Digging on the Dogs

First one of the day, quickly and humanely dispatched.

There was a fog out early this morning, and on the back roads I notice that both the Poison Ivy and the Sumac are starting to turn red. Fall in not quite here yet, but it's coming.

I do not expect this will be much of a year for leaf color -- the drought has been too fierce. When it gets this bad, the leaves just give up the ghost and come down in great brown drifts.

In drought, there is never much of a color guard to welcome in winter.

Things are beyond dry. The Potomac River is so low that the rocky gorge at Great Falls look like a foreign river. In the smaller creeks you can find dust on the stones where a pool should be. Not good.

The corn is all burned up, but still standing, while the soybeans have already come off, or are in the process.

I visited Nick's Farm last weekend, but the dogs found nothing in two hours of walking around. I have hunted this farm for a long time, and taken several hundred groundhogs off of this 250-acres, but I think Dave's aggressive plowing and ripping of dens has been what has really pushed things to a low level.

Dave has a number of free-range chickens, and he tells me he has just added a pen of turkeys. He says he lost 30 chickens to a raccoon which he trapped and shot, and I told him about two raccoons I had taken out of an old feed bunk some time back. Raccoons up near the house and the chicken pens will not last long with Dave's traps in action. He says he also took out a skunk with 6 babies. I tell him next time to drown them rather than shoot through the trap. Less stink that way. There are a few small things I know about.

Dave gave my name to a farm owner up the road (Call him, he'll get rid of your groundhogs), and I really like this new farm and appreciate the referral. I notice that the soybeans have already come off. A harvest transport truck is still in the fields, and it looks like there might still be some standing beans above the ridge, but with the fog we had, it's still too early for anyone to be cranking up the machine.

I tape up the locator collars really well, as the dogs will be in and out of water today. We check out a few dens in the bean fields, but the groundhogs have left. Who can blame them? There is not much left to eat in these fields. These dens might hold fox in a few months, however, and I will make their acquittance now.

The dogs and I go down to the creek, where it is still green, and the dogs are in and out of a den, but it's hard to tell if they are interested or just playing grab-ass, when -- BAM-- a groundhog bolts out of one of the holes and runs up a tree. Man that was a fast bolt! Smart groundhog. Good for him -- we'll be back later and see how he fares next time.

The dogs settle down and start working, and a bit later they locate again. It's a pretty shallow dig in a tough thicket of tree roots. After a bit of a saw job, we catch up to the groundhog who is not too enormous. He is quickly terminated and recycled for fox food. That's the deal on this farm -- clean out all the groundhogs along the creek where they are wrecking the stream banks. "Yes, ma'am right on it."

Mountain finds another occupied sette and bays it up good, and it sounds like a raccoon. I try to locate. From the sound, Mountain is staying and baying in one location, but the locator is a little shy about exactly where that location is. The box seems to read equally well in a four foot radius. Not good. I bar down to locate a pipe, and hit one, but after digging down to it, I realize it's the wrong one. Or the wrong bit of the right one. As it turns out, there are several den pipes here that are very close together thanks to the intersecting tree roots which keep the ground solid despite all the tunneling.

I eventually hit the right pipe, pull Mountain, and swap Pearl in. Pearl skits up the tube, digs through some dirt and starts to bay. The critter is making a noise that can best be described as "furniture-being-dragged-across-the-floor." I am pretty sure it is a raccoon, as this is the sound I expect from them. I posthole down between the roots for a foot or two, but hit an obstruction and cannot get in enough to figure out what it is. There's not enough room to cut it or remove it. Lots and lots of roots -- always a problem when digging alone.

I cut another hole in the wrong location, but at least I can get into the pipe here, and I reach in and grab Pearl who has a cut lip. I tie her up, and I am turning around to snare whatever's in the den pipe when a large, dark-colored groundhog crowns out of the den entrance. A groundhog? It tries to bolt, but it doesn't make it very far despite my considerable surprise. Damn if I have ever heard a groundhog make the sounds this one did!



Two down (and one bolted), but I am dead from the heat, and the dogs and I head back to the truck.

The day started off with a promise of Fall, but shook that off pretty quickly. Now it's 90 degrees in the shade -- not that we found any shade.

I am cooked, but we'll be back. Hopefully, it will be a little cooler.

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Coffee and Provocation

Rat Island, Alaska:
As I have noted in the past, rats are responsible for more animal extinctions in the last 400 years than any other single causal agent. Almost all of these extinctions have been birds endemic to small tropical islands, but a few islands outside of the tropics are also besieged by rats. Which brings us to aptly named "Rat Island" in Alaska where rats stranded there after the 1780 wreck of a Japanese sailing ship have multiplied and decimated the auklet population. Now, it seems, the island is set to get a good dose of rat poison thank to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If the USFWS wants some tips on how to "get 'er done," they might talk to the folks in New Zealand who rid Campbell Island of rats there after using 120 TONS of rat poison (over 240,000 pounds). A hat tip to Matt Mullenix for pointing me to the Alaska story.

The Case for Repeal of the Hunting Act:
The Brits are slow to mount American-style public relations and lobbying campaigns, and so it has only taken them a couple of years to put out a decent piece of literature arguing for the repeal of the Hunting Act (PDF). Better late than never, and a hat tip to the Countryside Alliance for this one.

Are Dogs the New Genetic Model?
Thanks to pervasive inbreeding that has resulted in nearly every Kennel Club breed being reduced to a specific kind of genetic wreckage, dogs are now a new gene model for science. There is a nice article on all this over at Gene Expression. A hat tip to Prairie Mary for pointing me to this story.

Texas Terriers?
It seems you can't turn around these days without someone coming up with a new breed of dog. This time, it's one called the Texas Terrier. Each to his own, and may the sea rise up to float whatever boat they are building. For a list of other recent (successful and unsuccessful) terrier breeds, see this older post.

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Border Collie Owners Battle What Doesn't Work

In 1848, Queen Victoria was introduced to working Collies at Balmoral Castle. She became captivated by these intelligent dogs and brought a few back with her to London, where they became the rage -- hitting center stage just as the first dog shows were starting to take off in the U.K.

With the rise of organized dog shows between 1860 and 1890, a show standard was written up for the Collie by John Henry Walsh (aka "Stonehenge"), a man who himself did not own or work Collies, but who felt himself expert enough in nearly every breed of dog to write a standard by which they could be judged by appearance alone.

Needless to say, dogs were soon being bred to this "standard," which assigned large numbers of points to head shape and size, coat length, and coat color.

A Collies ability to actually work sheep or take commands was not allotted a single point.


A Border Collie rides herd on sheep in a chute.


In 1893, the fate of the Collie took another bad turn when the very young Czar Nicholas II sent 15 Borzois to the aged Queen Victoria. Intended as a diplomatic gift to curry favor with an aged dog collector who also happened to be his wife's grandmother, the Borzois more than left their mark, as they were soon crossed with Queen Victoria's Collies, thereby helping to create the strange-looking, impossibly narrow-headed dog we now know as "the Lassie" Rough-coated Collie.

By the 1920s, these non-working and narrow-headed Collies appeared to be a different breed from the working Collies found in rural parts of Scotland, Wales and the rest of the British Isles.

While the show dogs were increasingly homogeneous, the working dogs were of varied sizes and colors. Some had short coats and prick ears, others had longer coats and folded ears. The dogs themselves ranged from 25 to 75 pounds, and they came in a wide variety of colors from brown or red, to black and white, from dappled Merle to various hues of gun metal gray. In fact, almost the only thing all these dogs had in common was an obsessive devotion to work created by breeding worker-to-worker for generations.

"Big one, little one, handsome one, ugly ones, long-coated, short-coated: nobody gave a damn. How's his outrun? Can he read sheep? Can he move a rank old cow?"
. . . . - Don McCaig, Dog Wars

Needless to say, these were not the kind of questions being asked by the folks at The Kennel Club shows!

As a result of divergent selection criteria -- working ability versus conformation -- the smart, working, heterogeneous collies that had been so admired by Queen Victoria in 1848, were systematically selected out of The Kennel Club gene pool in favor of more homogeneous conformation stock.

Could these pretty show dogs herd a cat across a living room? Perhaps, but no one had much illusion that they would be of any real use on a mountain side with 500 head of semi-wild sheep to pen before an approaching storm. Shepherds looked elsewhere for their working dogs.

But what did that matter? How many people really had sheep to pen? Never mind that the sheep and the hill created the Collie. How could a dog be harmed if it still looked good? A non-working Collie could be bred to a non-working Collie, and it would still chase a stick. What else was needed?

In fact, by The Kennel Club's light, what mattered was not the dog, but the name. And so, in 1924, when the International Sheep Dog Society (ISDS) brought working Collies to Hyde Park for a sheepdog trial, The Kennel Club objected. How could these feral-looking dogs be called Collies, they demanded!? They had no resemblance at all to the dogs in The Kennel Club ring!

"Fine," the ISDS replied, and promptly began calling their working dogs by a new name: "Border Collies," to differentiate them from their non-working Kennel Club cousins.


A Border Collie at Crufts: a bored animal at a dog show started by a man that never owned a dog.


Much the same story played out with working Fox Terriers at about this same period of time (complete with Queen Victoria in a supporting role).

Here too a breed of working dog, was quickly wrecked by Kennel Club breeders focused on pure conformation standards within a closed-registry system.

And here too, the true working dog continued to live on in the countryside under a different name -- the Jack Russell Terrier.

Move forward 100 years, and the tale plays out anew, as the Kennel Club bureaucracy circles back to try to round up two popular working dog breeds that somehow (how?) slipped out of sight and off their roles.

"The Border Collie? The Jack Russell Terrier? Oh, we must have them."

Never mind that these dogs had already been pulled onto the Kennel Club roles. By now the Kennel Clun dogs were ruined beyond recognition and operating under a different name. Time to try again!

It is here, at the start of the Second Battle for the Border Collie that Virginia sheep man and writer Don McCaig begins his tale in The Dog Wars: How the Border Collie Battled the American Kennel Club.

In its simplest form, McCaig's book is a battle between what works and what doesn't.

On one side you have the American Kennel Club -- a 19th Century organization driven by 19th Century genetic theories and an almost Kremlin-like bureaucracy in New York City. These people have the strange notion that all canine breeds can best be judged at a glance while trotting a dog around a ring on a thin string leash.

On the other side, you have a small collection of not-too-sophisticated farmers and sheep dog trialers; the very people who made the working collie what it is. These folks may not own a tuxedo or ball dress, but by God they know two true things; 1) that the show ring has never made a working dog, and; 2) that the mettle of a Border Collie can only be determined on the hill while working cattle, sheep or goats.

The fact that McCaig is a partisan in this war does not mean he has not written a fair book.

In fact, he is more than fair.

While he mentions some of the breeds ruined by the Kennel Club's love affair with closed registries and show ring standards, he does not catalogue them (or their ills) to the extent he could.

Nor does McCaig open up both barrels in order to blast the AKC' for their sordid history as puppy mill profiteers.

Instead, McCaig's book focuses on the straight-forward history of the "Border Collie War" of the 1990s, leavening historical chronology with short divergent tales of his own working dogs, Silk, Moose and Harry.

McCaig does a pretty fair job of puncturing the American Kennel Club lie that they "only register dogs," and that it is individual breeders -- not AKC policies -- that are responsible for the general decline in pure-breed quality and performance.

In fact, McCaig notes, the Kennel Club does far more than register dogs. It also mandates that all AKC breed be maintained in a closed registry which almost guarantees mounting levels of inbreeding.

The AKC also prohibits performance tests as a requirement of winning a championship, and they will not allow a club to ban puppy mill or pet store registrations which are a large part of the AKC's bread-and-butter business plan.

The staff of the AKC have forced the rewriting of show standards (as they did with the Labrador Retriever), and they will not allow a breed club to mandate a health check as a condition of registration, even if the breed has a serious, pervasive, debilitating, gene-based health care issue such as deafness, cataracts or dysplasia.

In fact, as McCaig makes clear, the AKC is really not interested in power-sharing with a strong breed club. If a strong breed club already exists outside the AKC, they are not willing to do much to woo its support in order to have them join the AKC.

It's much easier -- and safer -- to simply create a new club from whole cloth; a simple matter of finding a few dozen people who are anxious to "get in on the ground floor" with a new AKC breed.

These new AKC converts are likely to already believe that dog shows are the beginning-and-end-all in the world of dogs.

What does it matter that geneticists have said that the AKC's breeding scheme is unsound and bad for working dogs? They will be careful and breed smart.

So what if the AKC is a major engine driving the puppy mill and pet shop trade of dogs? If the AKC was not pocketing the cash, someone else would.

And who really needs working dogs any more anyway? Sheep herding with dogs is an anachronism, and fox hunting has been banned in the U.K. The modern world is all about fly-ball, agility, and Frisbee. If the dogs have a little less obsession and drive, they will still be fine for that.

And, so the AKC charges ahead and does what it wants.

When the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club (founded in 1954) turned down AKC overtures because the AKC would not allow their Club to deny membership and registration to puppy millers and breeders that sold their dogs to pet shops, the AKC simply created its own Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club to compete.

When the Border Collie folks said they would greenlight AKC admission only if there was a performance standard, the AKC would have none of it.

When the Jack Russell Terrier folks opposed a too-limited conformation standard and maintenance of the breed in a closed registry system with no limits on coefficients of inbreeding, the AKC simply rounded up a collection of breeders who cared more about blue ribbons and green cash than the future of this working dog.

McCaig gives a nod to these other dog battles, of course, but his concern is the Border Collie.

McCaig details an AKC in which both officials and staff are secretive, arrogant and clannish. They think nothing of omitting facts, telling lies, and stretching the truth. When asked to explain their intentions, they become a collection of Know Nothings, and when asked to sit down to see if common ground can be found, they express outrage that -- after 100 years of wrecking dogs -- the entire world is not willing to roll over and give them the benefit of the doubt on their say-so alone.

After all, they will tell you, they are the experts on dogs. What, you don't believe it? Well, just ask any of their all-breed judges who claim they can judge the value of a sheep-working dog at 40 feet, never mind that they themselves have never seen a sheep.

Ask any one of the terrier judges who have never dug four feet to a fox, or carried a shovel out of their own backyard.

You want to to know about whippets and greyhounds? Well the AKC has experts on chasing plastic bags on a string. Who would know more about running dogs than people with experience like that?

Though McCaig's book is brutal in its accounting, his tone is generally dispassionate and he sticks to the facts.

In fact, I would argue that McCaig's book is actually generous to the American Kennel Club.

Recognizing that the organization is behaving irrationally -- spending money to lose money, winking at puppy mills, capriciously changing breed standards, and ignoring the wishes of both breed clubs and dog owners alike, he wonders what is going on. How could people, whom he generously supposes are neither evil nor stupid, be so terribly misguided?

He dismisses the notion that it's all about money. He says it is not -- in discussions with the AKC they never mention money, and they seem offended that anyone would suggest theirs is a business (never mind the Madison Avenue offices, high salaries, black-tie galas, and plethora of cross-promotional activities with dog food companies, veterinarians, and dog toy manufacturers).

McCaig generously suggests that the AKC is guided by something else -- a vision that can best be described as religious in nature, since it seems to operate both independent of fact and based on faith alone.

And what is that faith? McCaig writes:

"Throughout the fight, I kept stumbling over a simple truth without quite seeing it: dog fanciers and their creature, the AKC, really do believe that what is most valuable about any dog can be judged in the show ring, that the show ring is the sole legitimate purpose and reward for all dog breeding. They even believe, against all evidence, that the show ring 'improves' breeds."

And, to give credit, McCaig cuts them a little slack about their belief system. He even tries to identify in -- at least a little bit.

"The AKC's faith in the show ring is no more implausible than the fourth-century creed I recite every Sunday in the Williamsville Presbyterian Church."

McCaig goes on to note that while AKC dog show folks really do believe a dog is all about looks, the AKC staff is motivated by something else in their eternal quest to pull ever-more breeds into the AKC show ring.

"When AKC staffers argued with traditionalists that they should abandon their venerable snobberies and recognize every breed they could, the staffers were just doing what staffers have done since the time of the pharaohs; increase their importance by swelling their organization."

And so, in the end, McCaig tries to humanize the AKC. He does not forgive them their lies, their pettifoggery, or for what they have done to the Border Collie and other working breeds, but he does try to see the world through their eyes.

Unfortunately, it's still not a pretty picture.

One big issue seems to be that the staff of the AKC feels that their power in the world of dogs is slipping from their fingers.

The United Kennel Club already registers more breeds, and other for-profit dog registries are popping up left and right.

The American Press Corps (from Time magazine to ABC's 20/20) have informed everyone that AKC dogs are more likely to have specific genetic defects than run-of-the-mill pound puppies.

And with their recent disastrous attempt to form an alliance with Petland, everyone now knows that a huge portion of AKC's bottom line comes from the registration fees pocketed from the sale of "misery puppies" cranked out by commercial puppy mill breeders.

Slowly, the glow is coming off the rose. So what to do?

Well of course, your double down your efforts and continue doing the same thing! Isn't that so often the way?

So how does it all end?

When the smoke and fog of war lifted, it turned out that both sides had lost the Border Collie War.

The Border Collie had lost because they were now just one more dog within the American Kennel Club where they were to be judged on looks alone rather on the brains, obsessive drive, and bidability that make them truly unique in the world of dogs.

The American Kennel Club lost because they not only activated a permanent (and growing) base of opposition outside of the AKC, but also because the public was apparently not deceived by their shennaningans. Ten years after the Border Collie were first drawn into the AKC, that organization registers only 2,000 border collies annually; only a tenth of the dogs the American Border Collie Association registers.

And while McCaig notes that the AKC has twice the number of herding trial events as the American Border Collie Association, the AKC events are poorly attended because "ordinary citizens seem to understand what's real and what's not."

At least for now, it seems, common sense has won out.

The same can be said in the battle for the Jack Russell. Not only is the AKC version of the dog not as popular as the AKC had hoped it would be, but it is no longer even called a Jack Russell Terrier. Meanwhile, the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America continues to prosper and thrive as the largest Jack Russell Terrier registry in the world. It's focus: to preserve and protect the Jack Russell as "first and foremost" a hunting dog.

And so, as George Santayana might have predicted, the world of working dogs has come full circle.

The AKC once again has drawn into its folds a type of working collie (and a type of working terrier too), and put them on the fast track to ruin in a closed registry system with a pure-conformation standard.

Within 50 years, these new AKC dogs will be as as close to their working cousins as chalk is to cheese, and 100 years from now, if the AKC is still around, the whole process will probably start all over again. Nonetheless, I suspect the working Border Collie and the working Jack Russell Terrier will continue to endure.

Bottom Line: Buy and read Don McCaig's new book about the battle for the Border Collie. It's a good book, and an important book. And, truth be told, there are damn few of those.



A Proposed New AKC Class: "Working Dogs Ruined by the Show Ring"


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He Was All Right Though . . .

Coffee and Provocation

Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains

This Land Is Your Land: One of the most important things the U.S. can do to avoid becoming a nation of canned hunts and pay-to-shoot sportsmen is to protect wild public lands so that they remain there for all Americans to enjoy in the future. Towards that end, Congress is poised to add as much as 3 million undeveloped acres to its wilderness roles. In my home state of Virginia, Republican Sen. John Warner and Democratic Sen. Jim Webb are pushing the Virginia Ridge and Valley Act which would protect as wilderness nearly 43,000 acres of forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, has introduced a bill that would classify 517,000 acres of wilderness in his home state, while 107,000 acres of wilderness in the Cascade Mountains and another 128,000 acres of wilderness around Mount Hood and in the nearby Columbia River Gorge is likely to be protected. For a very nice piece about what lasts (and what doesn't) see America's Wilderness Cathedrals from The Guardian (if you are a Republican you can skip the first few paragraphs).

Fox in Tasmania: The island of Tasmania remains an Eden for various small marsupials of the type pushed to the danger point in Australia due to the introduction of the red fox in 1845. Now it appears that some small-brain vandal has introduced red fox to Tasmania, and a 9-1-1 call has gone out to find and extirpate these environmentally destructive pests off the island.

Is Pet Overpopulation a Myth?: I rarely mention a book until I have read it, but Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America looks to be a very interesting read. I came across this book due to an interview with its author in the The Dallas Morning News, and then I went to the web site and the blog. Winograd used to run the San Francisco SPCA and says one of the reasons so many pets are put down in animal shelters is that most animal shelters do a crummy job of outreach. He has put together a serious indictment of PETA and the Humane Society of the U.S., and he is opposed to mandatory spay-neuter laws even as he celebrates voluntary spay-neuter. Oh, and did I mention that it has a Jack Russell on the cover? This is the book that PETA and HSUS do not want you to read, which means you really want to read it. No guarantees you or I will agree with everything, but surely it will make us think. My copy is on order.

DNA and Cocker Rage: Science magazine reports that "Dogs are helping to hunt down more than foxes and lions: Researchers are increasingly relying on them to track down genes and pathways involved in canine and human diseases." Specifically, the gene-trackers are looking to see if they can locate the gene that makes dogs "point" birds (a trait found in about 40 breeds) and (on the downside) that lead to "Cocker Rage" -- a brain disorder in some Cocker and Springer Spaniels in which the dogs become psychotically violent. The initiative is being driven by a $16 million award to more than 20 European researchers from a pending European Union award for about $16 million. A hat tip to Prairie Mary for this one! The article is pay-per-view, but if you are interested, see >> here.

Grizzly Found in Idaho after 61-year Absence: A Tennessee man hunting black bears in the North Fork of the Clearwater River shot and killed a grizzly Sept. 3. It was the first confirmed grizzly bear in Idaho since 1946. Back in Jan. of 2001, I ghosted a piece that appeared in Endangered Species Update (published by the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources) in which I noted that the roadless areas of Idaho remained perfect areas for Grizzly and that protecting areas like the Cleareater and the Nolo were vital to ensuring that the grizzly expanded its territory and numbers in the United States.
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Pulling a Vixen

I was pretty sure this fox was dead -- but ready to release it damn quick if it wasn't!

"Even though you think it is safe to get hold of him, you should always be on guard and never give a fox an even break.... Even if he is nearly dead, he is just as dangerous and if he is not dead, he may be shamming and be very dangerous."

Eddie Chapman's excellent little book "The Working Jack Russell Terrier" has a very nice section on handling foxes that should be read carefully for those that have a fondness for all their fingers. >> To order the book

My recommendation is a pole snare -- something that seems to not be used in the UK for reasons I cannot fathom. To make your own low-cost animal control pole (and save your dog unnecessary injury and perhaps save you a round of rabies shots as well) >> click here.

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The British Veterinary Protection Plan and the BBC

Your hamburger, Mr. Lynn.


I like steaks and porkchops well enough, and I bet you do too.

I will also bet that Guy Lynn likes the occasional steak and chop as well. But I wonder if he would like them quite as well if he knew that the cattle and pigs he eats are (gasp) routinely administered antibiotics by farmers that are not veterinarians, and that (double gasp) cows and sheep are routinely dispatched in the rural countryside by a single bullet to the brain.

What the hell am I talking about? And who is Guy Lynn, anyway?

Lynn is the "Look North Rural Affairs Correspondent" for the BBC. In short, he is a reporter.

More importantly, he is the reporter who recently sent nearly-70 year old dog man Ginger French to the penitentiary for the "crime" of selling antibiotics and vaccines without a veterinary license.

What's that, you say? Since when is selling vaccines and antibiotics a crime?

Well, it's not a crime in the U.S. In fact, every veterinary catalogue in America sells vaccines and antibiotics without a prescription, and the Terrierman.com web site will give you dosage information as well as show you how to give a puppy shot. There's nothing to it.

In the U.K., however, veterinarians managed to get a law passed making it illegal for a private citizen to sell vaccines or antibiotics to treat dogs.

As a consequence, if your running dog rips himself on a barbed wire fence in the U.K., you have to decide whether to risk doing nothing and have the wound go bad, or shell out a fairly significant amount of money to go to a veterinarian who will charge you 100 pounds sterling to slap three foil strips of clavamox or cephelaxin on the counter. No money? No treatment.

The same extortion game goes on for other kinds of minor health concerns, such as puppy protection shots and urinary tract and ear infections. Pay up or let the dog suffer.

BBC rural affairs reporter Guy Lynn was apparently horrified when he found out that Ginger French was selling antibiotics and vaccines without a license.

He was even more horrified to find out that Ginger would put down a dog with a .22 shot to the brain if that was required by its owner. The BBC 's rural affairs reporter was, in fact, so horrified that he secretly taped Ginger selling him antibiotics and detailing his price schedule for services. Then he added fake graphics and store-bought B-roll to his segment to suggest that Ginger French was operating on dogs (he was not), and that he was selling medicines other than those you can get out of a catalogue without prescription here in the U.S. and much of Europe (he was not).

To which I have to ask only one question: You're sure this is the rural affairs reporter for the BBC?

You see, Ginger French was not doing anything that farmers all over the U.K. and the world do every day.

British farmers dose their owns cows and pigs with penicillin and they feed truck loads of antibiotics to their chickens without a veterinarian in sight.

It's all perfectly legal.

Pigs and cows are vaccinated by farmers too, and those farmers are not veterinarians; some of them can barely read.

As for dispatch, surely Guy Lynn does not think the cow that was the progenitor of his steak-on-a-plate was put down with pentobarbital in a veterinarian's office? No, it was not. It was shot through the brain with a captive-bolt gun or a bullet, and I assure you that the fellow running the dispatch position on the killing line was not a veterinarian playing soothing classical music in an air-conditioned office.

In fact, if it is done right, death by bullet to the brain is instantaenous and not cruel. If you study human suicides, you will find that more people chose to kill themselves by a gunshot to the head than all other methods combined.

The objections to shooting a dog then, is not about ethics, it is about aesthetics.

In fact, the British are not really very high-minded about shooting a dog outside of the vets-for-pets craft guild created by the U.K. veterinary restraint-of-trade laws.

For example, if your dog is found worrying sheep, it can be shot dead on sight. And I assure you that when a running dog is shot dead by an agitated farmer, it is not shot cleanly through the head. It is gut-shot, or shoulder shot. And that's perfectly legal. What is not legal is paying an experienced dog man to do euthenasia with a .22 short round directly to the brain.

And let's be clear: low-income people were not going out of their way to see Ginger French because they do not care about their dogs. They were going to Ginger because they DO care about their dogs. They were driving some distance and paying money, but they were paying less money to Ginger because, in all liklihood, it is all that they could afford. Not every one is lucky enough to have a trust fund and a fat wallet.

French was NOT doing surgery on dogs; he was sticking to the basic stuff that anyone can do -- antibiotics, puppy vaccines, tail nips, and the like.

The case was never made that the antibiotics and vaccines that Ginger French was selling were defective in any way. In fact, they were perfectly fine. Antibiotics in pill or capsule form are good for as much as a decade past their expiration date, and dry vaccines too are quite safe and can be stored for a very long time. These things are available over the counter or by mail to regular people all over the world outside of the U.K.

In fact antibiotics and vaccines are so safe that we let farmers the world over do their own work rather than have veterinarians unnecesarily drive up the price of beef, chicken, lamb, pork and fish.

But in the U.K., they have allowed veterinarians to have the monopoly on dogs and cats even for the basic stuff like vaccines, tail docking, and antibiotics.

And so nearly 70-year old Ginger French has to go to jail for a year so that veterinarians can ply their game of economic extortion; a game of "give me your money or lose your dog's life."

This travesty has made Earth Dog - Running Dog editor David Harcombe grieve for the state of his nation. In an editorial in the current issue of the magazine (Sept. 2007), he writes:

"What a hell of a mess we have made of our nation. I used to be proud to be British. Now I am ashamed of a country which can send an elderly man to prison for a triviality which hurt no one except perhaps the pockets of a few vets. Our spineless, politically correct politicians have brought us to this."

To which I can only reply, "Amen."

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National Hunting and Fishing Day

Today is the 36th annual National Hunting and Fishing Day.

Who knew?

I missed national "Speak Like a Pirate Day" too. The dogs are really pissed about that one.

I guess I need a better calendar.

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Bullet to the Brain

Sad-eyed Joe



Cattle are generally raised for meat or milk. Longhorns are raised for meat, hide, horn and skull, although a significant percentage also end up as front-of-the-pasture ornaments, with some additional use found found as outcross stock, parade, pet and rodeo bulls.

Longhorns have long horns, and if you are raising them, you do not value free-thinkers. A longhorn with an independent streak is more than a handful; it can be a real liability. And so if a longhorn starts to "vote independent," it tends to be "liberated" from life a little earlier than if it had learned to color between the lines.

And so it is with some amusement that I occasionally read the "backstory" on individual Dickinson Cattle Company skulls in order to find out the nature of their transgressions. A small sampling of the descriptions that are written up (I think) by Kirk Dickinson, who is a Jack Russell terrier owner:

• Sad Eye Sam: This dreamer steer longed for the days he would become a herd sire. When the main bull was doing his thing, Sam wanted to be right between the bull and the cow. His visionary ideas caused him to be available as a skull today.
  


• Sparky: Unlike his name, he wasn't very bright. Sparky was raised in Pittsworth, NC. His owner raised tobacco and also preached at a small country chapel. When Sparky single handedly trashed a small marijuana patch behind a local volunteer fire department garage, his life was on the cutting edge of evisceration. His skull will hang obediently on your wall... unless someone lights up a weed.
  


• Don: This steer was just plain greedy. He stole milk from the other cows. He was not satisfied with just his mother's milk. He tried to get between the herd bull and his cow and that didn't work. He would stand side-ways parallel to the feed bunk preventing the others from getting feed, then he would eat it all. Once he chewed up a garden hose to this own water trough. It flooded his feed lot and every critter had to endure bull mud for days. He did one other thing that Bill Clinton would have even been ashamed of, and that did it.
  


• Pride: This steer was purchased at a Texas auction and represented to be very gentle. His new owner lived near Kansas City. One day, Pride was captured four miles from Liberty in a mobile home park work out ring. His uncontrollable attitude got him syndicated into one pound packages of lean grind. His skull will stay on the wall where it is placed.
  


• Rue Paul Bull: This young bull always acted a little funny. The tone of his bawl, the way he walked, and the way he wagged his tail at the other bulls. When he was turned with the cows, he walked the fence looking toward the bulls. The cows complained and almost tore up a corral. The other bulls made horrible jokes about him. He was part Watusi.
  

Dinosaurs in Disneyland vs. Hides on the Bayou

Back when I took vacations, I used to go to Hilton Head, South Carolina which is a very nice location where the family can ride bikes through beautiful woodsy areas, frolic on nearly-perfect beaches, and otherwise have a grand old time.

Sea Pines resort was created by Charles Fraser, and I came to know about it by reading John McPhee's truly excellent book about David Brower, entitled Encounters with the Archdruid, which still ranks as one of my top 10 favorite books.

When I first went to Sea Pines, I was skeptical and figured it would be a boondoggle surrounded by a morass. Few things are as pleasant as they are made out to be. Instead, I was surprised to discover a place rather heavily developed with multi-million dollar vacation homes and golf courses, but boasting a significant array of wildlife, and still-stunning beauty. Fraser did a good job of developing this place, and even the Sierra Club's David Brower had to give it a nod. As development, this was pretty nice.

Being a poor wage slave, the family and I could not afford to stay in a huge stand-alone mansion like that owned by Michael Jordan, but we could afford a week at a rather well-done town house in Sea Pines. Each of these townhouses backed up to a lagoon, and while everyone else was running off to the beach, I would often stay back, break out the fly rod, and go fishing at the edge of the lawn.

Every lagoon had fish in it, and there were lots and lots of lagoons. The fish were not huge -- little bass and lot of pan fish -- but they provided the kind of fast-sport I like, and so from about 8 am to 10 am, when it was not too hot for the fish to bite, I cast line.

After 10 in the morning, there was no point in casting for fish so I would change the game by tying on a dry fly and tipping it with a small bit of salami rind. This is the ideal rig to use if you are fly-fishing for turtles. This is low sport, but I am a low-sport kind of guy.

I caught a lot of turtles at Hilton Head because there were a lot of turtles to be caught. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Unhooking a turtle is not much of a problem, and I always let them go unharmed. I fish for amusement, not for food.

One day I hooked a turtle and was hauling it in, when I noticed a small wake following behind. It was a small alligator -- maybe 5 feet -- and before I could say "Bob's your Uncle," it had taken hold of the turtle and was trying to make off it with it.

What to do?

Now remember the rig I am using here -- a four-piece backpacking fly rod with a regular monofilament tippet. A 10-pound turtle is on the hook, and this five-foot alligator is on the turtle. This was going to be fun! And it was fun -- for about 30 -seconds -- and then the alligator realized there was some odd pressure on the turtle and he released it.

Now what do I do? Well, play through, of course. Which I did.

Unbelievably, the turtle was still hooked, and so I hauled him in, with the alligator following behind. When I pulled the turtle up on the bank, the alligator left the water following it. I backed up fast, letting out line at about the same speed as I was moving backward. It was then that the alligator saw me, turned tail, and -- splash -- he was back in the water.

But this alligator did not leave the bank. He knew I was a good bet to provide him an easy lunch, and try as I might to shake him by going around one side of the lagoon or the other, he would follow me hoping to steal my catch. Fishing was over for the day.

I tell this story because this is the only alligator story I have. I have never lived in a state that had alligators, and my first regular sightings of alligators have almost all been at Hilton Head. Every lagoon and golf course pond at Hilton Heads seems to have at least one or two of them, and yet there are old folks, children and pets everywhere. So I asked an islander working a boiled-peanut concession: Did they ever have any trouble with gators? "No, not really," he said. "Of course we don't let them get bigger than 6 feet before we relocate them."

Ah! I got it. Small is safe, and big is not. Common sense at work.

Of course common sense is pretty well misnamed, isn't it? Pretty rare stuff as far as I can see.

For instance, would you go snorkeling in a lake or pond with massive alligators in it? Me either. But, of course, there are people who do such things ... with predictable results.


A picture of the arm and the alligator taken immediately after the attack.


The story in yesterday's newspaper was about an alligator attack in South Carolina. As the story is told in The Telegraph and other newspapers:

Bill Hedden, 59, was snorkelling last Sunday in Lake Moultrie, in South Carolina, when his arm was bitten off by a 550lb alligator.

Nearby picnickers were shocked when Mr Hedden stumbled into their midst, grasping his left shoulder where his arm should have been, gushing blood and screaming: "Call my wife, call my wife!"

Nurses on a retreat 50 yards away ran to the scene and slowed the flow of the blood until paramedics arrived and put Mr Hedden in a helicopter.

He was taken to the Medical University of South Carolina, which declined yesterday to release any information on his condition or treatment, citing the family's request for privacy.

The Charleston Post and Courier reported that a family member said doctors were unable to reattach the arm, but that Mr Hedden was nevertheless in good spirits.

"The first order of Bill's care has been to stop the bleeding and save his life. His surgeons and health care team are determining the next steps in his care at this time," the family said in a statement. "We are in good spirits and thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers."

Mr Hedden's arm was retrieved from the alligator's belly after wildlife officers shot the 11ft 10in animal. The limb was then rushed to the hospital in a picnicker's ice cooler with a police escort.

There have been no confirmed deaths in South Carolina involving alligator attacks, wildlife officials said.

As luck would have it, the morning this article showed up, I had just settled down to reading a book sent to me for review: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting by Frank Miniter, the Executive Editor of American Hunter magazine. More on that book when I finish it, but suffice it to say that the first chapter on alligators is very good.

In a chapter entitled "Why Florida Has Killer Gators," Miniter notes that when the residents of Sanibel Island decided to ban all hunting and culling on the island in order to "be at one with nature" and return it to the Eden they imagined it once was, they failed to figure on The Alligator Issue.

A small alligator, under 6 feet long, is no real threat to humans, but once an alligator gets over 7 feet, pets and people may go missing.

On Sanibel Island this reality was put front and center when a 12-foot 457-pound alligator grabbed a woman on the island while she was gardening and pulled her into the water. She subsequently died.

The town decided to change their position on hunting, and began to cull all alligators over four feet on private property. In the next 6 months, trappers killed at least 80 large alligators on Sanibel, some over 14-feet long.

Sanibel Island's experience with large alligators is playing out across much of Florida, where dogs and cats routinely go missing, and it's not too uncommon to have a human attacked.

Perhaps such attacks are not too surprising in a state that has an alligator population of over one million and a human population of nearly 19 million, but it turns out that they are not necessary.

You see, you can have a LOT of alligators and no attacks on humans. That's the score in Louisiana. The reason: unlike Florida, Louisiana encourages licensed hunting of alligators, and alligator hunters go after the largest alligators in the easiest-to-find locations, i.e. the ones that are most likely to attack people and pets.

Louisiana actually has more alligators than Florida, but Louisiana alligators have never killed a human in that state's recorded history, while 11 people have been killed by alligators in Florida since 2001 alone.

The secret to Louisiana safety is that state's legalized hunting and harvest program called "Alligator Marsh to Market."

Because this program encourages the removal of very large alligators, the average size of alligators in Louisiana has stayed remarkably stable for a very long time, with the average size hovering around 7 feet. In Florida, however, the average size of killed alligators has steadily increased from 6 feet in 1977 to 8.4 feet in 2004.

Remember, under 7 feet an alligator is not much of a threat to humans, but over 7 feet things change quickly. The bigger an alligator gets, the more likely they are to be a real threat to people and pets.

In truth, of course, alligators are not huge killers of people. In Florida, alligators kill fewer people than swimming pools and lawn mowers. That said, the number of alligator attacks in Florida is on the rise, from 78 people in the 1980s, to 159 people in the 1990s, and 97 people in the five years between 2000 and 2005 (suggesting about 200 attacks can be expected in the first decade of this millennium).

There are reasons to legalize alligator hunting beyond safety, of course. Miniter notes that Louisiana's "Alligator Marsh to Market" program creates an incentive for people to protect and preserve wetland habitat. It has also put an end to alligator poaching, as no one will buy poached skins if legally tagged alligators caught in the wild, or raised on farms, can easily be purchased.

Alligator farms are, in fact, a core part of the Louisiana alligator management plan, says Miniter. Every year folks go out and harvest eggs from alligator nests, and those eggs are hatched out in captivity away from predators such as raccoon, fox, possum, and wild pig. Baby alligators are raised up from these hatchlings, and when the alligators reach 3-4 feet in length they are harvested for hide and meat.

About 17 percent of the alligators raised in captivity , however, are released back into the wild as one- or two-year-olds. These 35,000 - 40,000 released alligators serve as replacement stock for those shot by hunters every year.

In the end, what Louisiana has created is a perfect win-win: Louisiana resident are made safe from alligator attacks, wetlands are preserved, healthy alligator populations are maintained, and an economic engine is created.

And Louisiana's alligator industry is an economic engine; about 75 percent of all wild alligator hides, and about 85 percent of all farmed alligator hides used around the world come from Louisiana.

Just one more story that PETA will not tell you . . . .

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• To order >> The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting by Frank Miniter.
  

Clueless ... Clueless ... Clueless ... Naked

You're the fading star of a couple of forgettable movies and your time in the limelight has come ... and gone.

So what do you do now? Well, you could follow the well-trod path of other clueless bimbos and try to jimmy up a news headline by getting naked. Playboy magazine makes a small pile of money featuring naked celebs, and so too have other skin magazines from Maxim to Stuff.

But desperate naked ambition looks so ... cheap. Taking your clothes off for money is a lot like being a whore. Are there other options? Well, sure! You can get naked for a cause; you can get naked for PETA.

Which is exactly what the star of the movie "Clueless" has done. With her own flowery youth apparently beginning to wilt at age 30, Alicia Silverstone has decided to try to resurect her career by getting "buck-nekkid" for a cause. Or just because. Whatever. She's naked. And still clueless.

Who the hell is Alicia Silverstone, some of you may be asking. What, you never saw "Clueless"? Me either. How about "Beauty Shop," "Excess Baggage," or "Blast from the Past?" No? Me either. On the upside the word is that she's going to star in an NBC sitcom called "The Singles Table," only . . . uhhh . . . it hasn't been picked up yet. Maybe midseason. Or not. One thing for certain, it's Get Nekkid Time!

• For more, see Naked Hypocrisy
• Penn and Teller on PETA
• PETA Fails the Bible Test

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PETA Alicia Silverstone

A Challenge to All Breeders

A Challenge to Breeders: Let's see if we can change the culture and lead through positive exampe. Let's prove that it's not all about money and that we really care about dogs. Here's how: Put a link on the Home Page of your web site that connects directly to your breed's rescue. Put it right underneath the link that now says "Available" or "Our Boys," or "Our Girls." If you also want to put up a link to a general dog rescue, go ahead, but be sure to first put up a link to your breed's rescue.

Want to help more? Put a link to this post on every dog list-serv and canine bulletin board you are on. Tell folks "I did it," give the URL of your own web site, and see how many others follow.

• The direct link to this post >> http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2007/09/challenge-to-all-breeders.html

Terrier Dreams

Back to Digging on the Dogs

The temperature has come down, and so it's back to Sunday digging on the dogs.

The weather was just about perfect, and we hit the fields at about 9 am after piddling around at a general store getting ice, taping up collars, and generally doing all the stuff we should have sorted out the night before.

Chris had Moxie with him -- her first time out with me since March, when she had a major wreck on a groundhog. She has healed up, but some of her lip on both sides is permanently gone. On the upside, Chris says she has changed the way she works and is baying now. A hard lesson, and a reminder of two things: 1) You cannot completely control a dog underground, you can only hope they learn a sensible working style quickly, and; 2) anyone who says they value a hard dog is an idiot and probably a pretender.

We decided to stay away from the creek to avoid the undiggable hole in that one trunk we hit last month, and instead headed uphill to see what a small woody hedge in the middle of an alfalfa field held. The answer: a lot of trash.

There were at least three old refrigerators, an old chicken coop, old plastic barrels, wire fencing and God knows what else in this hedge -- not quite what I wanted, but about the habitat you would expect to find a possum in.

And sure enough, there was one. Moxie got in on it, and we tied up the other dogs and let her work it. This was a good soft catch for her, and about perfect for me as I wanted to see her working style a bit before we let her get in on a hog. She bayed a bit, and then gripped as she should, while Chris dug down and located a tail to pull a not-too-large possum, which was humanely dispatched.

While Chris was digging, I took out a minute to watch what I think was a Cooper's Hawk and a Crow battle it out in a mid-air dogfight. It was pretty intense, with the hawk initially on the attack, and then the crow coming back on his own terms, and with enough intimidation to rout the hawk. In the end, it was a draw, but if there had been a camera crew standing by, it would have made for a good National Geographic moment.



Moxie is not quite finished with this very dead possum.


The next hole was right along the fence line, with a huge eat-out in the soybeans in front of it. Pearl got in and bayed it up well. I barred the ground in front of her, and when I thought I was just behind the groundhog I dug down. In fact, I was right on top of the groundhog, and tailed it out without too much trouble and gave it a quick dispatch. Pearl came out of the hole with a small ding in the middle of her forehead, which had the odd effect of making her look like a devout bindi-wearing Brahman. This was a pretty nice groundhog that tipped the scales at 13 pounds (Pearl weighs a shade less than 10 pounds).


Pearl and her first groundhog of the day.


The next sette was just up the field and was a bit of a fortress, as the groundhog had dug his den right next to an enormous push-pile of brush. Pearl was in on it, and she stayed and bayed until we got down to her. We pulled Pearl and opened up the pipe a bit. We thought the groundhog was quite a bit farther on than where she had been baying, but in fact it turned out to be right there. There was no explaining why it had not gone back farther up the pipe (there appeared to be room), but it had not. It certainly could not dig away; the ground was like stone at the level she had esconced herself.

Due to the location of the brush pile, there was going to be no getting this groundhog out if it decided to back up the pipe, so we pulled Pearl and tied her up, and set Chris up with a pole snare. I then climbed on top of the brush pile and began slamming the bar into the ground behind where I though the groundhog was located.

I was down about three feet, and rattling the bar good, when the groundhog decided the noise behind him sounded worse than the silence in front of him, and he came forward just enough for Chris to snare a leg with the pole snare. Another quick dispatch, and we had a very fat pot-bellied 14-pounder accounted for.

The dogs slid in to another sette on the way back to the truck, but it was under an undiggable push pile of brush, and we left Mountain underground and walked away with the other two dogs. We were three-quarters of the way back to the truck when she came running down the field. Mountain knows I will not dig in every location, and if I am not digging after 20 minutes or so, she will generally come out to see what's up unless it's a fox or raccoon which seems to get her jazzed up a little more. We have a partnership, and by now we more-or-less understand how each other think ... or at least I think that is happening.

Chris and I loaded up on cold drinks at the truck, and decided to hit the creek but avoid the impossible tree sette we had gotten stuck in last month.

In short order, we got into two settes, Chris working solo with Moxie, and Mountain in on another sette farther back up the creek.

Moxie bolted her groundhog straight into Chris, who managed to dispatched it with quick footwork, a little luck, and one more assist from Moxie. Not a huge groundhog, but a nice no-dig bit of work from a dog learning (thankfully) to bay. This was a good-experience day for Moxie.



Chris and Moxie with her groundhog.


Mountain was in on a five-eyed sette, and though we had a pack over one of the possible bolt holes, the groundhog pushed past it and flashed off into the high weeds and thicket of the creek. Count one for Mother Nature. It did not help us humans, or the dogs, that there was a nest of ground bees in this sette.

With three groundhogs and a possum accounted for, and a fourth groundhog bolted, we decided to call it a day. It was only 1:30 in the afternoon, but there's no need to bleed a farm white, and every reason not to. There are still large parts of this new farm that remain unexplored, and I look forward to working it for several more years.

This day ended with all the dogs healthy and my muscles reasonably sore. Nothing more can be asked for; a perfect day in the field.

Some Cool Sites Worth Checking Out

This post should probably be called "Blogs That Are Way Better Than Mine," but not all of these links are blogs, and there are so many blogs that are better than mine that I could be here typing all day. So instead of the better title, I am calling this post "Some Very Cool Sites Worth Checking Out." I promise to do this kind of thing more often. For even more blogs better than mine, check out the blogroll in the right column on this blog.

• Bioephemera is a mash-up of biology and art. If you go straight to the Museum of Natural History, or could easily spend a morning looking at old biology prints, this is your kind of site. Very good, very cool, very eclectic. Gotta check it out.
• Prairie Ice is a site written by someone who lives in Montana, lives for the Antarctic, and has a fetish for birds. Oh, and did I mention he is an astounding photographer? Good stuff. Gotta check it out.
• Camera Trap Codger is a site done by a guy who hunts with camera traps and adds to it bits of interesting information on the critters he is photographing. A man after my own heart and a nice idea. Gotta check it out.
• Art of the Greyhound is exactly what it sounds like -- but better. This one is from a master sculptor who lives in North Dakota. Check out the pictures of the greyhound looking at the sculpture of a greyhound with the top of its cranium cut out. And then what happens? Gotta check it out.
• Laelaps is a site about dinosaurs and evolution and ecology and conservation and what's for dinner on the Serengeti. It's from a fellow at Rutgers and it's very well done. Gotta check it out.
• Bearskinrug is a site by a very good artist-illustrator in the U.K who also has a nice sense of humor perfect for children's books and The New Yorker magazine. Since I have no abilities in this arena, I am always a bit awed by anyone who can take a picture with a camera, much less draw one with colored pencils. Gotta check it out.
• uncylopedia is one of those wiki-things taken to its logical conclusion: a compendium of nonsense lies and distortions. How is this different from wikipedia? Not much, but check out the "dog" entry anyway. Very funny.
• Hybrid and Mutant Animals. It is what is says, and that should be enough to garner a "look see" from anyone.

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Straight Talk From Fox

I found this poem by Mary Oliver on the NRDC web site and thought it was pretty good. I do not read much poetry.

Straight Talk From Fox

Listen says fox it is music to run
over the hills to lick
dew from the leaves to nose along
the edges of the ponds to smell the fat
ducks in their bright feathers but
far out, safe in their rafts of
sleep. It is like
music to visit the orchard, to find
the vole sucking the sweet of the apple, or the
rabbit with his fast-beating heart. Death itself
is a music. Nobody has ever come close to
writing it down, awake or in a dream. It cannot
be told. It is flesh and bones
changing shape and with good cause, mercy
is a little child beside such an invention. It is
music to wander the black back roads
outside of town no one awake or wondering
if anything miraculous is ever going to
happen, totally dumb to the fact of every
moment's miracle. Don't think I haven't
peeked into windows. I see you in all your seasons
making love, arguing, talking about God
as if he were an idea instead of the grass,
instead of the stars, the rabbit caught
in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought
home to the den. What I am, and I know it, is
responsible, joyful, thankful. I would not
give my life for a thousand of yours.
. . . . -- Mary Oliver

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Where's Timmy?

A little humor and fair warning, there's nothing about dogs in here.

Earlier this week I was at a conference for a few days with the typical results that you get from such things -- a numb brain, a numb rear end, 500 emails in my unattended in-box, and a briefcase full of papers that will never be read.

On the up side, very occasionally someone will speak at a conference who will be much better than you expect, and this time around that distinction went to former Attorney General John Ashcroft who gave a fairly impressive no-notes speech on a fairly obscure but on-point legal topic, but who also told the slightly edgy and self-deprecating joke which follows.

It seems the Attorney General was visiting an elementary school as part of a tour of Southern Ohio.

After a short speech he asked if there were any questions, and a Third Grader by the name of Timmy stood up and said:

"I have three questions for you sir:

1. Where is Osama Bin Laden?


2. Where are the weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?


3. Is the Federal Government monitoring our email?
   

Just before the Attorney could answer, the recess bell went off and all the kids rushed out to play. When they came back, the Attorney General said, "I am sorry we were interrupted. I will now answer any questions the students might have."

A little girl by the name of Samanthaa stood up and said: "Mr. Attorney General, I have five questions for you, sir:

1. Where is Osama Bin Laden?


2. Where are the weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?


3. Is the Federal Government monitoring our email?


4. Why did the recess bell ring twenty minutes early today?


5. And where is Timmy?

And yes, everyone laughed. Nothing works quite as well as self-deprecating humor, and if you are smart enough to use it, you will almost always come away solid gold.

The other bit of humor is a true story. I was at the gym, trying to huff and puff my flabby self into a shape that is a little less grotesque, when an older fellow who had been working out earlier walked out of the men's locker room.

He was a good looking older guy, bald with a coronet of white hair and a nicely trimmed Santa Claus beard. But what got me was that he was wearing ... wait for it ... a camouglage mini-skirt.

No, not a kilt. A camouflage miniskirt.

I watched him stride across the gym floor and go up the stairs, and I have to say I was rather dumbfounded. Then I noticed another fellow in the gym looking at me with a "what the hell was that fruit-cake wearing?" grin on this face. I shook my head and said, "You'd think a guy his age would know you never wear Mossy Oak Breakup after Labor Day."

A wonderful line, I thought, but this being Washington, it was lost on this boiled-in-the-suburbs fellow. He looked at me like I was speaking Chinese.

Yes, this is a strange town.

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