language where the dogs are described as "Malamutes." In fact, many of the animals bought as wolves are Malamutes! Such is the plastic nature of dogs and wolves.

In Italy, Alaska, Minnesota, Spain, Ethiopia and the Middle East, wolves are occasionally crossing with dogs to create small unstable hybrids with the result being mostly wolf, but with sizable doses of dog coursing through the bloodstream.

Here in the U.S. no one knows what to make of the giant coyotes that have appeared in New York and Maine. They appear to be mostly wolf, but there's a little dog in there too.

And, of course, there is the Red Wolf, which has always been nothing more than a stable and self-replicating hybrid of a wolf and a coyote.

The point here is that the world needs to stop saluting this notion that there was a "magic moment" when a wolf became a dog, or that there is even a bright-line morphological difference between Wolves, Dogs, Coyotes, and Golden Jackals.

Bones, by themselves, do not actually tell us all that that much in this instance.

Malaysian feral dog

Native Siberian dog

Leonhard Sepalla and his sled dogs

Golden Jackal

Turkish Wolf

Vicious: Wolves and Men in America

Despite a lot of talk and unfounded rumor, there is only one record of a non-rabid wolf killing a human in North America since the arrival of Europeans.

Yet humans have killed wolves wholesale, using poison, traps, clubs, rifles, and even laying out mackerel hooks inside lumps of meat and fat. Nothing was too brutal in the quest to exterminate the wolf, and by 1880 a large part of America was wolf-free.

The wolf hung on into the 20th Century, however, in large part because the bounty system did not pay enough for people to spend months tracking down the last western wolves which were smarter and more trap-shy than most. When the Government began paying a professional cadre of wolfers to exterminate the last of their kind, however, the fate of the wolf was sealed.

Ironically, one of the last Government wolfers was Aldo Leopold, whose birthday it is today.  Aldo was a wolfer when he was a young man working for the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico. Leopold went on to write the first book on Game Management in the U.S., and became, posthumously, an icon of the modern environmental movement with his memoir, A Sand County Almanac.

Buried in that little book is an essay called "Thinking Like a Mountain," and within it a section in which Leopold observes the dying of a "fierce green fire" within a wolf as it bleeds out on on rock after being shot.

Up until that hunt, Leopold had thought what he had been doing was good for deer and the mountain, but after seeing the wolf die he suspected neither the deer nor the mountain agreed with that view.

In time, as deer overgrazed sections of the West and East, Leopold began to fully understand the importance of keeping top predators in the eco-system. "A thing is right," he wrote "when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of a biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

But Leopold came to this conclusion many decades after shooting out the last wolves of New Mexico, and in his youth he was among the cadres of Government wolfers who told stories about wolf hunts in order to help raise cash to support the public extermination effort.

Government-sponsored wolfers created traveling displays of wolf pelts and wolf skulls. These displays and stories memorialized the last of the western wolves and gave them names: The Custer Wolf, Old Three Toes, Old Lefty, and Old Rags the Digger, among them.

By giving individual wolves names and personalities, Government trappers helped break down the wall between wolf myth and wolf reality. The wolf, which had once seemed threatening, dangerous and mysterious, now became the outlaw hero of the story, and an emblem of the last days of the romantic (and dying) American frontier.

This is the essential plot structure of Jon T. Coleman's book "Vicious: Wolves and Men in America."

The book is not a text on wolf biology, but a history book that analyzes the gaps and nexus between wolf myth and wolf reality. Though well-written, it is more than a little burdened by the weight of being overly-academic and spending perhaps too much time on folklore and not enough on basic wolf biology. No matter -- if you have ever wondered how the wolf went from pariah to paragon in the space of 50 years, this book tells the tale.

Coleman suggests that the wolf reintroduction efforts of the 1990s (which have been quite successful) occurred because America is now mostly urban and has little contact with farm animals which now come from protected feed lots rather than the free-range forests and fields where wolf, ranchers, farmers and livestock once battled.

"Human predation has become so technical and abstract [in the lat 20th Century] that the consumers of animal protein no longer feel emotionally connected to the beasts they ingest...
Reintroduced wolves have thrived in a cultural environment that accepts the scientific extermination of millions of domestic animals but rejects violence towards a handful of wild creatures."

Would the wolf have been reintroduced if Americans still lived on grass-fed beef?

Perhaps not.

Did cows have to fatten in feed lots in order for America to returns its large predators to their spot on the ecological ladder?

Perhaps.

It is an uncomfortable kind of tradeoff.

Shooting Out the Land

Ranger McEntire of the Malheur National Forest (Eastern Oregon), Winter 1912 - 1913

A repost from this blog circa 2005

In 1887, 14 years before he became President, Theodore Roosevelt joined with a distinguished group of sporting Americans -- including George Bird Grinnell, William Tecumseh Sherman, John Lacey, and Gifford Pinchot -- to form the Boone and Crockett Club. The men who created the Boone and Crockett Club were all dedicated hunters. Grinnell was editor of Field and Stream magazine, a hunting and fishing journal, and as editor, he was shocked at the rapid depletion of America’s wildlife due to unregulated market hunting

Though by charter the Boone and Crockett Club numbered only 100 people, it was a very influential group. John Lacey eventually became a Member of Congress from Iowa and, in 1900, just before Roosevelt became President, he managed to get Congress to pass the Lacey Act which made it a federal crime to transport wild game across state lines if had been killed in violation of state laws — the first federal restriction on commercial market hunting in the United States.

Roosevelt, of course, became Vice President and then President upon the assassination of William McKinley. An avid sport hunter, Roosevelt was also an accomplish naturalist, and counted among his friends John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, and best-selling wildlife author John Burroughs.

It is hard to overstate the importance of hunting in Roosevelt’s life. Suffice it to say that he chose not to run for President after his second term so that he could go to Africa on a year-long safari, hunting big game and collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Institution.

During his presidency (1901 to 1911), Roosevelt more than tripled the National Forest system to 148 million acres (and made Gifford Pinchot the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service), oversaw the creation of 150 new national forest areas in 21 states, created four national game preserves, 51 federal bird sanctuaries, and established 18 national monuments. No president, before or since, has created such a sweeping public lands legacy.

In 1911, shortly after Roosevelt left office, Congress passed the Weeks Act to authorize the purchase of forest lands in the east. Much of this land later became part of the National Forest system in the eastern United States.

That same year the American Game Protective Association (AGPA) was founded and funded by gun and ammunition companies such as Winchester. This was the first sportsman-supported organization in the U.S. with a full-time professional staff, and it was later renamed the Wildlife Management Institute. In 1913, the shooting of migratory birds was regulated — the first step toward building back game bird populations deeply impacted by over-hunting.

America’s hunters lead the charge for wildlife habitat protection and the regulation of hunting seasons, providing an intellectual and moral framework now known as “hook and bullet conservation”.

Hook and bullet conservation has produced truly astounding results in the U.S. over the course of the last 100 years. Despite a three-fold increase in the U.S. population since 1900, we now have more bear, cougar, buffalo, turkey, elk, geese, duck, fox, raccoon, possum, alligator, groundhog, bald eagle, pronghorn, wolf, coyote, bobcat, and deer than at any time in the last 100 years. Beaver, turkey and river otter have been reintroduced into areas where they were wiped out, and wolf, elk and cougar are beginning to return to the east.

All of this has been made possible because the land and the forest -- otherwise voiceless -- has a voting constituency among American hunters and anglers. Not all hunters and anglers are good sportsmen who understand the need for conservation, but all good sportsmen are conservationists who understand the value of habitat and self-restraint.
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The Stolen Wolves of Kazakhstan

As I noted in an earlier post,

Wild wolves are still being domesticated every day.

Why?

Simple enough: for pets.

The same trend is true for every other animal under the sun: coyotes, red fox, monkeys, apes, hyenas, tigers, lions, tapirs, sloths, crows, hawks, parrots, badgers, fenecs, servals, raccoons, cheetahs, bears, bobcats, rats, agoutis, possum, groundhogs... the list is endless. We routinely make pets of them all, in modern culture as well as primitive.

In the picture, at top, we see modern Kazak hunters who have raided a wolf den to steal away the cubs. These wolf cubs are then raised and later sold to dog fighters or killed for their skins.

How close can a Kazak dog be to a wolf? That obviously depends a lot on the particular dog, but take a look at the Kazak dog below (source) and compare and contrast with the images, above.

Kazakhstan has the largest wolf population in the world, with about 90,000 animals spread over about a million square miles. For comparison purposes, Canada has a about 60,000 wolves spread over a land mass that is over three times larger.
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Terrier of the Tiger Tower

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The Tower of London once housed a menagerie or "bestiary" with a fantastic assortment of creatures, ranging from wolves, lions and leopards to giraffes, monkeys and tigers.

The "Tiger Tower" stood for over 600 years (beginning in the 1230s), and was located where the gift shop at the Tower of London is now situated. This precursor to the London Zoo provided London residents with a glimpse of the fauna to be found in the larger world.

Among the famous who visited were Samuel Pepys, William Blake (who illustrated his poem The Tyger" after sketching the animal from life at the Tower), and one Geoffrey Chaucer who worked at the Tower for two years (1389-1390).

A terrier features prominently in the closing of the Tiger Tower. By the early 1830s, the close quarters and poor condition of the animals kept at the Tower had become a minor issue. Exotic animals expired with some regularity. They were difficult to replace, and their death made for poor public relations.

Things came to a head on April 29, 1834, when a "large and furious" wolf managed to slip out of his cage inside the Tiger Tower. The wolf immediately headed for the interior of the Tower across a short moat, but he was thwarted by a keeper - one Sergeant Cropper - who quickly shut a door to prevent the wolf from gaining further access.

Cropper's small terrier, always at his side, rushed in to do battle with the wolf. The terrier quickly realized it was over-matched, however, and it raced up the stairs into Cropper's little residence where his wife and daughter were located. The wolf, of course, followed close on his heels, and the battle continued inside the apartment. Once can only be imagine the carnage and sound that ensued, but the battle interlude gave the woman and girl time to flee, though it surely cost the terrier its life.

The wolf was eventually recaptured, but the Tiger Tower was closed the next year and the animals transferred to the newly opened London Zoo in Regent's Park.

In 1852, the Tiger Tower itself was destroyed, although the "Lion Gate" remains. This tale can be found in The Tower Menagerie by Daniel Hahn.

This post was written in 2004.

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Oops. There Really IS Dominance in Wolves

We all make mistakes.  I make 'em every once in a while, and you do too.

The true test is not whether you make a mistake, but whether you own it, and by that test Lee Charles Kelley comes out alright.

I don't know Kelley.  Never read him before.  We might disagree on nothing, or disagree on almost everything.  I have no idea.  That said, I give him a small nod for cowboying up for a serious error.  It would be nice if other dog trainers would follow suit. 

Kelley writes in Psychology Today online:

A Mea Culpa to Mech, an Apology to Bekoff

When it comes to understanding canine behavior, Dr. David Mech — the world's leading expert on wolves — and Dr. Mark Bekoff — the world's leading expert on coyotes and canine play — are two of my biggest heroes. So imagine my chagrin to discover that they're both irritated with me....

I wrote a piece last week titled "Deconstructing the Dominance Myth (Again...)," which was a response to a personal blog post written by Dr. Roger Abrantes, posted on another part of the internet, far, far away. The main thrust of my article wasn't that dominant behaviors don't exist, but that the terms we're using to describe them are anthropomorphic, and that saddling dogs with these labels is harmful to any dogs whose behaviors may, in fact, be the result of stress or anxiety, not dominance. I now realize, and freely admit, that I made mistakes in my article, mistakes I wasn't aware of until Dr. Bekoff pointed them out to me here.

My first mistake was referring to the concept of dominance as a myth. That's a charged word, one that carries with it the implication that scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding animal behavior are all operating under some kind of mass delusion. I deeply regret making that insinuation, however unintentionally. In recent years, it's become fairly common in the dog training world for some of us to talk about "the myth of dominance" in a somewhat cavalier way. What's generally meant by this is that the idea of dominating a dog, as the basis for a training system, isn't based on real science and can be harmful to the human-canine bond.

Dr. Bekoff also took me to task for the following passage:

"Dr. David Mech, the world's leading expert on wolves, says that in 13 years of studying the wolves on Isle Royale in Michigan he never saw any displays of dominance. In other packs Mech says that dominance displays are so rare as to be almost nonexistent."

I turns out that this isn't exactly true. I was basing what I said on the following passage from a 1999 paper ("Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs," Canadian Journal of Zoology.): "In natural wolf packs, the alpha male or female are merely the breeding animals, the parents of the pack, and dominance contests with other wolves are rare, if they exist at all. During my 13 summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack, I saw none." (I made another mistake by getting the geographical location of Mech's studies wrong.)

Dr. Bekoff apparently sent a copy of my post to Dr. Mech, who responded with the following: "A quick scan of the Kelley article reveals much misinformation attributed to me. This misinterpretation and total misinformation like Kelley's has plagued me for years now. I do not in any way reject the notion of dominance."

In his post, Dr. Bekoff pointed me (and other readers) to a 2010 paper written by Dr. Mech and H. Dean Cluff ("Prolonged Intensive Dominance Behavior Between Gray Wolves, Canis lupus") in which they write: "Dominance is among the most pervasive and important behaviors of wolves in a pack."

Clearly, I'm not keeping up on my research. So I was wrong to insinuate, here and in other pieces I've written on dominance, that Mech believes dominance is rare or doesn't exist at all in wild wolf packs. I apologize for my mistake and will attempt to make corrections to all the pieces I've written that contain this outdated view (there are a lot of them).

But wait. It gets worse!

My thesis about the cause of dominance and submission—as outlined briefly in my post—is that they're primarily the result of a wolf's internal tension and stress. But in the comments section of Dr. Bekoff's post, Simon Gadbois, from the Canid Behaviour Laboratory at Dalhousie University in Halifax, wrote: "My PhD thesis was on social stress in wolves... Jane Packard, that had done the stress studies with Mech in the 80's was on my committee. Here I can tell you that your interpretation is wrong because you are over-generalizing. We simply do not have enough data to jump to the conclusions that you get to."

Read the whole thing, but let me be clear that I am applauding Kelley for owning up to his error, setting the record right, and putting it in print.

Contrast that to another person who will remain unnamed, but who was the subject of a blog post about dominance (in which David Mech weighs in -- see the comments) authored by Dr. Mark Johnson.  Read that post here: Is Dominance Always Bad?  And, of course, the answer is NO. I featured excerpts from Dr. Johnson's post on this blog some years ago (see here) and even featured video of wolf dominance filmed by Dr. David Mech and Dean Cluff (see here).  For those who like video-enhanced story, I put up a post entitled Dominance Creates and Maintains Wolf Packs which told the story of the rise and fall of the Druid Wolf pack -- the largest wolf pack in the world at the time it was being filmed. 

And yet we still have this nonsense about dominance in wolves and dogs as a "myth."  Why is that?

Mostly it's because a small slice of dog trainers have decided that in order to differentiate themselves in the world of dog training they need to brand what everyone else is doing as "abusive" while proclaiming "their" method (click-and-treat) as the only one that is "scientific."  

This is the Internet School of Dog Training where Lee Charles Kelley has apparently been hanging out and drinking the Koolaid, and it seems he has simply not bothered (up to now) to actually read the sources that he and others have been referencing. 

Even now he cannot quite let go of the nonsense, writing that what he meant "is that the idea of dominating a dog, as the basis for a training system, isn't based on real science and can be harmful to the human-canine bond."

Um.  Mr. Kelley, you still don't get it.  Dominance is not violent.  It is not bad.  It is simply taking control and establishing respect and leadership on your part and establishing respect and followship on the part of the dog. It is not a threat to the human-canine bond, it is the essence of it.  And, to be clear, dominance occurs every day and not only with wolves, but also with dogs, people, elk, bison, and pretty much every other animal that lives in social groups (as well as many that do not). Dominance makes the world go around.

Kelley, describes himself as as a "neo-Freudian" dog trainer. I have no idea what that means, but he seems to think it has something to do with prey drive. I guess I know a little about prey drive in dogs since I have working terriers with the scars to prove it, but I have never felt any need to quote Freud. Let us remember that the real experts on dogs have tails. 

I have to say I find it amusing that Kelley says words like "dominance" and "submission" are "anthropomorphic" and then turns around and calls himself a "neo-Freudian" dog trainer.  Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot.  Not too much self-awareness there!

So what is this contrived and entirely fake controversy about dominance in dogs about? 

It is about marketing. 

Remember that dog trainers are trying to sell a service and so they are trying to differentiate themselves.

In order to differentiate themselves, a dog trainer may claim to be neo-Freudian or "gentle" or "natural" or "positive" or "holistic" or "balanced." 

Casting about for a rationale for why people should choose their training methods as opposed to their competitors, many of these folks have done two things simultaneously:

1. Mis-characterized scientific work on wolves and dogs, including and perhaps especially the work of David Mech, and;
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2. Mis-characterized the training methods of thousands of years of dogs trainers, including and perhaps especially the work of Cesar Millan, who happens to be the most famous dog training personality on television these days (a spot previously held by Barbara Woodhouse).

Since the previous text straightens out much of this mis-characterization of Mech, let me address the second one -- the mischaracterization of Cesar Millan. 

In Cesar's Rules, Millan and co-author Melissa Jo Peltier write about what Millan actually does and what he has actually written:

My co-author tells me that on occasion someone will say to her, “I don’t approve of Cesar’s training methods.” When she tells the person that what I’m doing isn’t dog training but dog rehabilitation, he or she often grudgingly admits to having watched only one or two episodes of the show or a one-minute clip on YouTube and typically has not read any of my books or seen my videos. When my co-author asks, “What do you think his methods are?” the answer invariably is something like, “Oh, all the choke chains and the e-collars and the alpha rolls.”

Well, any regular viewer of Dog Whisperer knows that these tools don’t fairly represent what such a critic would call “my methods.” Curious about this, our producers did a show-by-show breakdown, watching hundreds of hours of television and counting when a particular technique was used in any given episode. At the time the breakdown was done, we’d filmed 140 shows, covering over 317 separate cases of problem dog behavior.

The person who doesn’t approve of my “methods” might be surprised to learn that the number one thing I advocate nearly every show is simply leadership (in 98 percent of the episodes), which I teach as the calm-assertive energy that any leader, teacher, parent, or other positive authority figure projects to her followers. I’ve used the word dominance to describe the energy of leadership, but in the animal world dominance doesn’t mean “brutality,” and assertive certainly doesn’t mean “aggressive.” I believe that good leadership never involves bullying or intimidating; instead, it depends on confidence, knowing what you want, and sending clear, consistent messages about what you want.

The number two method I advocate, according to the producers’ breakdown, is body language (91 percent), which is a primary way in which leadership is projected in most animal species. My third top “method” is exercise — walk your dog properly at least twice a day (72 percent). And what is the fourth most common “method” I’ve used on Dog Whisperer episodes?

This one may shock a few people. I used positive reinforcement in one form or another 67 percent of the time in the first 140 shows. As Barbara De Groodt reminds us, positive reinforcement doesn’t have to mean cookies. It can mean anything that a dog likes and that becomes a motivator or reward for the dog.

Personally, I don’t think I have a specific “method” or “system” that I apply in order to change or improve a dog’s behavior. For me, there is no magic formula. I believe in trusting my instincts and in treating each dog as an individual.

So there you go: those are Millan's "methods," and if you oppose them, then you are telling me and the world that you oppose leadership, exercise, body language, and positive reinforcement.

There is much more in the book of course, but you will have to actually buy the book and read it.  Since a quick glance through Lee Charles Kelley's previous writings tells me he has not actually read Cesar Millan either, he might take a hint and do a little reading there too. 

Does reading books (and not just Internet bulletin boards and Facebook posts) make me an "old school" dog trainer?  

If so, then I am very old school, and I have the T-shirt to prove it! 

This post is from Feb 24, 2012

The Beast of Exmoor and Other Nonsense

A repost from February 2009

Stories of feral "beasts" lurking in the darkness of the English countryside have been around for hundred of years, and were already old when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used such a tale as the basis of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The stories persist, of course.

Here are a few contemporary descriptions of various U.K. beasties:

• Beast of Muchty: "I was travelling to my work at 04:30 when a cat the size of a Lurcher, jet black, small head, very slim with a long tail ran in front of my car (about fifty yards). The whole incident was over in 2 seconds ... "
• Beast of Bont: "The main evidence for the existence of these sharp-clawed, but mysterious stalkers has been the death toll among vulnerable herds of sheep."
• Beast of Barford: "It is twice the size of a dog print and clearly shows three huge claws and a large pad at the back. Wildlife experts believe the print is the most conclusive evidence yet that big cats are roaming Warwickshire."
• The Beast of Gloucester and The Black Beast of Inkeberrow: "A 'huge black beast' ran in front of Ray Lock's car on the other side of the river near Lydney... one evening near Monmouth where it was described as 'jet black and about the size of a large dog.'"
• Beast of Burford: "A £5,000 reward has been offered for the capture of a 'big cat' which has been terrorising a farming community ..... Pc Ray Hamilton, wildlife crime officer at Thames Valley Police, admitted there had been several sightings - but said this was not unusual. 'We've had sightings of everything you could imagine - pink flamingos, lions, dingos, wolves and even a giant ant-eater in Pangbourne.'"

The human desire to create imaginary "beasts" seems to have some correlation to the loss of large predators and true wilderness.

With the extinction of the bear and the wolf, the U.K. has lost all large predators and now has to suffice with two rather unimpressive meso-predators, the fox (average weight 15 pounds and living almost entirely off of mice) and the badger (average weight around 25 to 30 pounds and living almost entirely off of worms, beetle grubs, and small bulbs).

So what are these large feral "beasts" seen in the English countryside, and why is it that they are never actually found?

The short answer is that these "beasts" are nothing more than large escaped lurchers (coursing dog crosses) that have taken to livestock-worrying. As an article on the Beast of Osset notes:

"On a parkland estate in rural Yorkshire a poacher's lurcher (a fast greyhound-like hunting dog) was at large for six months but was sighted only once during that period. The gamekeepers knew it was there because they found the roe deer that it had killed, but it took a concerted effort with volunteers to flush it out of the wood."

In fact, sheep worrying is a serious problem in the U.K., and while any dog can end up attacking sheep, it is the larger dogs such as Lurchers and Bandogs (mastiff crosses) that do the damage that lead some to think a large cat or lion is loose in the English countryside.

Sheep worrying by lurcher.

In fact, a lurcher really does look like a large cat if seen in the dark or fog, and especially if it is seen only briefly from a moving car, as most "big cat" sightings are.

A Bandog (what the Hound of the Baskervilles was) really does look like a lion if seen under the same circumstances.

What is amazing about the "big cat" stories in the U.K., however, is how easy they are disprove, and yet how utterly resistant people are to having their bubbles burst.

Take the issue of "big cat footprints". Most of these footprints are clearly large dog prints. How can we be sure? Simple -- all the footprints show claw marks. All the large cats, except the cheetah, however, walk with retracted claws, otherwise they would quickly dull

This foot print of the "Beast of Barford"
is held up by a young hopeful.

The other issue has to do with hounds -- the U.K. is crawling with fox packs, and yet none has ever chased and cornered a large cat other than the now very rare native Scottish Wildcat, which is not much larger than a tabby.

You can be sure that if the big cats were out there, British fox hounds would have found them by now! In the U.S., small teams of less experienced hounds manage to track down marauding farm-country cougars in only a few hours time.

Finally, we come to the issue of rub strips -- bits of carpet and tacks impregnated with a mixture of catnip and beaver castoreum -- that have failed to turn up any positive large cat hits in the U.K.

Wherever these rub strips are used -- whether in North America, South American, Europe, Africa, or Asia -- they are quickly found and rubbed against by large cats and other predators.

A DNA analysis of fur caught on the hooks of the carpet tacks can not only identify what species of animal has left it behind, it can identify what specific animal has come by in the night.

Rub strips are so accurate they are now routinely used to survey population densities of such elusive large cats as leopard, lynx, cougar, and jaguar, as well as badger, wolverine, bear, wolf, coyote and bobcat.

Of course, "Beast of" stories are not unique to the U.K.

Here in the United States we have Sasquatch and some local tales of little green men, swamp creatures, and even a werewolf or two (all delivered with a wink to small children).

In truth, however, we have far fewer fantasy "Beast" stories than the U.K. for a simple reason: we have more real top end predators.

In states like Minnesota, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and North Carolina we really do have wolves prowling the remote sections.

In Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina we really do have 12 foot lizards slithering out of drainage ditches and quite capable of eating an old lady alive.

Mountain lions really do prowl the remote sections of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado and even Texas, and are now being found as far east as Iowa.

Black bears number well over 400,000 in the lower 48 states, and there are over 100,000 more in Alaska.

Bobcats are everywhere, as are coyotes -- the later so common that there are bounties on them, including in my home state of Virginia.

No one living in a large America city today lives more than two hours away from a major top-end predator of some kind.

This is a glorious thing, and something we should count among our greatest national treasures.

But a "Beast of Bondwynn?" No, we don't have that.

In a world in which top-end predators are still common, there is no reason to invent ghost stories.

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Isle Royale Wolves on Thin Ice

In an earlier post entitled Islands of Wolves, Rats, Lions and Dogs, I detailed the different social-demographic-and genetic loads and problems that occur when different species occupy islands or otherwise suffer from extremely isolated (and therefore inbred) populations. 

As I noted, what species an animal is, where it feeds on the pyramid, and how it lives and loves are very important issues so far as genetic health and long-term population viability are concerned.

To illuminate that point I compared the extreme genetic isolation of the Isle Royale Wolves in Michigan to what has occurred when rats, and lions have found themselves on similar sized islands.

Now comes word that scientists are worried that the Isle Royale Wolves may go extinct. 

Isle Royale National Park's gray wolves, one of the world's most closely monitored predator populations, are at their lowest ebb in more than a half-century and could die out within a few years, scientists said Friday.

Only nine wolves still wander the wilderness island chain in western Lake Superior and just one is known to be a female, raising doubts they'll bounce back from a recent free-fall unless people lend a hand... There were 24 wolves — roughly their long-term average number — as recently as 2009.... The only intact pack had six members. One wolf wandered alone, while a couple — including the only known female — staked out territory and apparently mated.

Should the Isle Royale Wolves be allowed to go extinct?

If that happens, what will happen to the moose population, and what will that mean for the island's vegetation?

To be clear here, there is no great decision to be made here. 

We have many thousands of wild wolves all over the lower-48 now, and extremely healthy wolf populations  exist all over Canada and Alaska as well.  The wolf is an animal that is not only off the Endangered Species List, but is allowed to be hunted in a few states. 

The fate of a dozen wolves on Isle Royale, then is largely a philosophical debate, and not necessarily one of great import or permanence.  After all, wolves did not exist on Isle Royale at all just 70 years ago.  Even if all the wolves on the island died out this year (a very unlikely scenario), a hard freeze over Lake Superior next winter might return a new population from the mainland soon enough.
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The Sounds of a Wolf Hunt

A pair of northern European wolves.

Wolves' wild boar hunting (Canis lupus lupus) by nordicnature


The annotated sound tape, above is of a pair of wolves in Sweden hunting, first an elk and then, when that did not go so well, wild pig which appeared on the scene. From the web location where this audio was found comes this description from Håkan Olsson, who recorded it:

I was out photographing/recording. It was late, but the full moon helped lighting up my surroundings. I had the recorder in rec/pause and my headphones on, so all sounds around me was amplified like I usually have.

Since I was trying to photograph animals. I had my camouflage clothes on. I rarely use a hide. Suddenly I heard that the ducks, lapwings and other birds to the left of me flew up in the air worried about something. I looked in that direction with my binocular and then I saw two wolves coming in my direction. They were about 200m from me. The female (smaller) was about 50m ahead of the male. She stopped when she was about 40m from me a little to the left. She probably “sensed” that I was there… She sat down and looked around. The male wolf came straight at me since he was to the right of the female from my view. He stopped at about 30m from me. He stared at me or in my direction for 5 minutes… I was leaning to the left in a not so comfort position so I said to myself, please go now… my back hurts, but he didn’t. Instead, he lay down in the grass… and he continued staring at me (or my not camouflaged mic). I was completely still and after a few minutes he started to look around instead. The female passed him and lay down further away to the right of me. After 10-15 minutes he joined her. They changed positions a few times and seemed to be in no hurry. Then the female started to target a red deer bull. She crawled on her stomach closer and closer. The male followed about 30m behind her. She got closer and closer and when she had about 50m left to the red deer she got in to full attack. The male wolf followed and they both attacked the red deer bull. The deer defended himself really well with his big horns. He attacked the wolves so they had to back off a few times. The wolves continued their attack from two directions for a while, but then they gave up and lay down in the grass. After a while they tried again, but the deer still defended himself really well. He didn’t make the mistake to try and run. They gave up again and the walked away to the edge of the field and lay down just inside the forest. After about 20 minutes I heard a familiar sound. Wild boar heard was incoming…

Here my posted recording at soundcloud starts, since there was just breathing sounds and sounds when wolves and deer move in the grass previously, so not much to listen to.

A very special thanks to Anton Woldhek for sending this to me! Fantastic!

Wild boar crossing road, Sweden.

Obama FWS Tells NYT to Try Science

Remember when the Obama Administration was going to take away all our guns, put an animal rights loon in charge of taking away all our dogs, and then ban all hunting?

That really was the nonsense being spewed by the far right, to which they also added that Obama was really foreign-born and was a closet whitey-hater.

Ah well,there is nothing more horrible than the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts! 

Here we are, three years later, and there are more lawfully-owned guns in America than ever before, and the Obama Administration even lifted long-standing restrictions on guns in national parks.

Dogs?  Obama got one himself, and so far no one has come knocking on my door or yours to take away our dogs.

The "radical Animal Rights" folks in the Obama Adminisration are going to end hunting? Yeah right.  Maybe not so much. 

The latest from the Obama Administration comes in the form of a letter from Dan Ashe, the Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  Mr. Ashe, writing in response to an editorial in The New York Times about the status of wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains, notes that the wolf has fully recovered in that part of the U.S.

Your Sept. 23 editorial “Way of the Wolf in Wyoming” implies that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the Fish and Wildlife Service have somehow betrayed the species we worked so hard to recover. And it is recovered. Today, more than 1,650 wolves, in 244 packs, occupy the northern Rocky Mountains, exceeding recovery goals for 11 consecutive years.

We understand the emotional reaction to wolf hunting, but the facts don’t support your conclusions. Wyoming’s plan will maintain a healthy wolf population above the wildlife service’s recovery goals and set up an extensive monitoring program to ensure that this remarkable success is maintained.

Wolves will remain completely protected in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and within the National Elk Refuge. Outside of these areas, the wolf will be managed as a trophy game species subject to regulated hunting in nearly all remaining suitable wolf habitat in Wyoming. More than 90 percent of the population lives within these areas.

The Endangered Species Act has done its job for the wolf. It’s time to recognize and celebrate this environmental success and get to work on other species that truly need our help.

Regardless of what you think about wolf magagement in this country, I think we can all agree that no one in the Obama Administration is letting Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the U.S., or Ingrid Newkirk of PeTA, sit at the public policy table!

The Obama Adminsitration is working on science, not sentiment.   Little wonder then that those on the far right, or the far left, cannot  understand it!

• Related Links:
  ** Crying Wolf in Dog and Hunting Debates
  ** Ken Salazar Is OK with Me
  ** Cass Sunstein Is OK with Me
  ** The Internet Fuels Extremists and Fools
  ** When To Shoot a Wolf
  ** Elk, Wolves and Grazing
  ** Who Speaks for the Dogs?
  ** Obama Administration to Ban Hunting
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Who Domesticated Whom? And Why?

Greenland natives with pet wolf on deck of S.S. Diana, 1898.  Source.

How did wolves become dogs?

A lot of nonsense has been written on this topic. Some folks, for example, seems to be captivated by the notion that wolves self-domesticated by approaching ever-closer to our camp fires until at last they rested their heads on our laps. There's a "Just So" story if I have ever heard one!

Another story commonly offered up is that humans domesticated wolves and turned them into dogs in order to use them to hunt.

Nonsense.

Wolves still exist all over the world today, but no one is domesticating wolves in order to turn them into hunting partners. In fact, most primitive people do not use dogs to hunt at all, and for a very good reason: dogs are more likely to alert game than find it, and dogs are not all that easy to train to a high degree of command.

Look at the the techniques used to bring home the bacon in primitive cultures all over the world, and you are more likely to find stealth, snares, traps, poison, and human drivers rather than dogs. Trained wolves used to hunt? They exist nowhere.

Yet wild wolves are still being domesticated every day.

Why?

Simple enough: for pets.

The same trend is true for every other animal under the sun: coyotes, red fox, monkeys, apes, hyenas, tigers, lions, tapirs, sloths, crows, hawks, parrots, badgers, fenecs, servals, raccoons, cheetahs, bears, bobcats, rats, agoutis, possum, groundhogs... the list is endless. We routinely make pets of them all, in modern culture as well as primitive.

Pet hyena with Nigerian street performers.

Children with pet coyote.

So why have we heaped special creation myths on the dog-to-wolf conversion? What's the subtext there?

The subtext may be that when it comes to the origin of dogs, we would rather tell ourselves a lie than the truth.

The truth is that our first relationships with dogs was not forged in their desire to return a tossed ball to hand, but in out brutal masacre of their mothers and fathers, and their kidnapping to a strange and alien world where they grew dependent upon us for food, affection and any semblance to freedom.

And why did we do this? For our own amusement, and nothing more.

Our first relationships with wolves and dogs, then, was not forged in some notion of benign, mutual co-dependecy, but in blood and fear.

No wonder we created another story to hide the shame!

Adolph Murie and family with pet wolf, Mount McKinley, Alaska, 1940.

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Un-Natural Selection for FAIL... and WIN

Understanding mutation is basic to understanding evolution and dogs.

The concentration of mutation is what "selective breeding" is all about, but in the case of dog breeders it is UN-natural selection rather than natural selection.

Dog breeders are generally selecting for FAIL -- the thing that is rare in nature because it is maladaptive in natural dogs (i.e. it causes them to die or fail to thrive).

The good news for dogs (as well as horses, chickens, cows and other domesticated breeds) is that most mutations are very minor -- an odd coat color, an odd-shaped head, a particular behavior trait -- which are not fatal in the sheltering wake of free food and shelter provided by humans.

Return the dog, chicken, horse, or cow to the wild, however, and devolution quickly occurs as unsuccessful mutations are culled out in the absence of human protection and food subsidy.

Of course one of the mutations that has made dogs different from wolves is a small mutation in temperament -- brains capable of more trust and less aggression. 

If we look around the world today, we find primitive and not-so-primitive people routinely bringing wild-caught baby animals into their huts and tents -- monkeys, parrots, tapirs, pigs, cheetahs, hawks, fox, badger, and coyote.  

Some wild animals, if caught young enough and trained the right way, settle into an uneasy life of captive bondage, but most do not.  Wolves are a species that teeters on the cusp.  Out of 1,000 wolves caught as pups, perhaps one is calm enough that, if trained in a primitive manner, it can survive into adulthood as a kind of semi-feral camp wolf living among primitive people without chain leash or iron cage. 

Without vaccines or medicine, of course, life for this tame wolf will be short, and finding a mate with a similarly relaxed outlook on life is not too likely. 

In all probability, it was only after scores of thousands of years that a small line of "tame wolves" was created and became large enough, and useful enough, to be a self-sustaining feature among some primitive camp people. 

This was the first dog.

The genes that control fear and aggression are not single-function bits of code.  Like all genes, they control quite a few other things as well.  In this instance they appear to control morphology -- coat color, ear shape, facial shape, and tail carriage, as we see in the Russian Fox experiment, below.




And so we are on our way. With new expressions of coat color, ear shape, and tail carriage we now start breeding for external appearance.

Over time, the natural scenting and prey drives of dogs are also harnessed and refined to chase rabbits, point bird, scent badger, and chase deer. While some dogs are bred for a kind of phlegmatic biddability (think retrievers and lap spaniels), others are bred for a little more rev in the engine (think working terriers and butcher's dogs).

Over all this time, the human population of the world is growing. It took two million years for the population of the world to hit one billion (1830) but only 100 years to add the next billion (1930). By 1960, just 30 years later, we had added our third billion. Subsequent billion-mark human population thresholds were crossed in 1975 (4 billion), 1987 (5 billion) and 1999 (6 billion). The world's population will click past 7 billion this year.

As a consequence of human population growth, the world has less space for wolves. Humans have roaded, channeled, plowed, fenced, logged, and restocked the world with those domesticated versions of wildlife that it finds useful. The wolf is from another time. It is wild and untamed. It is not useful and so, like a weed in a corn field, it is cut out even as its domesticated version -- the dog -- is brought in to sit next to us by the fire. Un-natural selection for FAIL in the natural world of the past has proven to be selection for WIN in the tamed, roaded and track-homed world of today.
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