Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2006, 03:34:44 PM
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ALDEN, N.Y. -- An elderly couple's dog helped save them from freezing to death during a surprise storm by digging a 20-foot tunnel through the snow.
The snowstorm fell in the Buffalo, N.Y., area in October. Eve Fertig, 81, and her husband, Norman, were taking care of injured birds in a wildlife sanctuary on their Alden property when it hit.
The storm intensified and the couple became trapped by falling trees and heavy snow.
"It just started piling up," Eve Fertig said. "I said, 'Norman, we can't stay here, we'll die.'"
The couple's 160-pound German shepherd-timber wolf mix, Shana, started digging under the trees and through the snow. She dug a 1-foot-wide tunnel 20 feet back to their home.
Shana then came back to Eve and Norman and barked. When the couple hesitated, Shana wouldn't give up. She grabbed Eve Fertig's jacket with her mouth. They all went through the tunnel.
"It was quite a distance," Eve Fertig said. "We get out and she pulls us out. We got on the back deck, got the back door open and we fell inside. And we laid there all night."
Shana, rescued as a neglected puppy from an apparent puppy mill operation, now has a hero's plaque and an honorary fire helmet from firefighters who later checked on the Fertigs.
Shana's hero award for bravery came from the group Citizens for Humane Animal Treatment.
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By JENNIFER FEEHAN
BLADE STAFF WRITER
FINDLAY- A Jackson Township man who shot and killed a Findlay police dog after it came onto his property insists he didn't know the dog worked for police, but a Hancock County grand jury apparently saw things differently.
Steven E. Vanderhoff, 41, was indicted this week for assaulting a police dog and cruelty to animals. The assault charge, a third-degree felony, alleges that while Flip was not assisting police at the time he was killed Nov. 18, the shooter had actual knowledge that Flip was a police dog.
"He didn't. His girlfriend can tell you that he didn't know who the dog was," said Jeff Whitman, attorney for Mr. Vanderhoff.
Mr. Whitman said Mr. Vanderhoff, his girlfriend, and their young son live in the country, about a quarter-mile from Findlay Police Officer Bryon Deeter, Flip's handler who kept the dog at his home. He said Mr. Vanderhoff rarely drove in the direction of the Deeters' house and had never seen the dog before the day he came home with his son and saw Flip come up to the car. Mr. Vanderhoff told Hancock County sheriff's deputies the dog would not get away and kept sticking its nose in the door when he would try to open it. He said he eventually was able to get inside the house, where he retrieved a gun, came back outside, and fired once at Flip when the dog failed to obey commands to get away. "Anyone has the right to protect themselves on their own property," Mr. Whitman said. While investigators said Mr. Vanderhoff never described Flip as "aggressive," his attorney insisted he used similar words. "He used words like threatening, attacking, menacing," Mr. Whitman said. "… The dog was charging him. When he fired the shot, reports show [the dog] was shot in the front chest. It was not like he was shot in the hip or shot running away from him. The dog was only 15 feet from him." Mr. Whitman said Mr. Vanderhoff feared for his son's safety. The youngster was still in his car seat and "he didn't think he could get his son and get into the garage without the dog coming at him." No charges have been filed against Officer Deeter for failing to confine the dog, and Findlay Police Chief Bill Spraw said yesterday that Officer Deeter had not been disciplined for violating any departmental policy. "I think there's other factors involved in this… I don't know that Bryon was completely culpable," the chief said. The officer's son had let Flip out of the house, then failed to let him back in before the family left to go to a relative's house. Mr. Whitman said he understands the police department's loss but said his client has suffered as well "My personal opinion is there's been too much made out of this thing," he said. "I don't think the officer should be charged. It was an unfortunate series of events. I don't know why anyone needs to be punished any more than they have been over this." Mr. Vanderhoff, who is to be arraigned Wednesday in Hancock County Common Pleas Court, faces up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine if convicted of the assault charge. Cruelty to animals, a second-degree misdemeanor, carries a maximum sentence of 90 days. City law director Dave Hackenberg said shortly after Flip was killed, he sent a bill to Mr. Whitman for more than $11,000 that the city paid for the dog. He said that under Ohio law, a person who shoots and kills a dog is responsible to pay for it. "It's the statute," Mr. Hackenberg said. "I'm not saying, 'You shot our dog. You owe us.' The statute says if you shoot a dog you have to pay the value, pure and simple. We paid $11,000-plus for that dog trained. If we wanted to be real stinky about it, he's worth more than that now." After Flip was killed, Findlay native and Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger announced that he would buy a new police dog for his hometown. Chief Spraw said Officer Deeter has been working with a loaner dog named Spike, also a Belgian Malinois, and Spike seems to be working out.
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll...WS17/612220406
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Subject: Dog Philosophy
The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue.
-Anonymous
Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.
-Ann Landers
If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.
-Wil l Rogers
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.
-Ben Williams
A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
-Josh Billings
The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
-Andy Rooney
We give dogs time we can spare, space we can spare and love we can spare. And in
return, dogs give us their all. It's the best deal man has ever made.
-M. Acklam
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people,
who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
-Sigmund Freud
I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
-Rita Rudner
A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before
lying down.
-Robert Benchley
Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.
-Franklin P. Jones
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will
go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
-James Thurber
If your dog is fat, you aren't getting enough exercise
-Unknown
My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to $3.00 a can. That's almost
$21.00 in dog money.
-Joe Weinstein
Ever consider what our dogs must think of us? I mean, here we come from a grocery
with the most amazing haul, chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the
greatest hunters on earth!
-Anne Tyler
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to
the idea.
-Robert A. Heinlein
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is
the principal difference between a dog and a man.
-Mark Twain
You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says,
'Wow, you're right! I never would've thought of that!'
- Dave Barry
Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.
-Roger Caras
If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and
then give him only two of them.
-Phil Pastoret
My goal in life is to be as good a person as my dog thinks I am.
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NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/world/europe/09dogfight.html?th&emc=th
MOSCOW, Feb. 8 — The two opponents padded and paced on a snowcovered basketball court, waiting for their fight to begin.
Viktor Korotayev for The New York Times
A dogfighting tourney was held at a sanitarium in the Tula region.
They were adult Central Asian wolf dogs in the middleweight class. (Crafty: In the picture, both dogs look like Akitas) Both were undefeated in a combined 42 appearances in Russia’s fighting-dog rings. Each weighed more than 100 pounds.
The referee gave the sign. Their trainers released them. The dogs growled, lunged and met, locking jaws on each other’s faces. They began pulling and twisting, each trying to force the other to the snow.
About 150 people lined the fences to watch. The most intense matchup of the fourth stage of the all-Russian dogfighting championship, held in a forest region well south of Moscow, had begun.
Dogfighting is prohibited in much of the West, and animal rights advocates have long wished to have it banned in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet world, labeling it a cruel and a bloody diversion for gamblers and thugs. They have succeeded in Moscow, where the fights are forbidden by mayoral decree.
But throughout Central Asia and the Caucasus, and extending to the outskirts of Russia’s capital, a form of the sport has thrived, cementing local legitimacy and gaining new followers since the Soviet Union’s collapse 15 years ago. It has also returned to Afghanistan, where it was forbidden during the Taliban’s rule.
The sport involves massive, thick-headed breeds, including Central Asian shepherd dogs and Caucasian ovcharka, bred by livestock herders across the continent to defend sheep and cattle in the mountains and on the steppe. Collectively the dogs are called volkodavs, the wolf-killers.
The All-Russian Association of Russian Volkodavs, which sponsors a national fighting championship and participates in fights in other nations, claims to have more than 1,000 breeders among its members and another 1,000 owners who enter dogs in fights.
It holds tournaments almost openly, and has enough fans to support a glossy magazine, a Web site and an annual championship tournament.
Its members brush aside criticism as ill-informed and superficial, saying the sport has roots in traditional contests in which shepherds tested their work dogs and celebrated their stamina and wolf-fighting skills. The also insist that their tournaments, unlike secretive fights with pit bulls and other fighting breeds, never involve contests to the death, and that the dogs are rarely injured seriously.
“Only people who have not seen it, and do not understand it, dislike this,” said Stanislav Mikhailov, the association’s president, as owners gathered recently for the latest tourney, held in a sanitarium in the Tula region, in the forest south of Moscow.
This event was at once open and partly closed. The fans streamed in. But one Western and three Russian journalists were admitted on condition that the sanitarium’s location not be disclosed, out of fear of vandalism or protests by opponents of the fights. In the Caucasus and in Asia, dog owners said, such precautions are not necessary.
In the ring the fight continued. The dogs tugged each other in tight circles by their snouts and then broke free, snarled and attacked again. Sometimes they rose up, pressing for leverage with forepaws while driving forward on hind legs and seeking a purchase for their bared teeth.
Their handlers crouched beside them, shouting encouragement.
One dog, a reddish-tan shepherd’s dog called Sarbai, took an early advantage. He weighed about 135 pounds, at least 30 pounds more than his foe. “Good boy, Sarbai!” his handler shouted. “Bite him well! Work!”
Sarbai wagged the stump of his clipped tail.
His opponent, Jack, had a slightly crooked left rear leg, which his owner said had been broken when he was hit by a car five years ago. He could not match Sarbai’s strength. But he was quick. He refused to submit. As he yielded ground, he clamped onto Sarbai several times, sometimes biting the larger dog’s neck, sometimes lunging for his legs.
While most of the day’s more than 10 matches drew little blood, this one was different. Jack and Sarbai tore each other’s mouths with the first bites. Blood flowed, staining the dogs’ faces and flanks.
They fought for about 15 minutes as a light snow fell. Eventually the pace slowed until the dogs, exhausted, at last stood almost motionless, tongues out. The referee signaled for rest. The first round was a draw.
The legality of such spectacles is unclear. Russia’s criminal code includes a statute forbidding cruelty to animals, but to date, animal rights advocates and dog breeders agree, it has not been used against volkodav fights.
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(Page 2 of 2)
The statute’s language is vague, and Elena Maruyeva, director of the Vita Center for Animal Rights Protection, a private organization in Moscow, said the government did not interpret it broadly. “In practice it is very, very hard to prosecute a person under this law,” she said.
Sarbai, with his trainer, Aleksandr Fedyakin, is a 135-pound shepherd’s dog that took part in the recent tournament in a forest area south of Moscow.
Between rounds of the fight between Sarbai and Jack, another dog, Khattab, above, extended his undefeated record.
The dog owners say that because the fights are not forbidden, they are allowed. They note that government officials know about the tourneys, and the association publicizes the results. Fans also sell plainly labeled videos of the fights.
“We are a semi-open organization,” said Yuri Yevgrashin, the chief referee for the day’s events.
Whatever its official status, the sport appears to be under no significant threat. Ms. Maruyeva and an official at another of the principal animal protection organizations in Moscow said that so far, they had not pushed for bans on wolf dog fighting. Instead, they hope for other measures, like restrictions on the breeding of attack dogs, registration of wolf dog breeders and enacting standards for their care.
On the court, the second round began. The dogs locked jaws and began tumbling against snow banks. Jack still would not quit. The momentum seemed to turn. Could the smaller dog win?
“I am with you, Jack!” a red-faced man screamed, holding a plastic up of vodka. But the second round ended like the first — with two exhausted dogs.
Under the association’s rules, dogs are sorted into two classes for age and weight. They are juniors until age two and a half, when they are classified as adults. Middleweights must weigh less than 62 kilos, about 136 pounds. Any dog larger is a heavyweight.
The largest, weighing roughly 200 pounds, are not highly regarded. “They are too slow,” Mr. Yevgrashin said.
Each fight lasts until one dog shows fear or pain — by dropping its tail, squeaking, whimpering, refusing to fight or snapping its jaws defensively, all grounds for instant disqualification. There is no scoring. There are only winners and losers or, in fights that continue for three rounds without an animal yielding, draws.
Sometimes the outcome is clear within a minute. Other times, fights last more than 45 minutes. A veterinarian is always on hand, Mr. Mikhailov and Mr. Yevgrashin said.
Between Sarbai and Jack’s rounds, other dogs fought. One was called Koba, the nickname used by Stalin. He won.
Another was named Khattab, after a Jordanian-born terrorist who fought in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Chechnya before Russia’s intelligence service killed him with a poison-soaked letter in 2002. He won, too, in the junior middleweight class, extending his undefeated record to eight wins.
Many dogfights in Russia are said to be tainted, with steroid-swelled dogs, or animals smeared with wolf fat to confuse or intimidate their foes, or dogs’ mouths injected with Novocain to make them fight without hesitation. But Edgar Grigorian, Khattab’s owner, said that at this level the matches were clean.
“We are adamantly against cheating,” he said. “I can always tell a dirty dog in a fight, and a good judge will always see it.”
Mr. Grigorian and several other breeders and association members said that there was no prize money, but that successful fighters were used to sire puppies, which could sell for more than $500 each.
In two days at the sanitarium, no admission fee was charged and no gambling was visible, although the breeders said there might be some private side bets.
The previous night, owners and fans had gathered in the sanitarium to celebrate their sport. Behind a hotel room door, a huge dog guarded a metal bowl of meat. When Mr. Yevgrashin opened the door, the dog stared at a stranger and growled.
Mr. Yevgrashin closed the door. Shamil Dotdayev, who sells videotapes of fights and copies of his book, “Caucasian Volkodavs,” reflected on the tournament ahead.
The fights, he said, help preserve breeds with ancient roots in Central Asian and Caucasus life and with a continuing utility in food production. The dogs that succeed, he said, are an essential part of this hard, canine lot — the pack leaders.
Animal rights groups disagree. They say the breeding system rewards the attributes needed for fighting, which are narrower than those for guarding a livestock herd or leading a pack.
Mr. Dotdayev admitted that his interests were broader. He poured shots of vodka and said that dogfighting had an almost irresistible draw, and that studying fighting dogs can become a shepherd’s or mountain man’s obsession.
“The dogs teach us,” he said. “You cannot look at a dog and tell who it is. The dog is on the inside, not on the outside. It is in his spirit.”
“It is the same with people,” he added, and lifted his glass.
On the basketball court, Jack and Sarbai were led back for a third round.
Sarbai quickly pulled Jack to the snow. Each time Jack escaped he was pinned anew, until he was spent and began to snap his jaws, signaling defeat. His tournament was over. Sarbai advanced to the next round.
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The Purpose of a Dog - (From a 4 yr. old)
Being a veterinarian, I had been called to examine a ten-year old Irish
Wolfhound named Belker. The dog's owners, Ron, his wife, Lisa, and their
little boy, Shane, were all very attached to Belker and they were hoping
for a miracle.
I examined Belker and found he was dying of cancer. I told the family we
couldn't do anything for Belker, and offered to perform the euthanasia
procedure for the old dog in their home.
As we made arrangements, Ron and Lisa told me they thought it would be good
for the four-year old Shane to observe the procedure. They felt as though
Shane might learn something from the experience.
The next day, I felt the familiar catch in my throat as Belker's family
surrounded him. Shane seemed so calm, petting the old dog for the last
time, that I wond ered if he understood what was going on. Within a few
minutes, Belker slipped peacefully away. The little boy seemed to accept
Belker's transition without any difficulty or confusion We sat together for
a while after Belker's death, wondering aloud about the sad fact that
animal lives are shorter than human lives.
Shane, who had been listening quietly, piped up, "I know why."
Startled, we all turned to him. What came out of his mouth next stunned
me. I'd never heard a more comforting explanation.
He said, "People are born so that they can learn how to live a good life -
- like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right?" The
four-year-old continued, "Well, dogs already know how to do that, so they
don't have to stay as long."
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,269653,00.html
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — This is a dog story.
It's about a plucky little Jack Russell terrier named George, who stood like a giant against two marauding pit bulls and gave his own life to save five kids from the steel-trap jaws and razor-sharp teeth of the vicious attack machines.
Local officials say it's also a story about the people who trained the pit bulls to kill and who may have fed the animals methamphetamines to make them even more deadly.
The tragedy unfolded Sunday afternoon on New Zealand's North Island, in the town of Manaia, where a group of children — and George — were walking back from a trip to the candy store.
Out of nowhere, the children told police, the two pit bulls lunged at them.
One of the kids, Richard Rosewarne, 11, told the local paper that George never backed down against the pit bulls, doggedly refusing to let the them get at his little brother, 4-year-old Darryl.
"George tried to protect us by barking and rushing at them, but they started to bite him — one on the head and the other on the back," Rosewarne said. "We ran off crying and some people saw what was happening and rescued George."
It was too late, however, to save the little 9-year-old terrier. Steven Hopkinson, the veterinarian who treated George, said the dog's wounds were the worst he'd seen. Putting him down, Hopkinson said, was the only option.
For Allan Gay, George's owner, the loss is especially devastating. He lives alone and George had been his faithful companion for seven of his nine years, inheriting the pup when neighbors moved away.
"These two pitbulls rushed up and were going for the little boy," Gay said, choking back tears. "George went for them, it's what he would do. He didn't stand a chance, but I reckon he saved that boy from being chewed up.
"If it wasn't for George, those kids would have copped it," Gay said.
Gay said he had been receiving phone calls non-stop from relatives and news media since word got out about George's heroics.
"The phone has been going since about half past seven this morning. Every time I hang up it rings again. It's worn out; I might have to get a new one," he said.
The pit bulls, meanwhile, were found Tuesday and turned over to local officials, who said they would be destroyed.
Officials also are investigating reports that the dogs could have been given methamphetamines to make them more aggressive and very unpredictable.
"I understand it commonly happens in Rotorua," animal control officer Kiernan Best said.
"The pitbulls I've had dealings with are naturally aggressive because of the type of people they are with," Best said. "They keep pitbulls around because they don't like visitors, and one can only presume they have something to hide, that they are into crime and drugs.
"They are paranoid about officials visiting and the dog emulates the owner," Best said.
Gay, meanwhile, and the kids George saved built a makeshift memorial to their hero.
"George was brave," Gay said, as each of the kids held a photo of the little pup they'll never forget. "He took them on and he's not even a foot high. ... He jumped in on them, he tried to keep them off."
And, he gave his life doing so.
The Associate Press and Taranaki Daily News contributed to this report.
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Black Commonwealth's Attorney, who blocked execution of search warrant obtained by Sheriff's Office, playing the race card because his effort to protect Michael Vick got bitch slapped by the Feds.
Feds use warrant, search Vick's property
Associated Press
Posted: 11 hours ago
SURRY, Va. (AP) - Federal law enforcement officials descended on a home owned by Michael Vick on Thursday armed with a search warrant that suggests they're taking over an investigation into the Falcons quarterback's possible involvement in dogfighting.
More than a dozen vehicles went to the home early in the afternoon and investigators searched inside before turning their attention to the area where officials found dozens of dogs in late April and evidence that suggested the home was involved in a dogfighting operation.
Surry County officials had secured a search warrant in late May based on an informant's information to look for as many as 30 dog carcasses buried on the property. The warrant never was executed because Commonwealth's Attorney Gerald G. Poindexter said he had issues with the way it was worded.
That search warrant expired Thursday.
"What is foreign to me is the federal government getting into a dogfighting case," Poindexter said. "I know it's been done, but what's driving this? Is it this boy's celebrity? Would they have done this if it wasn't Michael Vick?"
Poindexter said he was "absolutely floored" that federal officials got involved, and that he believes he and Sheriff Harold D. Brown handled the investigation properly.
"Apparently these people want it," Poindexter said. "They want it, and I don't believe they want it because of the serious criminal consequences involved. ... They want it because Michael Vick may be involved."
Poindexter said he found out about a sealed search warrant filed in the U.S. Attorney's office about the time federal investigators executed it Thursday.
"If they've made a judgment that we're not acting prudently and with dispatch based on what we have, they've not acting very wisely," Poindexter said.
He said Surry County officials were preparing another search warrant for the property and that the investigative team planned to meet to make sure they had all the experts needed to make the search most effective.
"There's a larger thing here, and it has nothing to do with any breach of protocol," Poindexter said. "There's something awful going on here. I don't know if it's racial. I don't know what it is."
State police assisted investigators from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Attorney's office in executing the warrant, Virginia State Police Sgt. D.S. Carr said, declining to comment further.
Thursday evening, a state police evidence collection truck was parked inside the fence surrounding the house. Investigators could be seen carrying a large sheet of plywood and a box.
The U.S. Attorney's office would not confirm a search warrant was filed.
Messages left at Brown's office were not returned, and a dispatcher said he left for the day at around 4 p.m.
An after-hours call to Vick's attorney, Larry Woodward of Virginia Beach, was not immediately returned.
During an April 25 drug raid on the home Vick owns in the county, authorities seized 66 dogs, including 55 pit bulls, and equipment that suggested someone at the property was involved in a dogfighting operation.
A search warrant affidavit said some of the dogs were in individual kennels and about 30 were tethered with "heavy logging-type chains" buried in the ground. The chains allowed the dogs to get close to each other, but not to have contact, one of myriad findings on the property that suggested a dogfighting operation.
Others included a rape stand, used to hold non-receptive dogs in place for mating; an electric treadmill modified to be used by dogs; a "pry bar" used to open the clamped-down mouths of dogs; and a bloodied piece of carpeting the authorities believe was used in dog fights. Carpeting gives dogs traction in a plywood fighting pit.
Vick has claimed he rarely visits the home and was unaware it could be involved in a criminal enterprise. He also has blamed family members for taking advantage of his generosity. Vick's cousin, Davon Boddie, was living at the home at the time of the raids.
Vick, a registered dog breeder, has said in more recent interviews that his lawyers have advised him not to discuss the investigation.
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Great video of bull terrier saving a man from...a bull.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/438598/stray_dog_saves_a_man_from_a_bull/
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:-o :-o :-o Outstanding!!!
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Dog wins a race against time to bring aid to injured athlete
By Brian Metzler, Rocky Mountain News
December 19, 2006
A prominent Colorado adventure athlete can thank her dog and a Utah search-and-rescue team for saving her life after she fell and injured herself while running and spent two nights in subfreezing weather near Moab last week.
Danelle Ballengee, 35, of Dillon, will have surgery today at Denver Health Medical Center to repair a broken pelvis suffered while running with her dog near the Amasa Back Trail south of Moab last Wednesday.
She also is recovering from severe frostbite on her feet, internal bleeding and numerous cuts and bruises.
The two-time adventure racing world champion and elite triathlete, trail runner and mountain biker slipped on a patch of ice on Hurrah Pass and tumbled off three successive rock faces of 10 to 20 feet each.
A Grand County (Utah) Search and Rescue team on all-terrain vehicles found Ballengee at about 3:30 p.m. Friday after her dog, Taz, a 3-year-old German shepherd-golden retriever mix, led rescuers on a five-mile journey to the accident site.
"I'm just happy to be alive," she said. "I thought about my family and my friends and everything I do, and I just kept saying to myself, 'I can't die. I'm not ready to die.' But it would have been so easy to relax and curl up and die."
Ballengee left around noon Wednesday for what she thought would be a casual two- hour trail run in the 40-degree weather. She was wearing light running pants, two lightweight running shirts and a lightweight fleece top.
After the fall, Ballengee crawled about a quarter-mile on her hands and knees to try to find help.
During the night, she did sit-ups and kept her upper body moving to keep warm. She drank snowmelt from a puddle when the water in her hydration pack ran out and ate two packets of raspberry energy gel she had carried on the run.
Ballengee owns a home in Moab and spends a lot of time running, cycling, climbing and paddling there in preparation for adventure races. Sometimes she trains with friends but often just with Taz.
A Moab neighbor called Balengee's parents in Evergreen on Thursday after she hadn't seen any sign of Ballengee for more than a day.
"We've told her before to be safe and leave a note about where she's going, but that's not always possible," her mother, Peggy Ballengee, said Monday. "With all of the things Danelle does, we didn't really want to bother people. But we just had a gut feeling that we needed to do something, and thank God we did."
Police initially searched Ballengee's house for signs of foul play and notified authorities in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona about her missing vehicle. They also searched the Colorado River and nearby lakes on the advice of her parents, who thought she might have been kayaking.
Moab police found Ballengee's pickup truck at the Amasa Back trailhead at 12:30 p.m. Friday. As search-and-rescue personnel arrived, a dog matching the description of Taz was seen running around the trailhead.
"We were going to try to identify the dog, but the dog basically didn't want to be caught and instead turned around and headed back toward the trail," said Curt Brewer, chief deputy with the Grand County Sheriff's Office.
"When that happened, the search crew decided to follow the dog. And the dog took our rescue personnel right to her. I think we would have eventually found her, because we were in the right location, but the dog saved us some time," he said.
A helicopter airlifted Ballengee to St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction. She was moved to Denver on Saturday.
A titanium plate and pins will be inserted into her pelvis to repair the breaks. Doctors have told her it is unlikely that she will lose any toes because of the frostbite, but it could be two to six months before she can walk.
Nighttime temperatures dipped to the low 20s in the Moab area last week and reached the mid-40s during the day. A hunter died of exposure on Nov. 29 near Moab after getting stranded in the La Sal Mountains.
On the first night of Ballengee's ordeal, Taz slept with his head on her stomach, but the second night he was hesitant to get near her.
"The first night I couldn't really cuddle with him because I had to stay on my back, but he cuddled next to me and helped keep me warm," Danelle said. "But the second night he either got mad or he got a plan in his head.
"Either way, I just can't wait to give him a big hug. He has no idea how important he can be."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5223711,00.html
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http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...x.html?cnn=yes
Quote:
The indictment handed down Tuesday against Falcons quarterback Michael Vick and three others describes in detail how they procured a property in Virginia for the purpose of staging dogfights, bought dogs and then fought them there, and in several other states, over a 6-year period. With at least three cooperating witnesses providing the details, federal authorities compiled a detailed case that traces the birth and rise of Bad Newz Kennels.
But not a single line in the 18-page indictment will generate more rage toward Vick and the others charged -- Purnell A. Peace, Quanis L. Phillips and Tony Taylor -- than a sentence near the end. It reads: "In or about April of 2007, Peace, Phillips and Vick executed approximately eight dogs that did not perform well in 'testing' sessions at 1915 Moonlight Road by various methods, including hanging, drowning and slamming at least one dog's body to the ground."
In interviews I conducted for an earlier story on the subculture of dogfighting and Vick's involvement, several experts described to me the process of "rolling" dogs. Owners take young dogs, usually puppies, and put them in an enclosed area and see how they react. They prod the dogs and urge them to get angry. If a dog shows aggression toward another dog, that's a positive. If a dog is timid, it is useless. Some fighters give away puppies that don't show the required "gameness." Other owners don't bother with the trouble of finding them a home and simply kill them.
Vick and his three associates, according to the indictment, fall in the latter category. Federal investigators allege Vick is a murderer of dogs who weren't willing to fight for his enjoyment. Even worse, his actions appear more sinister than most professional dogfighters.
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RICHMOND, Va. — Bear is a golden retriever-shepherd who attacked a bicyclist. Dee Dee, a pit bull mix, killed a cat. Cody, a Labrador mix, bit the neighbor.
Dog Bite Law Web site
(dogbitelaw.com)
Virginia's Dangerous Dog Registry
(virginia.gov)
Bibliography of Articles on Dog Bites
(cdc.gov)
Their mug shots, misdeeds and home addresses went online this month at the Virginia Dangerous Dog Registry, a new Web page modeled after the state’s sex offender registry. It lets residents find dogs in their county that have attacked a person or an animal, and that a judge has decided could cause injury again.
Created after dogs killed a toddler and an 82-year-old woman in separate incidents in the last two years, Virginia’s registry is part of a growing effort by states to deal with dogs deemed dangerous. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia hold owners legally liable if their dogs maim or kill, and in 2006, Ohio became the first state to enact a breed ban, though it was later overturned.
In the last two years, nearly 100 municipalities have taken similar steps — banning pit bulls, Rottweilers, English bull terriers and American Staffordshire terriers, or passing regulations that require owners to use muzzles or short leashes in public, according to the American Kennel Club.
Last month, Texas responded to a November 2005 mauling death of a 76-year-old woman by enacting some of the harshest criminal penalties for delinquent dog owners, making it a felony with a possible 10-year prison sentence for anyone whose dog seriously injures a person while off its leash.
But lawmakers taking steps to deal with growing concerns have struggled to ensure public safety without impinging on the privacy and property rights of dog owners. Several of the measures have been overturned in the courts, and many national dog owner and veterinarian associations say the bans are difficult to enforce and ineffective since, they say, if one breed is banned, dog owners seeking aggressive dogs will simply begin fostering fierceness in other breeds.
After the indictment of the Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, who is accused of running a dog-fighting ring from his property in Virginia, the Humane Society estimated that more than 30 percent of dogs in animal shelters were pit bulls, many of them trained as fighting dogs and later abandoned on the streets. That is up from 2 or 3 percent of the shelter population that were pit bulls 15 years ago, the officials said.
“Of course it’s a serious concern when you have more people wanting and training aggressive dogs, and more of those dogs are being abandoned,” said John Goodwin, an expert on animal fighting with the Humane Society.
Counties in Florida and New York have also created publicly accessible dangerous dog registries like the one in Virginia, and legislators in Hawaii are considering one. Critics of the registries say that by publicizing the home addresses of dangerous dogs, they invite harassment by neighbors and invade the privacy of dog owners. Seventeen states now have a “one bite rule” protecting dog owners from liability for the first attack.
“It seems a little unfair to single out a dog if they haven’t done something in the past,” said Jacqueline Short, 40, who lives in Newport News, Va. She is Bear’s owner and says the bicyclist was her pet’s first biting offense.
Now that Bear has been officially designated a dangerous dog, he must be muzzled and walked on a short leash when he is taken in public. But Ms. Short says the toughest requirement has been the $100,000 liability insurance that she now has to carry, which costs about $1,000 a year.
“Courts need to look at the dog’s history and the severity of the incident,” Ms. Short said, “and if the dogs haven’t shown aggression in the past then that should be taken into account before they are considered dangerous.”
Even with stiffer penalties, animal control departments are often understaffed and under-financed and therefore unable to apply the laws.
“Leash laws don’t work because they’re not enforced,” said Mary Hill, the sister of Lillian Stiles, who was killed in Texas in November 2005 by a pack of dogs and whose death inspired the state’s law.
Ms. Hill, who likes to exercise regularly, said she was often frustrated by dogs left off their leashes that chase and harass runners and walkers.
Each year, roughly 4.7 million people are bitten by dogs and about 800,000, half of them children, seek medical attention, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On average, a dozen people die each year from dog attacks, according to the center. In 2003, 32 people died from dog-related incidents.
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Page 2 of 2)
From 1979 to 1998, more than half of the dog-related fatalities were caused by pit bulls and Rottweilers, according to a study published in 2000 in The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Randall Lockwood, a senior vice president of the association and one of the authors of that study, said it was a mistake to make policy decisions based on dog-related fatalities, because they are so rare.
“In the ’70s, Dobermans were the scary dogs of choice, and they were involved in more fatalities,” Mr. Lockwood said. “And later, German shepherds and St. Bernards used to be the ones involved in attacks, which is probably why Stephen King chose to make Cujo a St. Bernard, not a pit bull.” Fatalities are, above all, a reflection of the type of dog that is popular at a given time among people who want to own an aggressive status symbol, he said.
Pit bulls have undoubtedly become that symbol in recent years, and communities that have tried to ban them have run into problems. At least 12 states prohibit local municipalities from passing breed-specific legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Critics say the bans are costly and impractical to enforce since breeds are often difficult to identify and dogs are often of mixed breed.
In March 2006, Ohio’s law banning pit bulls was overturned on the grounds that the state could not prove that pit bulls were inherently more dangerous than other breeds.
In Virginia, 75 to 100 dogs have been declared dangerous by a judge, and many of them have been euthanized or moved out of state.
But victims say the insurance is actually the most important part of Virginia’s new law.
Betty Greene’s mother, Dorothy Sullivan, 82, was killed by a neighbor’s three pit bulls that entered her yard. Ms. Greene said she had heard from a number of victims of dog attacks who, more often than not, ended up having to pay for their hospital bills.
The three pit bulls were euthanized and the owner was sentenced to three years in prison for involuntary manslaughter, Ms. Greene said.
“There is no way to explain the grief,” she said. “It’s even worse when the victim has to pay for the lawyers, the death, the hospital bills.”
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second post of morning:
MASONVILLE, Colo. - Zoey is a Chihuahua, but when a rattlesnake lunged at her owners' 1-year-old grandson, she was a real bulldog.
Booker West was splashing his hands in a birdbath in his grandparents' northern Colorado back yard when the snake slithered up to the toddler, rattled and struck. Five-pound Zoey jumped in the way and took the bites.
"She got in between Booker and the snake, and that's when I heard her yipe," said Monty Long, the boy's grandfather.
The dog required treatment and for a time it appeared she might not survive. Now she prances about.
"These little bitty dogs, they just don't really get credit," Booker's grandma Denise Long told the Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070723/ap_on_fe_st/odd_chihuahua_rattlesnake
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What ever law they pass, I wont give up my Pitts...I will move first.
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i almost started another thread on 'hunting' but since this also relates to dogs i decided to do it here, and some of this is not directly related to dogs.
so forthe first time i went on a hunt for wild pigs with a local guy in northern california coast using 4 dogs. the dogs were pit, australian shepard, mcnab, and other mixes. dogs that are fierce enough to fight, good hunting instincts, good runners without tiring, etc.
one of my friends grew up in the hills several miles inland of the ocean where local people have been living mostly by logging up until recently with lots of free time. a past time and way to put meat on the table was huntingthe hogs. mainly male boars in the summer with more fat, and female sows in the fall winter more fat then. and the sows are nursing in the summer.
4 nights ago we went out, 4 of us, 4 dogs. 1 female dog which was her first time and learning from the others. she seemed to show interest but was real hesitant and the other 3 did most of the hunting. they would run ahead and sniff and hunt and run back tous repeatedly. we walked at first on an old road overgrown at dusk. within minutes the fastest dog barked a mountain away, in the coastal mountains and these were not tall ones. we started running and trying to figure out where he was as he was unusually quiet, barely any baying. soon we heard more barking as the oldest most experienced and alpha male ran to catch up and number 3 named rasscal and beta dog who was staying back, why i am not sure followed only until we were right on the fight. so we we hustled down the valley and up a mountian or huge hill and the sow started squealing super loud. they had caught her in a small pool of water 3 feet deep at the most. 3 dogs on her head, 2 on the ears dragging her deeper. the guy taking us out grabbed her by the rear leg and dragged her back and i stabbed her in the lungs. the female new dog watched and barely took part. the dogs were vicious, she was about 130 lbs. roughly. we were hoping for a boar, and i was quite nervous at first hunting for boars at night when they routinely stand and fight and can gut a dog or a human by swinging their head.
we gutted her and tied front legs to back ones and packed her out like a backpack. we hunted for a few more hours with no hogs chased. the guy we went with was real in tune with his dog pack, explaining and talking about what he saw and such the whole night. i felt quite a bond with the dogs after the kill as we all took part in it. it was great to see dogs live something real and use their bodies closely to what they were designed to do, more than trot around parks. and they knew we hunted with them, even back at the house when we started to get ready, they knew it was time to hunt. and zack the guy wh took us out was choosing which dogs to take and he mostly let them decide. when it was time to go the oldest and most experienced was injured and seemed not interested but jumped in the truck at the last minute, and one refused to go being recently ground into the dirt and ripped up by a boar, not ready to face another. i hope we go again, there is nothing like the chase. tim
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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,504508,00.html
CANINE SMARTS
Behavioral Science Turns to Dogs for Answers
By Julia Koch
For a long time, domesticated dogs were seen as just the slobbering, dumbed-down ancestor of the wild wolf. Dogs, though, have learned a few tricks of their own through the millennia -- and can teach us a lot about ourselves.
Guinness the border collie loves the program. Flip on the monitor, and she can sit for hours watching the colorful images flitting across the screen -- like a teenager in front of a Playstation. As soon as the images change she presses the touch screen with her nose. If she selects the correct one of two photos, a piece of dry dog food automatically drops down to her feet. If she selects the wrong one, the screen turns red for a moment, and then the exercise continues.
PHOTO GALLERY: BRILLIANT MUTTS
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (10 Photos)
Guinness, though, rarely makes mistakes. She can identify different landscapes, and picking out dog breeds, likewise, doesn't present much of a challenge. She's even adept at choosing human faces. "It's only when she is supposed to recognize the same face in different photos that she makes a lot of mistakes," explains Friederike Range, a biologist at the University of Vienna.
Guinness isn't the only dog able to master these image experiments. Since the university's "Clever Dog Lab" opened its doors in a ground floor apartment in Vienna's Ninth District in April, the city's dog owners have inundated the place. "So far only one or two animals have shown no interest in the computer," says Range. "For most of them it's a blast."
What may seem like simple amusement for Guinness and her fellow canines is in fact revolutionizing cognitive research. Range is the first animal researcher to attempt to lure domestic dogs to a touch screen. Scientists in her field have spent decades working with pigeons pecking at pictures, conversing with apes using brightly colored touch symbols, and listening in on the grunting noises made by seals. But the talents of Canis familiaris remained largely unexplored.
Smarter than Apes?
For serious scientists, Lassie and her friends were deemed little more than dumbed-down ancestors of the wolf, degenerated into panting morons by millennia of breeding. But a younger generation of researchers has set out to restore the reputations of our beloved pets. "Dogs can do things that we long believed only humans had mastered," says Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in the eastern German city of Leipzig.
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. It is precisely their proximity to people -- which disqualified our four-legged friends as a model for so long -- that now makes them interesting to animal researchers. "When it comes to understanding human behavior, no mammal comes even close to the dog," says Kaminski. Her Leipzig research team has demonstrated that dogs are far better than the supposedly clever apes at interpreting human gestures.
The researchers held two containers, one empty and the other containing food, in front of chimpanzees and dogs. Then they pointed to the correct container. The canines understood the gesture immediately, while the apes, genetically much more closely related to humans, were often perplexed by the pointing finger.
That's not all. Many dogs were even capable of interpreting the researcher's gaze. When the scientists looked at a container, the dogs would search inside for food, but when they looked in the direction of the container but focused on a point above it on the wall, the dogs were able to understand that this was not meant as a sign.
Follow the Finger
Dogs are so geared toward communication with people that it seems to run in their genes. For a still-unpublished study, Kaminski and her fellow researchers repeated the pointing experiment with six-week-old puppies. Astonishingly, even the puppies understood immediately that it was worth investigating the area the human finger was pointing to.
"Puppies are still with their mother at six weeks. The phase in which they are most susceptible to human influence only begins after that," explains Kaminski. Her conclusion is that the animals must already have the innate ability to interpret human gestures.
In a complex experiment, Adám Miklósi, a biologist at the Hungarian Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and one of the pioneers of modern dog research, demonstrated that wolves, on the other hand, lack these communicative abilities, nor are they capable of learning them. He had 13 of his students each raise one wolf puppy. The students fed the wolves with bottles, took them home and onto the subway, and taught them to walk on a leash and respond to basic commands.
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After a few months the researchers had the young wolves and a group of young dogs attempt the same task. First both groups were taught to remove a piece of meat from a container. After a while, the investigators closed the containers. While the young wolves kept trying to get to the food, the dogs stopped immediately, sat down in front of their human trainers and stared at them.
"The wolves were only interested in the meat," says Miklósi, "and, of course, so were the dogs, but apparently they knew that they would reach their goal more quickly by communicating with the people."
MPI researcher Kaminski believes "that dogs can show us how simple mechanisms can enable highly complex understanding." Human beings also had to learn highly developed communication over the course of the millennia, which leads the MPI researchers to hope that the dog can in fact teach his owners a great deal about their own history. "If two remotely related species have similar characteristics, they probably developed as a result of comparable evolutionary processes," says Michael Tomasello, one of Kaminski's colleagues.
Even more attractive for researchers: dogs are easy to study. "The great advantage of dogs is that we can study them in their natural habitat without any great effort," explains Adám Miklósi.
==========
Behavioral Science Turns to Dogs for Answers
By Julia Koch
Part 2: How Your Dog and Your Kid Are Similar
Kaminski's Leipzig team attracted a lot of attention three years ago with their report on Rico, an exceptional border collie who was able to tell more than 200 different toys apart. Even more astonishing was the fact that he learned new concepts using the same principle with which young children learn the meaning of new words. Since then the owners of a number of dogs with similar abilities have contacted the institute in Leipzig. Apparently Rico the memory genius was not an isolated case.
PHOTO GALLERY: BRILLIANT MUTTS
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (10 Photos)
Partly because of such sensational stories, dog research has "literally exploded" in recent years, says Britta Osthaus, a psychologist with the University of Exeter in Great Britain. Osthaus is examining whether dogs have a basic understanding of physical processes and can think logically.
Biologist Range is mainly interested in finding out which learning strategies dogs use. Using a touch screen, she wants to test whether the animals can transfer information from the screen to reality and whether, like people, they learn by a process of elimination. "The dog is just beginning to become a model organism for animal psychology," says Range, "and there is so much left to study."
Follow Guinness
Range has already shown that dogs use a learning strategy -- selective imitation -- that, until recently, was believed to be unique to human children once they turned a year old. She taught her own dog to push a handle to open a food dispenser. Every dog would instinctively use its snout to push on such a device. But Guinness was only rewarded when she used her paw.
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. Once Guinness had learned the technique, individual dogs were brought in to observe her. If Guinness had a ball in her mouth, so that it was obvious that she could not use her snout, most of the observers pushed on the handle with their snouts. But when they saw Guinness without a ball they usually used their paws. If Guinness chose the more difficult method for no apparent reason, the dogs apparently concluded that there must be some advantage to this behavior.
Young children behave in a similar way. If they observe an adult activating a light switch with his forehead instead of his hands, they only imitate the behavior if the adult's hands are free. In other words, they are clearly, and deliberately, choosing the eccentric method. But if the adult uses his forehead because he has his hands full, most of the children flick the switch with their hand.
It is no coincidence that the domestic dog's ascent to stardom in behavioral research coincides with its career as a lifestyle accessory. "In the past, dogs were mainly trained to obey, and many things were simply forbidden," says Range. "But if a dog only dares to breathe when his owner allows him to, it's difficult to study his cognitive abilities."
Border Collies Outclass them All
Nowadays dog owners send their beloved pets to agility training, where they balance on ramps and crawl through tubes. Some dogs attend "dog dancing" sessions, and puppy training has become all the rage. "Dog education has changed," says Range.
With this change comes clear evidence of cognitive differences. The breeds that were used for hunting or as herding dogs only a few dog generations ago have proven to be especially clever. Border collies like Rico and Guinness would probably be happiest watching over their own herds of sheep. "They simply want to work," says Range. American dog researcher Stanley Coren is convinced that the border collie is the most intelligent of the roughly 400 breeds of dog.
Judging by the numbers of volunteers who show up at Range's dog behavior laboratory, many owners are convinced that their dogs are exceptionally gifted. Range gets two to three inquiries a week from dog owners wanting to test their dogs for intelligence. The Leipzig researchers already have about 1,000 potential test dogs in their database.
"There is a village near Exeter where I now know every dog," says British researcher Osthaus. This is surprising, because her experiments are usually frustrating for dog lovers. "It's almost embarrassing to me, but with my experiments I tend to run up against the limits of dog intelligence."
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Osthaus recently placed a trellis in her laboratory. The test dog was placed on one side of the trellis and the owner on the other. The animal was able to see its owner through the gaps in the trellis, and an opening was easily visible at one end of the trellis, which was several meters long.
And Cats?
After the dogs had slipped through the opening several times, Osthaus moved the barrier so that the opening was now on the opposite side of the room. "All 20 dogs ran to the wrong side first," says Osthaus. Apparently habit trumps canine common sense. A Doberman simply sat down where the opening had been, while another dog even tried to run through the trellis.
As clever as dogs are when it comes to all things relating to their masters, they fail miserably when logic comes into play. For example, dogs can pull a string to drag a piece of meat out of a box. But when Osthaus placed two pieces of string in a crisscross pattern, they always pulled on the string that led in a straight line to the meat. "They simply do not understand the connection through the string," says Osthaus.
Another experiment the Exeter psychologist performed offers some consolation to dog lovers. Osthaus repeated the test with a group of cats, a species that loves playing with strings. The cats, says Osthaus, "did far worse than the dogs."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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Just though i would share this ...I want a puppy sired by this big fella
http://www.motorcitypits.com/bigblock.html
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Damn, now that's a good-looking dog!
My wife and I went to the Berkeley animal shelter to see about adopting a dog (we already have a shih tzu, see my avatar), and 90% of the dogs they had were Pit Bulls or Staffordshire Bull Terriers. I wouldn't be against getting one of these if we had a bigger house and the dog was not bred for aggression. Unfortunately though, the latter doesn't seem to be the case most of the ones at the shelter. It really sucks that there are so many people out there breeding dogs that either don't know what the hell they're doing or are specifically breeding for undesirable qualities (like aggression).
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Over the years, my second Akita killed three skunks, getting zapped every time. The tomato juice remedy helped, but with an Akita's undercoat, the process was long and difficult.
Today I ran across this remedy:
Skunk antidote from Popular Mechanics, Aug 95:
Makes 1 quart
1/4 cup baking soda, mix with
1 teaspoon liquid soap -preferably Dawn, then mix with
1 quart 3% hydrogen peroxide
wash pet with mixture immediately and rinse with warm water.
mix does not store well and could rupture a sealed container.
Alternative is to scrub pet with baking soda and liquid soap mixture and then pour the hydrogen peroxide over the pet.
for a gallon, increase as follows: 1 cup baking soda, 1 tablespoon liquid soap and 1 gallon (4 quarts) of 3% hydrogen peroxide.
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Damn, now that's a good-looking dog!
My wife and I went to the Berkeley animal shelter to see about adopting a dog (we already have a shih tzu, see my avatar), and 90% of the dogs they had were Pit Bulls or Staffordshire Bull Terriers. I wouldn't be against getting one of these if we had a bigger house and the dog was not bred for aggression. Unfortunately though, the latter doesn't seem to be the case most of the ones at the shelter. It really sucks that there are so many people out there breeding dogs that either don't know what the hell they're doing or are specifically breeding for undesirable qualities (like aggression).
@rogt
This new puppy addition from Bigblock will add to my family a 4th Pitbull :-D The current 3 is a blue ( 90lbs) Named "Crom" a Red Nose with Green Eyes my boy ( 98lbs) Brutis and another Red nose with red eyes named (92lbs) Leonidus This new Pup I am gonna bring home will be LapuLapu...All my pits are kind hearted and have never attacked another dog nor have attacked people..However..When the Sun goes down and they are no longer in happy day dance..I would not jump over my gate or try to break in..At night their whole attitude changes to patrolling my house..
I have a 11 year old son and a about to be 2 year old Daughter and I have found on some night they have pushed her door open and two are laying in front of her door and another one is laying close by..
Or sometimes they will break up and guard everyones door...Son, Daughter and my lady and myself all have door guardians..It baffles me..lol!
So woah to the fool who breaks into my house at night..If you come, you better come deep and creep cause a total of 280lbs of Pitbull does not want you in our house when the Sun goes down. :-D
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If I may indulge in some semantics here, I would suggest that because all dogs descend from the wolf, it is not that dogs are bred for aggression, it is that most dogs are bred to delete aggression.
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Point taken. But surely you'll agree that some breeds are more prone to excessive aggression than others. Some of the sweetest dogs I've ever met were pit bulls or rotties, but I have no doubt that they came from experienced, reputable breeders and received proper training as puppies. That and their owner made sure his lifestyle allowed for meeting the dog's exercise needs before deciding to have him.
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In addition to exercise, there is the matter of having a feel for how the dog sees the world. An Akita for example sees things very strongly in terms of respect, territory, and the bond of the pack. The hunting drive can be quite undiluted from that of the wolf. Thus, if the dog is given to understand the boundaries of the territory that belongs to the pack e.g. the house and the yard and he sees you noticing the subtle little things he does to protect then he feels who he is meant to be.
For example, when the children are upstairs and the wife is downstairs and he is positioned just so at the top of the stairs to monitor both levels and his ears are doing the radar thing even as his head is down and then there is a noise out of order with the flow of things and he coils up, ready to activate should it be necessary, let him see you do the same, have a moment of eye contact and then decide together wheth the noise is OK or not. He knows in this warrior moment that he is not alone, that you and he are pack across the frontiers of man meets dog. Of course usually it is nothing and together you and he decide to deactivate. He releases his coil up and settles in again, fully juiced in the importance of what he does and who he is.
This too is aggression. To each his own. For me, this.
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I just read that moth balls are good for keeping skunks away.
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In addition to exercise, there is the matter of having a feel for how the dog sees the world. An Akita for example sees things very strongly in terms of respect, territory, and the bond of the pack. The hunting drive can be quite undiluted from that of the wolf. Thus, if the dog is given to understand the boundaries of the territory that belongs to the pack e.g. the house and the yard and he sees you noticing the subtle little things he does to protect then he feels who he is meant to be.
For example, when the children are upstairs and the wife is downstairs and he is positioned just so at the top of the stairs to monitor both levels and his ears are doing the radar thing even as his head is down and then there is a noise out of order with the flow of things and he coils up, ready to activate should it be necessary, let him see you do the same, have a moment of eye contact and then decide together wheth the noise is OK or not. He knows in this warrior moment that he is not alone, that you and he are pack across the frontiers of man meets dog. Of course usually it is nothing and together you and he decide to deactivate. He releases his coil up and settles in again, fully juiced in the importance of what he does and who he is.
This too is aggression. To each his own. For me, this.
When someone knocks at our door the "3 Brothers" will follow suit with either my Childrens Mother or with me to greet who is at the door and they seem to wait..watching how either one of us takes the situation..As soon as I look at them and say " It's all good" They march away..But one always watches whats going on..
The pack thing is always there. I was walking with my Family with Son on side Mom on his other side and us pushing my Daughter in her stroller. I was walking all three of the Brothers and a Man was walking his 2 rots. I think it caught my boys off guard because they saw them coming and surrounded us..
My Boy Brutis took to the front and the others moves along the other sides and took on what I like to call shield mode lol! The man nooded and said hello and his dogs passed and the brothers continued to walk like that for the rest of our walk.
My soon to be wife can also take them for walks and they wont pull wont push and allow her to control them. I once asked her to take her protection with her and she laughed and said "why? I got this guys"
But the moral of the story is. I understand that effect Crafty. My dog's always look to make sure that the situation is ok and look at me so we can all three decide if that noise was ok.
The one thing I find funny is that there is always one of them that just does not buy it and will walk over to check it out.
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Mighty Dog
There's a new lease on life for the dogs of war: For Veteran's day, SPCA International kicked off a program to repatriate the Iraqi pets that have become adored companions of American troops serving in Iraq. Inspiring the effort was a story the group learned of one flea-bitten and starved puppy named Charlie. The "size of a potato," he was rescued during a routine patrol and gradually brought from the edge of extinction by a diet of MREs. He's now the official Charlie Company mascot.
The plan, called Operation Baghdad Pups (www.baghdadpups.com), aims to make sure "no buddy gets left behind," despite obstructionist military regulations and a cost estimated at $4000 per dog. The bond between soldiers and their faithful friends, of course, is legendary: A dog named "Stubby" received the rank of sergeant in WWI and at least three dogs were recognized for valor in WWII. These days, there's even a United States War Dogs Association to honor the memory of man's best friend in peace and war.
-- Collin Levy
WSJ
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http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/12/22/alaska.wolf.attack.cnn
Wolves surround women and dogs in Alaska
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Woof,
The Eastern coyote has hybridized with the Eastern red wolf, which makes for a much larger animal than the Western coyote and it has more wolf like tendenices such as packing up during cold weather periods. There has been a few instances of aggressive behavior toward humans as well. I trap and hunt coyotes here where I live, they are amazing animals but they really are taking a toll on livestock.
P.C.
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Woof,
I caught a red fox this morning in one of the traps I had out for coyotes. I do my best to make a set animal specific so I don't catch untargeted critters but it's impossible not to attract fox to a coyote set. So, I use offset jaw, paw catch steeltraps. These traps have a gap between the jaws after they been tripped that prevents them from damaging the legs of smaller animals and that way I can release them.
The fox I caught was a young female, a beautiful animal with a fluffy red, black tipped tail that was longer than the length of her body. As I approached her she was doing her best to get away and as I came closer she froze, hoping I wouldn't see her. I spoke to her saying hi there foxy, her head tilted in typical dog fashion. I didn't want to set her into a panic trying to get away so I took my time getting my release pole ready. She was totally fixated on me, her eyes never blinked. As I put the loop over her head she bit it and started trying to get away again but I was able to get her under control fairly quick. I had some trouble trying to get the trap in position where I could release the jaws and at some point my hand and her mouth came within range. She showed no aggression at all and continued to stare me down with a look that seem to say your lucky I'm not a coyote. I eased up on the trap and her foot came out then I stepped back and took the loop off her head. She continued to just sit there staring at me while I talked to her, not realizing she was free. Finally I said you can go now and clapped my hands; she was off like a shot. There is something about having an interaction with wild animal (that doesn't involve getting bit) that really speaks to the buried connections of our animal selves. Wonderful!
P.C.
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8-)
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CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year.
The so-called delisting is scheduled to begin in late March, almost five years later than federal wildlife managers first proposed, mainly because of human tussles here in Wyoming over the politics of managing the wolves.
Now changes during that time are likely to make the transition even more complicated. As the federal government and the State of Wyoming sparred in court over whether Wyoming’s hard-edged management plan was really a recipe for wolf eradication, as some critics said, the wolf population soared. (The reworked plan was approved by the federal government in November.)
During that period, many parts of the human West were changing, too. Where unsentimental rancher attitudes — that wolves were unwelcome predators, threatening the cattle economy — once prevailed, thousands of newcomers have moved in, buying up homesteads as rural retreats, especially near Yellowstone National Park, where the wolves began their recovery in 1995 and from which they have spread far and wide.
The result is that there are far more wolves to manage today than there once would have been five years ago — which could mean, biologists say, more killing of wolves just to keep the population in check. And that blood-letting might not be quite as popular as it once was.
“If they’d delisted when the numbers were smaller, the states would have been seen as heroes and good managers,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. “Now people will say they’re murderers.”
Wolves are intelligent, adaptable, highly mobile in staking out new territory, and capable of rapid reproduction rates if food sources are good and humans with rifles or poison are kept in check by government gridlock — and that is precisely what happened.
From the 41 animals that were released inside Yellowstone from 1995 to 1997, mostly from Canada, the population grew to 650 wolves in 2002 and more than 1,500 today in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The wolves have spread across an area twice the size of New York State and are growing at a rate of about 24 percent a year, according to federal wolf-counts.
Human head counts have also climbed in the same turf. From 1995 to 2005, a 25-county area, in three states, that centers on Yellowstone grew by 12 percent, to about 691,000 people, according to a report earlier this year by the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana. That compares to a 6 percent growth rate for Wyoming as a whole in that period, 7.5 percent for all of Montana, and 19 percent for Idaho. The wolf population has grown faster in Idaho than any place else in the region, doubling to about 800 in the past four years.
The director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Terry Cleveland, said changes in economics and attitude were creating a profound wrinkle in the outlook for human-wolf relations. Mr. Cleveland, a 39-year-veteran with the department, said that many newcomers, who are more interested in breath-taking vistas than the price of feed-grain and calves, do not see wolves the way older residents do.
In the public comment period for Wyoming’s wolf plan, sizable majorities of residents in the counties near Yellowstone expressed opposition. Teton County, around Jackson Hole, led the way, with more than 95 percent of negative comment about the plan, according an analysis by the state. Many respondents feared that the plan would lead to more killing of wolves than necessary.
“It used to be, ‘Yeah, we live near wild animals,’ now it’s like, ‘Gosh, we need to manage them, and it’s the job of the state to do that,’ ” said Meg Daly, a writer in Jackson, who submitted a comment opposing the wolf plan and recently spoke to a reporter by telephone. Ms. Daly said she had lived in Wyoming as a child and moved back last year.
Many new land owners around Yellowstone have also barred the hunting of animals like elk on their property, sometimes, in a single pen stroke, closing off thousands of acres that Wyoming hunters had used for decades. Mr. Cleveland said he expected that those same “no trespassing” signs would be up and in force, creating de facto wolf sanctuaries, when wolf hunters or state wildlife managers started coming around this year. But the trend of land enclosure, Mr. Cleveland said, is probably not in the wolf’s long-term interest.
“As large ranches become less economically viable, the alternative is 40-acre subdivisions,” he said, “and that is not compatible with any kind of wildlife.”
Some advocates of wolf protection say that for all the talk of moderation and the nods to a changing ethos, old attitudes will take over once the gray wolf is delisted.
“I think it’s going to be open season,” said Suzanne Stone, a wolf specialist at Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation group.
Ms. Stone said she thought the changes that led to federal approval of Wyoming’s wolf plan were mostly cosmetic.
Ms. Stone and others are concerned that the plan grants Wyoming something that no other state in the Yellowstone region received: the right to kill wolves at any time by any means across most of the state.
In the northwest corner near Yellowstone and in Idaho and Montana, wolves will be classified as trophy game animals and may be killed only in strictly controlled numbers by licensed hunters. In the 80 percent of Wyoming outside the Yellowstone area, however, wolves will be labeled predators, with no limits and no permits required to kill them.
The state has pledged to maintain at least 15 breeding pairs, or about 150 animals, in a five-county region around the park. The state now has about 362 wolves, according to the most recent estimates in late September.
That formulation sounds just about right to Chip Clouse.
“I support no wolves on private land, and right now we have wolves running rampant,” said Mr. Clouse, a rancher and a former outfitter in Cody, just east of Yellowstone, who has lived in Wyoming for 37 years. “They brought the wolves in for people to see on the public lands, in the park, and what has happened is that they have grown so many packs that they’re now impeding on people who are just trying to live and make a living on their own property.”
Joel DiPaola, a chef at a Jackson ski resort who arrived in Wyoming from Connecticut in the early 1990s, just before the wolves, said he thought much of the huffing and puffing about the animals was emotional and would make little difference.
“As the state was dragging its feet, the wolves were breeding and expanding,” Mr. DiPaola said. “It’s now going to be almost impossible to get rid of them even if they try. Once they seem to get a foothold and have a refuge in the parks, they’re here.”
NY Times
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A dog's run-in with a skunk sends his owner scrambling for cleaning ideas. He ultimately finds an easy solution.
By David Colker,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 27, 2008
Work stinks.
I'm not talking about my job, which I love. Honest.
No, it was a certain emanation noticed by a colleague who innocently approached my desk and asked, "Has there been a skunk back here?"
Early that morning my ever-curious dog, Earl, had gotten sprayed by a skunk in the backyard. Before I could catch him, he sped back into the house through his doggy door, frantically rubbing against everything in sight, starting with the bed.
It was like a Pepe Le Pew cartoon with Smell-O-Vision.
As much as I tried to clean the smell, starting by giving Earl a bath, my olfactory nerves were so overcome that I missed items. Like my sweater, which I had brought into the office that morning. Even my hands carried the stench, though I had washed them repeatedly.
And so began my quest to eradicate skunk spray from dog, furniture, clothes and body. You'd think there'd be solid information on how this can be done, but the Internet and the friendly advice of friends -- all of whom stood at a distance -- were full of misconceptions.
There are remedies, however, based in science. One was even featured in a chemistry journal.
It would be wise to heed them. They probably will be needed more often as we continue to encroach on natural habitats.
Veterinarian Sylvia Domotor, whose office is in Monrovia in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, said skunks had found a highly agreeable habitat in suburbia.
"They're very adaptable to living in communities," said Domotor, who has practiced in San Gabriel Valley communities for more than 20 years. "They're small, nocturnal. They use sewers as highways, and bushy backyards are perfect for them."
Also, residential communities partly shield them from two of their natural enemies: coyotes and bears.
"In this area," Domotor said, "skunks are not even what I consider to be mountain animals anymore."
Earl and I just wanted our house back. And as for my career and social life, essence of Pepe wasn't likely to be a boon to either.
Luckily, an unassuming engineer in the Midwest hit upon the prime solution to skunk smell several years ago when he wasn't even trying.
"I was working on a project that produced hydrogen sulfide gas as a byproduct," said materials engineer Paul Krebaum in Lisle, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. "The gas vented up and then came back into the building through the air-conditioner intakes."
This didn't make him popular with others in the building.
"The gas," he said, "had your basic rotten-egg, sewer-gas odor."
Krebaum mixed a compound that neutralized the odor. It was placed in filters in the venting system, and the complaints stopped.
The project he was working on never made it to market. But in 1993, a colleague mentioned that the family pet had gotten sprayed by a skunk.
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The common wisdom was to use commercially available, often expensive, concoctions with marginal results or a home remedy such as tomato juice that merely masked the smell for a while.
"All you ended up with was a pink dog and a pink bathroom," Krebaum said.
He figured that a weakened version of the solution he used to deal with the gas, which was a cousin to the skunk smell, might work.
Not only did it work, but the ingredients also were available in most supermarkets.
Krebaum, 47, has modified the pet version over the years. Here's the current formula:
Mix together a quart of hydrogen peroxide (3% strength), a quarter cup of baking soda and 1 or 2 teaspoons of liquid soap. Many brands will do, but Krebaum said Softsoap and Ivory Liquid worked particularly well.
Wearing latex gloves to protect your hands, massage the solution into the fur, being careful not to let it drip into the pet's eyes. Let it sit for about five minutes and then rinse with warm water.
That's it. The skunk smell should be completely or almost gone. The process can be repeated if the smell is still prominent.
The process works by breaking down skunk spray, which is composed mostly of highly pungent compounds called thiols. Spoiled food and rotten eggs also contain the highly nose-sensitive thiols. The end product of that chemical process is a sodium salt.
Krebaum said the mixture was safe for dogs and cats if used carefully.
"The stuff that people put on their hair to bleach it is far stronger," he said. "The worst that could happen with a pet, I figured, is that it would come out a shade lighter."
He gave out the formula to those who needed it and considered making it as a commercial product. The main problem was that the solution, as formulated, had to be mixed just before being applied or it would lose its effectiveness. Worse, it produces a gas that could make a closed container explode on a shelf.
He figured out how to possibly get around these problems but still wasn't enthusiastic.
"The people I was working for at the time weren't interested in this kind of product," Krebaum said. "And I already get paid well as an engineer. So I thought, 'Why not just give it away?' "
He published the formula in Chemical and Engineering News in 1993 and later exposed it to a huge audience when he put it on the Web at home.earthlink.net/~skunkremedy/home.
Earl is a smallish mutt of about 20 pounds, but I mixed up a double batch that evening to make sure I could get the solution deep into his fur.
I put him in the bathtub and the process began. Although Earl looked at me with those what-did-I-do-wrong eyes, he didn't squirm much as I applied the mixture. For the area near his eyes, I used an old washcloth.
I let a bit of the solution wash over my hands too, then rinsed us both with tepid tap water.
As I dried Earl and wrapped him in clean towels, there was none of the stench that had packed such a wallop.
Then came loads of laundry that included everything he had touched, including old sheets used to cover the furniture during the day.
I added to each load a scoop of OxiClean stain remover -- more of Krebaum's advice. "It basically uses a hydrogen peroxide-like compound," he said. Everything came out smelling fresh.
By 2:30 a.m., I got to bed, with a fluffy, sweet-smelling, slightly lighter-in-color Earl curled up beside me.
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Akitas at the AKC
http://video.westminsterkennelclub.org/player/?id=217239
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Nanny Rips Baby Girl From Jaws of Coyote in California Sandbox
Saturday , May 03, 2008
CHINO HILLS, Calif. —
A nanny pulled a 2-year-old girl from the jaws of a coyote when the animal attacked the toddler and tried to carry her away in its mouth, officials said.
The girl was playing Friday in a sandbox at Alterra Park in Chino Hills in San Bernardino County. Around 10:30 a.m., the caretaker heard screaming and saw a coyote trying to carry the child off in its mouth, officials said.
The babysitter grabbed the child and pulled her from the coyote's grasp, the sheriff's department said in a statement.
The coyote then ran off into nearby brush.
The child suffered wounds to her buttocks and was taken to Chino Valley Medical Center and was later released, director of nursing Anne Marie Robertson said. She was later transported to Loma Linda University Medical Center to receive the rabies vaccine.
San Bernardino County Animal Control and the State Department of Fish and Game were searching for the animal, Wiltshire said.
Miller said there was another attack in the area in October when a coyote bit a 3-year-old girl playing in a cul-de-sac. The girl needed treatment for puncture wounds to the head and thigh, Miller said.
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More on coyote-human interaction
http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=anrrec/hrec
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California 2-Year-Old Dragged From Yard by Coyote in Third Such Attack in Five Days
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. —
A coyote grabbed a 2-year-old girl by the head and tried to drag her from the front yard of her mountain home in the third incident of a coyote threatening a small child in Southern California in five days, authorities said.
The coyote attacked the girl around noon Tuesday when her mother, Melissa Rowley, went inside the home for a moment to put away a camera, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said in an incident report.
Rowley came out of the house and saw the coyote dragging her daughter towards a street. She ran towards her daughter, and the animal released the girl and ran away, said sheriff's spokeswoman Arden Wiltshire.
Rowley took her daughter to a hospital where the toddler was treated for several punctures to the head and neck area, and a laceration on her mouth. She was then flown to Loma Linda University Hospital for further treatment, although her injuries were not life-threatening.
State Fish and Game wardens and county animal control authorities set traps for the coyote and were monitoring the neighborhood high in the San Bernardino Mountains about 65 miles miles northeast of Los Angeles.
On Friday, a nanny pulled a 2-year-old girl from the jaws of a coyote at Alterra Park in Chino Hills, a San Bernardino County community about 30 miles east of Los Angeles. The girl suffered puncture wounds to her buttocks and was treated at a hospital.
A coyote came after another toddler in the same park Sunday. The child's father kicked and chased the coyote away.
Alterra Park is near Chino Hills State Park, a natural open space of thousands of acres spanning nearly 31 miles.
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TULSA, Okla. — The sheriff's office has backed off its recommendation that three dogs that are part of a bestiality case should be destroyed.
Donald Roy Seigfried, 55, and Diane Whalen, 54, face felony charges of committing crimes against nature, the statute that deals with bestiality.
Sheriff's officials at first said the animals appeared aggressive and should be put down. Animal rights groups argued that the dogs should be spared.
"The undersheriff has rethought his position on the dogs involved in the pornography," said sheriff's Capt. John Bowman. "Because of their status as being victims in this whole thing, he decided they will not be euthanized.
"His intent is to maintain them until they can be rehabilitated and then to get them adopted by people or organizations who are aware of their background and get a good home for all of them."
The sheriff's office received evidence the dogs had been filmed dozens of times performing sex acts with a woman.
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http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pb...374/1001/RSS01
Pit bull attacks, kills 3-year-old in Jackson
Mark F. Bonner • mark.bonner@jackson.gannett.com • July 23, 2008
A chained pit bull attacked and killed a 3-year-old boy Tuesday night in south Jackson.
Jackson police would not identify the toddler.
The mauling happened about 9 p.m. while the child played outside with friends at 112 Maple Ridge Drive across the street from his home.
"Right now, our big question is: Where were the parents?" said police spokesman Sgt. Jeffery Scott. "This child was mauled to death. What was that 3-year-old doing by himself?"
Scott said investigators were still interviewing witnesses late Tuesday. He said it was too early to say whether homeowners Shannon and Shaunda Reason, who own the dog named Blue Eyes, or anyone else would be charged.
The attack occurred when the boy wandered from the front yard into the carport where the dog was, Scott said. As the child made the corner toward the back of the house, he met the dog face-to-face.
The 2 1/2-year-old pit bull bit into the boy's neck and upper torso. Police said the dog then dragged the boy inside the Reasons' house, where he died.
When police and animal control officers arrived, Scott said the dog charged them, forcing officers to open fire. The dog was wounded but not killed.
Now in animal control custody, the dog will be quarantined and observed for 10 days before officials decide whether it should be euthanized.
The Reasons were being questioned late Tuesday.
Down the street, Isaac Stuckley said he heard the attack and mistakenly thought someone had been shot or stabbed.
"It happened so quick," the 12-year neighborhood resident said. "A lot of screaming, yelling and cursing - I thought a big fight had broken out."
Stuckley said the Reasons keep three pit bulls.
Stuckley said there had been a large gathering in front of the home before the attack.
"I have a pit bull myself," Stuckley said. "But it's for safety. It's not for children. That child didn't even have a chance. The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach."
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Hello all, I found a decent book on the history of the Akita, " Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain," by Martha Sherrill. It's the history of the breed in modern times and how a single man in Japan, Morie Sawataishi brought the breed back from the brink of extinction at the end of WWII. I was unaware the breed had dwindled to about a dozen or so dogs! I have not yet finished the book but I've found its a easy read if not a bit mystical. You can find it on Amazon.
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Thanks-- I just ordered it.
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Dog guarded owner's body for weeks after death
German shepherd protected body for up to six weeks, investigators say
updated 6:37 p.m. ET Aug. 12, 2008
GREELEY, Colorado - A dog stood guard over her owner's body for up to six weeks after the man committed suicide on the remote northeastern Colorado plains, authorities said.
The body of 25-year-old Jake Baysinger was found Sunday on the Pawnee National Grasslands about 75 miles northeast of Denver. Cash, his German shepherd, was found beside him, thin and dehydrated but still alive. The dog had apparently survived by eating mice and rabbits, authorities said.
The Weld County coroner ruled Baysinger's death a suicide. The cause of death wasn't immediately determined but authorities found a gun nearby, the coroner's office said Tuesday. Baysinger was reported missing June 28. An extensive search failed to locate him, but a rancher saw Cash last weekend, went to investigate and discovered Baysinger's body and his pickup.
"At least we know it's over now," said Baysinger's wife, Sara. "We'd been looking for my husband for six weeks, and this isn't how we wanted it to end. At least we can close this."
Cash has been reunited with her and her 2-year-old son, Lane. She said her little boy is "very close to that dog" and happy to see her again.
Investigators said the dog probably kept coyotes away from the body.
__________________
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Dog attack styles!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZm037jPNgc&feature=related
Tony Torre
Miami Arnis Group
www.miamiarnisgroup.com
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Anyone here have any experience with Bullmastiffs? Been looking to get one for a while and wanted some first person feedback.
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Dogfighting Subculture Is Taking Hold in Texas
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December 7, 2008
Dogfighting Subculture Is Taking Hold in Texas
NYT
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
HOUSTON — The two undercover agents were miles from any town, deep in the East Texas countryside, following a car carrying three dogfighting fanatics and a female pit bull known for ripping off the genitals of other dogs. A car trailed the officers with two burly armed guards, hired to protect the dog and a $40,000 wager.
When the owners of the opposing dog, a crew from Louisiana, got cold feet and took off, the men in the undercover agents’ party reacted with fury, offering to chase them down and kill them. The owner of the female pit bull, an American living in Mexico, was merciful. He decided to take the opposing dog and let the men live, the officers said.
Over 17 months, the agents from the Texas state police penetrated a murky and dangerous subculture in East Texas, a world where petty criminals, drug dealers and a few people with ordinary jobs shared a passion for watching pit bulls tear each other apart in a 12-foot-square pit.
Investigators found that dogfighting was on the rise in Texas and was much more widespread than they had expected. The ring broken up here had links to dogfighting organizations in other states and in Mexico, suggesting an extensive underground network of people devoted to the activity, investigators said.
Besides a cadre of older, well-established dogfighters, officials said, the sport has begun to attract a growing following among young people from hardscrabble neighborhoods in Texas, where gangs, drug dealing and hip-hop culture make up the backdrop.
The investigation here led to the indictments of 55 people and the seizing of 187 pit bulls, breaking up what officials described as one of the largest dogfighting rings in the country.
“It’s like the Saturday night poker game for hardened criminals,” said one of the undercover agents, Sgt. C. T. Manning, describing the tense atmosphere at the fights.
In between screaming obscenities at the animals locked in combat, Sergeant Manning said, the participants smoked marijuana, popped pills, made side deals about things like selling cocaine and fencing stolen property, and, always, talked about dogs.
Dogfighting drew national attention in 2007 when Michael Vick, the quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, was convicted of felony conspiracy after holding dogfights on his property in Smithfield, Va. On Monday, officials in Los Angeles announced the breakup of a dogfighting ring. It was the outcry among animal-welfare groups after Mr. Vick’s arrest that prompted the Texas Legislature to make dogfighting a felony in September 2007. Before that, the police in Texas had largely ignored the phenomenon because the offense was a misdemeanor.
In the Texas case, law enforcement officials described a secretive society of men who set up prize fights between their pit bulls and bet large sums on the outcome. Many of those indicted had long criminal records, but they also include a high school English teacher, a land purchaser for an oil company and a manager at a Jack in the Box restaurant.
The participants generally arranged the fight over the phone, matching dogs by weight and sex, and agreeing to a training period of six or eight weeks.
The training techniques were brutal. One man who was indicted trained a dog by forcing it to run for up to an hour at a time through a cemetery with a chain around its neck that weighed as much as it did. Then he forced dogs to swim for long periods before running on a treadmill. Every day the dogs would be given dog protein powders, vitamins and high-grade food to build muscle.
Then, as the fight date approached, the trainers would starve the dog, give it very little water and pump it full of an anti-inflammatory drug.
The fights were held in out-of-the-way places — an abandoned motel in the refinery town of Texas City, a horse corral in a slum on the Houston outskirts, behind a barn on a farm near Jasper and at a farmhouse in Matagorda County, south of Houston.
The two undercover agents, Sergeant Manning and his partner, S. A. Davis, posed as members of a motorcycle gang who stole automated teller machines for a living. They infiltrated the ring, allied themselves with a group of people who owned fighting dogs and rented a warehouse in Houston, where fights were eventually held.
People came to the contests from as far away as Tennessee, Michigan and the Czech Republic. Every weekend, fights were held throughout the area for purses that usually ran about $10,000. The agents documented at least 50 fights.
“The undercover cops were sometimes invited to three different dogfights in a night,” said Belinda Smith, the Harris County assistant district attorney prosecuting the cases, along with Stephen St. Martin.
The ring members called the fights “dog shows.” The two dogs would be suspended from a scale with a thin cord tied around their neck and torso. If one of the dogs did not make weight, the owner would forfeit his half of the prize money, or the odds would be adjusted. After the weigh-in, the owners washed each others’ dogs in water, baking soda, warm milk and vinegar to make sure their coats were not poisoned.
Then dogs were forced to face off in a portable plywood box two feet tall, usually with a beige carpet on the floor, to show the blood, officials said. At the command of “face your dogs,” the animals were turned toward each other. When the handlers released them, the dogs would collide with a thud in the center of the ring, tearing at each other’s mouths, jaws, necks, withers and genitals, officials said. A referee usually would let the dogs fight until one backed off, then the handlers would take them back to their corners and wash them for 30 seconds.
During the fight, the exhausted animals would sometimes overheat, lock onto each other and lie in the ring. The handlers would blow on them to cool them off and force them to fight.
The fight usually ended when a dog refused to cross a line in the center of the ring to confront the opponent, known as “standing the line.” Such dogs were usually drowned or bludgeoned to death the next day, officials said.
“These guys take it very personally,” Sergeant Manning said. “It’s a reflection on them.”
Most of the dogs seized were kept outside in muddy yards, chained to axles sunk in the ground, with only six feet of tether and no shelter, beyond, in some cases, a toppled plastic 40-gallon barrel. All suffered from multiple parasites, veterinarians said.
“These dogs were kept in more than cruel conditions — they were subjected to torturous conditions,” said Dr. Timothy Harkness, of the Houston Humane Society. “Death was more pleasant than what they had to exist for.”
Many of the surviving animals had battle wounds on their necks and mouths, Dr. Harkness said. Although some were not aggressive toward people, they were all bred to attack other dogs, and officials made the decision to euthanize them last week.
Dr. Dawn Blackmar, director of veterinary public health for Harris County, said that putting down more than 80 dogs in her care was heart-wrenching. “It was absolutely awful,” Dr. Blackmar said. “It’s not the dogs’ fault. It’s that people have taken and exploited this breed.”
The members of the dogfighting ring were careful about who attended a fight, often limiting each side to 10 guests and quizzing people about who they were, who they knew.
The principals would keep the location of the fight secret until the last minute and then go in a caravan of cars to the rendezvous point, making it difficult to collect evidence, law enforcement officials said. They were also secretive about where they kept their dogs, for fear of robbery.
“People would go to the fights and talk about their yards,” said Ms. Smith, the assistant district attorney. “But they were very secretive about where their yards are.”
Ms. Smith said dozens of people who attended fights had yet to be identified, despite photos, because they piled into cars that did not belong to them to go to the events and never used their real names.
“There are a lot of people doing this,” she said. “We could have gone on and on and on with this investigation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/us/07dogs.html?hp
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEVYvN4Qces&feature=related[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEVYvN4Qces&feature=related
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQpu9UoXCeM
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http://www.workingpitbull.com/
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o0GsA4qDHE
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2BgjH_CtIA&feature=related
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Man's First Friend
What was the original domesticated animal?
By Christopher Beam
Updated Friday, March 6, 2009, at 6:27 PM ET
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In a study released Friday, a team of archaeologists presented new evidence that horses were domesticated in 3500 B.C.—about a thousand years earlier than previous estimates. What was the first domesticated animal?
The dog. No one can pinpoint exactly when humans first started keeping dogs as pets, but estimates range from roughly 13,000 to 30,000 years ago. Archaeologists can tell domesticated canines apart from wolves through skeletal differences: Dogs had smaller teeth, for example, and a reduced "Sagittal crest"—the bone ridge that runs down the forehead and connects to the jaw. The earliest dog bones, discovered in Belgium in 2008, are from 31,700 years ago. But ancient dog skeletons have also been unearthed in western Russia, near its border with Ukraine, and elsewhere across Europe, Asia, and Australia, suggesting that canine domestication was a widespread phenomenon.
Scientists have also used DNA evidence to estimate the origin of domesticated dogs. The so-called "molecular clock" theory posits that if you know the speed at which DNA mutates, you can develop a chronology for doggie evolution. Say you know when wolves and coyotes separated and became different species, and you know what their genomes currently look like. You can then determine how long it took for those genetic changes to occur. Based on this methodology, dogs as a species are estimated to be 15,000 to 20,000 years old. But critics argue that gene substitution is not a constant process—it speeds up, then slows down—making the estimates rough at best.
How did dogs get domesticated in the first place? The first ones were basically just tame wolves. Some researchers believe wolves were first attracted by the garbage produced by early human settlements. Those canines brave enough to approach humans, yet not so aggressive as to attack, got fed. Eventually, they no longer needed the strong jaws and sharp teeth of their feral counterparts. Their noses got smaller, too. (Dogs characteristics can change a lot in only a few generations.) After this initial process of "self-domestication," humans started breeding dogs to help with hunting, herding, standing guard, and carrying stuff. Humans also deliberately bred dogs to be more adorable.
Other pets came later. Sheep and goats were first domesticated roughly 11,000 years ago, while cats became pets around 7000 B.C. with the advent of agriculture. (As people collected and stored grain, it would attract mice, which would then attract cats.) Around the same time, people started keeping cattle for consumption purposes. Several thousand years later, around 4000 B.C., as trade routes developed, humans began using oxen, donkeys, and camels to transport goods. Horses were eventually domesticated for both riding and carrying goods, but scholars differ on which purpose came first.
http://www.slate.com/id/2213121/?GT1=38001
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Regulators and lefty loons go after a woman who sold a Shepherd to VP Biden. . . .
By GRETCHEN METZ, Staff Writer
Click to enlarge
EAST COVENTRY — It was a proud moment for Linda Brown when then-Vice President-elect Joe Biden selected her kennel to purchase his new German shepherd puppy.
That was in mid-December.
For Brown, that proud moment was short-lived.
After the story about the puppy sale ran in the newspapers and on TV newscasts, three dog wardens from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture showed up on Brown's doorstep for a kennel inspection.
And they showed up again and again for four visits over four months.
She said she has also received death threats from animal activists against her and Biden, which were reported to the Secret Service and the FBI.
Bob Slama, special agent in charge of the Secret Service's Philadelphia field office, said the agency "cannot comment on an ongoing investigation."
J.J. Klaver, special agent at the Philadelphia field office of the FBI, said his agency is not investigating the matter at this time.
"I thought when Joe Biden bought a puppy from me, what an honor," Brown said. "Out of millions of breeders in the country, in the world, he picked me."
The glow dimmed almost immediately.
Following a story about Brown and Biden in the Daily Local News, readers posted 131 comments, some chiding Biden for having the Secret Service with him when he went puppy shopping and others complaining he did not get the dog from a shelter.
Brown was taken to task for selling pedigree dogs.
Brown said she has read the comments, even the one that said she was sued.
"I'd like to meet that person," Brown said, adding that she has not been sued.
Some people were outraged about the photograph of Biden holding a 5-week-old puppy, Brown said. But, the breeder points out, Biden only came to select a puppy on that visit, left it with its mother and returned three weeks later to take it home.
Brown was not only vilified in posted comments to newspapers but also on the Web site of People for the Ethical Treatment Animals, or PETA.
According to a Dec. 12 press release from the animal rights group, it aired its controversial TV commercials "Buy One, Get One Killed" in Biden's home state of Delaware after he bought his dog from Brown. The commercial blames euthanization of animals in shelters on people who purchase pets from breeders.
Brown also was cited for record-keeping problems and warned about maintenance and sanitation shortfalls by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
"I was cited for a piece of kibble on the floor and five strands of dog hair. They took a picture of that, they walked around, snapped pictures and don't tell you why," said Brown, who disputes all the items where she was written up.
Brown's case was heard by District Justice James DeAngelo in South Coventry on March 31. She was found "not guilty" for each citation, the judge's office confirmed Wednesday.
Chris Ryder, press secretary for the Department of Agriculture, said Brown was inspected in December because of a complaint. He said it was department policy not to release the name of the person who complained.
Brown's kennel, Wolf Den, was inspected twice a year by the agency and routinely had satisfactory reports until December 2008 when it had seven unsatisfactory inspection results out of 26, according to the inspection records on the agency's Web site.
Ryder said the inspectors returned as a matter of follow-up to determine if the unsatisfactory matters had been taken care of. He said more than one inspector was brought in because Brown runs a large kennel.
Before going to court, Brown had to hire a lawyer. So far her legal fees are $4,000, she said.
"Never, never, never again," Brown said about selling a dog to anyone with a high profile.
Brown said she gets her breeding stock from Germany. Each dog costs between $5,000 and $10,000.
"If I paid that much for them, don't you think I'd treat them pretty good?" Brown asks.
While the First Family was shopping for a Portuguese water dog, Brown said those breeders were getting in touch with her to find out what her experience had been like.
Brown has a few words for them.
"It's been horrific since December," she said.
http://www.dailylocal.com/articles/2009/04/09/news/srv0000005068031.txt
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http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=Re644qgnCtw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Esherdog%2Enet%2Fforums%2Ff7%2Fmongolians%2Dusing%2Deagles%2Dhunt%2Dwolves%2Dthats%2Dright%2Deagles%2D959782%2F&feature=player_embedded
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Last November, Australian couple Jan and Dave Griffith took their Australian cattle dog, Sophie Tucker, on a sailing trip off the coast of Queensland. The couple and their pet were having a wonderful time at sea until a storm struck one day. While the Griffiths worked to keep the boat on course, they turned away from Sophie. A moment later, she was gone. She had slipped overboard, and the couple feared that she had drowned.
“We were able to back-track to look for her, but because it was a grey day, we just couldn’t find her and we searched for well over an hour,” Jan Griffith told BBC News.
“We thought that once she had hit the water she would have been gone because the wake from the boat was so big.”
The Griffiths returned home in tears over the loss of their beloved pet. But four months later, they received some surprise news: Sophie had been found on a remote island, alive and well. She had swum five miles to shore after falling off the ship, and had survived since then by eating baby goats and other small animals.
The rangers who discovered her initially thought that Sophie was a wild dog, because she did not let people come near her. But when the Griffiths came to pick her up, Sophie immediately recognized her owners. After Jan Griffith called her name, “she started whimpering and banging the cage and when they let her out she just about flattened us,” she told the AAP news agency.
Her castaway adventure finally over, Sophie is doing well at home, relaxing by the pool and eating all the treats she wants. But Jan Griffith still can’t get over what her dog must have gone through to survive.
“She was a house dog and look what she’s done, she has swum over five nautical miles, she has managed to live off the land all on her own,” she told BBC News. “We wish she could talk, we truly do
http://gimundo.com/news/article/dog-lost-at-sea-four-months-discovered-on-deserted-island/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7986816.stm
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Is there a snake bite vaccine for dogs?
There is a vaccine against rattlesnakes for dogs. For more information, see http://www.redrockbiologics.com/
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I have known 2 dogs bitten by rattlesnakes. They both recovered with no ill effects. They were both just nursed not doctored ( no antivenom was given). I am forming the opinion that rattlesnake venom does not effect dogs as it does people. Of coarse this is just 2 examples and many other variables could explain the recovery, dry bite etc. The effect could be like the fallow web spider in Australia, lethal to people but annoying to dogs. I am not a vet just an observer. You might visit The Texas A&M web site or call the University I have had many agricultural questions answered there with a phone call. They would know about the vaccine. I have heard it is harder to get into Aggie Vet school than medical school.
Freki
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Dogs descended from wolf pack on Yangtze river
Today's dogs are all descended from a pack of wolves tamed 16,000 years ago on the shores of the Yangtze river, according to new research.
Published: 10:28AM BST 02 Sep 2009
It was previously known that the birthplace of the dog was eastern Asia but historians were not able to be more precise than that.
However, now researchers have made a number of new discoveries about the history of man's best friend - including that the dog appeared about 16,000 years ago south of the Yangtze river in China.
It has also been discovered that even though the dog has a single geographical origin it descends from a "large number of animals - at least several hundred tamed wolves, probable even more"...
Peter Savolainen, a biology researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and who led the study with a team of Chinese researches, said: "For the first time in world history it is possible to provide a detailed picture of the dog, with its birthplace, point in time, and how many wolves were tamed.
"This is a considerably more specific date and birthplace than had previously been put forward.
"Our earlier findings from 2002 have not been fully accepted, but with our new data there will be greater acceptance.
"The picture provides much more detail."
Researchers, writing in Molecular Biology and Evolution, also said that the time for the emergence of the dog conforms well with when the population in that part of the world went from being hunters and gatherers to being farmers, which was 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
Mr Savolainen added: "The fact that there were so many wolves indicates that this was an important, major part of the culture.
"The findings provide several exciting theories.
"For example, the original dogs, unlike their later descendents in Europe, which were used as herders and guard dogs, probably ended their lives in the stomachs of humans."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6125898/Dogs-descended-from-wolf-pack-on-Yangtze-river.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/weekinreview/01kershaw.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print
November 1, 2009
Good Dog, Smart Dog
By SARAH KERSHAW
Life as a Labradoodle may sound free and easy, but if you’re Jet, who lives in New Jersey, there is a lot of work to be done.
He is both a seizure alert dog and a psychiatric service dog whose owner has epilepsy, severe anxiety, depression, various phobias and hypoglycemia. Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall.
Jet seems like a genius, but is he really so smart? In fact, is any of it in his brain, or is it mostly in his sniff?
The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did.
Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.
In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.
Hungarian researchers reported in a study last year that a guide dog for a blind and epileptic person became anxious before its master suffered a seizure and was taught to bark and lick the owner’s face and upper arm when it detected an onset, three to five minutes before the seizure. It is still somewhat mysterious how exactly dogs detect seizures, whether it’s by picking up on behavioral changes or smelling something awry, but several small studies have shown that a powerful sense of smell can detect lung and other types of cancer, as the dogs sniff out odors emitted by the disease.
Beyond these perceptual abilities, in which trainers can use the dogs’ natural instincts, some research has examined dogs’ actual cognitive ability, and found not just good doggie, but smart doggie.
“I believe that so much research has come out lately suggesting that we may have underestimated certain aspects of the mental ability of dogs that even the most hardened cynic has to think twice before rejecting the possibilities,” said Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an author of several books on dogs.
Dr. Coren’s work on intelligence, along with other research suggesting that the canine brain processes information something like the way people do, has drawn criticism. And there is good reason. For most of the last century the specter of a horse named Clever Hans hung over anyone who tried to prove that dogs were acting in thoughtful ways — not merely mimicking or manipulating people into believing that they in fact grasped human concepts.
Clever Hans was said to be able to count, make change and tell time by tapping his hoof, until investigators in the early 1900s learned that Hans was merely responding to his trainer’s body language, tapping when the trainer nodded his head. This provided an enduring example for those who believed thought was the exclusive domain of humans.
But in 2004, German researchers reported that a border collie named Rico could learn the name of an object in one try, had 200 objects in his repertoire and remembered them all a month later, all very human. Even skeptical animal behavior researchers found the Rico results impressive and sound. Is it possible that Rico turned the tide on the Clever Hans problem, even though there is debate about how we can reliably measure what dogs know?
By giving dogs language learning and other tests devised for infants and toddlers, Dr. Coren has come up with an intelligence ranking of 100 breeds, with border collies at No. 1. He says the most intelligent breeds (poodles, retrievers, Labradors and shepherds) can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals, while the others can learn 165. The average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the animal can get “the idea of being a dog” by differentiating photographs with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.
But Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida who specializes in canine cognition and has himself said he met a border collie who knew 1,500 words, takes issue with efforts to compare human and canine brains.
He argues that it is dogs’ deep sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable — but that doesn’t mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog’s entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.
“I take the view that dogs have their own unique way of thinking,” Dr. Wynne said. “It’s a happy accident that doggie thinking and human thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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Bay area, CA:
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http://www.hssv.org/adoption_pet-of-the-week.html
A friend of mine works at HSSV and sent this out. The dog's not 100% Akita, but she is apparently just completely awesome. So, I figured it couldn't hurt to send it your way on the off chance you guys would consider adopting her.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/us/05religion.html?_r=1&pagewanted=printDecember 5, 2009
Religion Journal
Yes, Miky, There Are Rabbis in Montana
By ERIC A. STERN
HELENA, Mont. — In Montana, a rabbi is an unusual sight. So when a Hasidic one walked into the State Capitol last December, with his long beard, black hat and long black coat, a police officer grabbed his bomb-sniffing German shepherd and went to ask the exotic visitor a few questions.
Though there are few Jews in Montana today, there once were many. In the late 19th century, there were thriving Jewish populations in the mining towns, where Jews emigrated to work as butchers, clothiers, jewelers, tailors and the like.
The city of Butte had kosher markets, a Jewish mayor, a B’nai B’rith lodge and three synagogues. Helena, the capital city, had Temple Emanu-El, built in 1891 with a seating capacity of 500. The elegant original facade still stands, but the building was sold and converted to offices in the 1930s, when the congregation had dwindled to almost nothing, the Jewish population having mostly assimilated or moved on to bigger cities.
There is a Jewish cemetery in Helena, too, with tombstones dating to 1866. But more Jews are buried in Helena than currently live here.
And yet, in a minor revival, Montana now has three rabbis, two in Bozeman and one (appropriately) in Whitefish. They were all at the Capitol on the first night of Hannukah last year to light a menorah in the ornate Capitol rotunda, amid 100-year-old murals depicting Sacajawea meeting Lewis and Clark, the Indians beating Custer, and the railway being built. The security officer and the dog followed the rabbi into the rotunda, to size him up.
Hanukkah has a special significance in Montana these days. In Billings in 1993, vandals broke windows in homes that were displaying menorahs. In a response organized by local church leaders, more than 10,000 of the city’s residents and shopkeepers put make-shift menorahs in their own windows, to protect the city’s three dozen or so Jewish families. The vandalism stopped.
Lately, the only commotion about Hanukkah has been the annual haggling among the rabbis over who gets to light the menorah at the Capitol. (It has since been resolved — at this year’s lighting, on Dec. 16, they will each light a candle; in the future they will take turns going first.)
Last year, the rabbinic debate resumed as the hour of lighting neared and 20 or so Jewish Montanans filed into the Capitol.
One woman could be heard reporting, excitedly, that a supermarket in Great Falls would be carrying matzo next Passover; a guy from Missoula was telling everyone that he had just gotten a shipment of pastrami from Katz’s Deli in New York.
The menorah was lighted and Hebrew prayers chanted, while the officer watched from a distance with his dog. He figured he would let it all go down and then move in when the ceremony was done. The dog sat at attention, watching the ceremony with a peculiar expression on its face, a look of intense interest. When the ceremony was over, the officer approached the Hasidic rabbi.
“I’m Officer John Fosket of the Helena Police,” he said. “This is Miky, our security dog. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
Miky, pronounced Mikey, is in a Diaspora of his own. He was born in an animal shelter in Holland and shipped as a puppy to Israel, where he was trained by the Israeli Defense Forces to sniff out explosives. Then one day, Miky got a plane ticket to America. Rather than spend the standard $20,000 on a bomb dog, the Helena Police Department had shopped around and discovered that it could import a surplus bomb dog from the Israeli forces for the price of the flight. So Miky came to his new home in Helena, to join the police force.
The problem, the officer explained, was that Miky had been trained entirely in Hebrew.
When Officer Fosket got Miky, he was handed a list of a dozen Hebrew commands and expressions, like “Hi’ sha’ er” (stay!), Ch’pess (search!), and “Kelev tov” (good doggy). He made flashcards and tried practicing with Miky. But poor Miky didn’t respond.
Officer Fosket (who is not Jewish) suspected he wasn’t pronouncing the words properly. He tried a Hebrew instructional audio-book from the local library, but no luck. The dog didn’t always understand what he was being ordered to do. Or maybe Miky was just using his owner’s bad pronunciation as an excuse to ignore him. Either way, the policeman needed a rabbi.
And now he had found one. They worked through a few pronunciations, and the rabbi, Chaim Bruk, is now on call to work with Miky and his owner as needed. Officer Fosket has since learned to pronounce the tricky Israeli “ch” sound, and Miky has become a new star on the police force. The two were even brought in by the Secret Service to work a recent presidential visit.
So all is well in the Jewish community here because the Hasidic rabbi is helping the Montana cop speak Hebrew to his dog. It is good news all around. The officer keeps the Capitol safe, and the Hebrew pooch is feeling more at home hearing his native tongue.
But the big winner is the rabbi, a recent arrival from Brooklyn who is working hard (against tough odds) to bring his Lubavitch movement to Montana. He has been scouring the state for anyone who can speak Hebrew, and is elated to have found a German shepherd he can talk to.
Eric A. Stern lives in Helena, Mont., and is senior counselor to Gov. Brian Schweitzer. The Beliefs column by Peter Steinfels will return on Dec. 19.
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True story:
Both my wife Katherine and one of our three dogs have diabetes and are on insulin.
Yesterday my dog Buckwheat started shaking and having a hypoglycemic reaction.
Katherine fed her these dried chicken chips from the pet store and the dog soon seemed better.
Than Katherine started getting shakey and having a low blood sugar reaction.
Buckwheat ran and came back with a chicken chip and dropped it in Katherine's lap.
I love dogs.
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One of the dogs I grew up with would remind us to take off our muddy boots after doing chores by blocking the door and patting the scrusher with a paw. Dad frequently di the same thing, pointing at our boots while standing in the door and tapping the scrusher with his boot.
They can be pretty smart sometimes.
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By Ellen Gibson
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; HE06
Dog genes that code for such signature pet traits as the furrowed skin of the Shar-Pei have been identified in a study that shows how centuries of breeding gave rise to 400 kinds of domestic dogs.
Researchers analyzed the genes of 275 dogs in 10 breeds to see how breeding practices have altered their DNA, the hereditary template in their cells. The results, reported last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that some conspicuous physical traits, or phenotypes, such as height and coat color, can be traced to particular genes of beagles, border collies, dachshunds and poodles, among other breeds.
"When you have a Chihuahua that's nine inches tall and a Great Dane that is seven feet tall, that can be traced back to IGF1," the gene that influences dog size, said Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was the paper's lead author.
Understanding how breeding leads to artificial selection of some doggy DNA can clarify the way genes give rise to appearance and behavior in other species, the researchers said. Such knowledge "holds considerable promise for providing unique insights into the genetic basis of heritable variation in humans," they wrote.
Dogs are "a great system for understanding how genetic variation influences how individuals in a population act differently, look different and have different susceptibilities to disease," Akey said in a telephone interview.
Domesticated dogs have been bred for more than 14,000 years, the report said. The strict form of selective breeding used today to turn out desired characteristics in the animals is a more recent phenomenon.
"Most dog breeds were formed in the last 500 to 1,000 years, a relatively short time frame in terms of evolution," Akey said.
Today there are more than 400 genetically distinct breeds of domestic dog, yet "relatively little progress has been made on systematically identifying which regions of the canine genome have been influenced by selective breeding during the natural history of the dog," the study said.
To pursue this, the researchers analyzed the full set of genes, called the genome, of 10 breeds of domesticated dogs to locate the most-differentiated regions of their genes. Of the 10, the most genetically distinct breeds were the German shepherd, Shar-Pei, beagle and greyhound.
The researchers were able to zero in on one specific gene, called HAS2, which causes deep wrinkling in the skin of the Shar-Pei. The breed is characterized by a sandy coat, furrowed skin and a wide muzzle, according to the American Kennel Club, the nation's largest purebred dog registry. The HAS2 finding was confirmed in two follow-up analyses.
This gene is of particular interest, Akey said, because HAS2 mutations in humans can lead to a skin condition called cutaneous mucinosis. This rare disease affects mostly young people and involves skin lesions and inflammation, according to the American Academy of Dermatology.
Previous analyses of canine genomics had linked four genes to physical traits including coat color and texture, leg length and size. The researchers in this study were able to confirm all four earlier findings, including variations in the genes IGF1 and FGF5 that account for the differences in dogs' size and limb length, respectively.
Akey and his team also identified 150 new gene locations, containing more than 1,600 genes, that have been altered by artificial selection. They plan further testing of these genes, he said. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
-- Bloomberg News
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011503145.html
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'Survival of the Cutest' Proves Darwin Right
ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2010) — Domestic dogs have followed their own evolutionary path, twisting Darwin's directive 'survival of the fittest' to their own needs -- and have proved him right in the process, according to a new study by biologists Chris Klingenberg, of The University of Manchester and Abby Drake, of the College of the Holy Cross in the US.
The study, published in The American Naturalist on January 20, 2010, compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, to which dogs belong along with cats, bears, weasels, civets and even seals and walruses.
It found that the skull shapes of domestic dogs varied as much as those of the whole order. It also showed that the extremes of diversity were farther apart in domestic dogs than in the rest of the order. This means, for instance, that a Collie has a skull shape that is more different from that of a Pekingese than the skull shape of the cat is from that of a walrus.
Dr Drake explains: "We usually think of evolution as a slow and gradual process, but the incredible amount of diversity in domestic dogs has originated through selective breeding in just the last few hundred years, and particularly after the modern purebred dog breeds were established in the last 150 years."
By contrast, the order Carnivora dates back at least 60 million years. The massive diversity in the shapes of the dogs' skulls emphatically proves that selection has a powerful role to play in evolution and the level of diversity that separates species and even families can be generated within a single species, in this case in dogs.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100120093525.htm
Much of the diversity of domestic dog skulls is outside the range of variation in the Carnivora, and thus represents skull shapes that are entirely novel.
Dr Klingenberg adds: "Domestic dogs are boldly going where no self respecting carnivore ever has gone before.
"Domestic dogs don't live in the wild so they don't have to run after things and kill them -- their food comes out of a tin and the toughest thing they'll ever have to chew is their owner's slippers. So they can get away with a lot of variation that would affect functions such as breathing and chewing and would therefore lead to their extinction.
"Natural selection has been relaxed and replaced with artificial selection for various shapes that breeders favour."
Domestic dogs are a model species for studying longer term natural selection. Darwin studied them, as well as pigeons and other domesticated species.
Drake and Klingenberg compared the amazing amount of diversity in dogs to the entire order Carnivora. They measured the positions of 50 recognizable points on the skulls of dogs and their 'cousins' from the rest of the order Carnivora, and analyzed shape variation with newly developed methods.
The team divided the dog breeds into categories according to function, such as hunting, herding, guarding and companion dogs. They found the companion (or pet) dogs were more variable than all the other categories put together.
According to Drake, "Dogs are bred for their looks not for doing a job so there is more scope for outlandish variations, which are then able to survive and reproduce."
Dr Klingenberg concludes: "I think this example of head shape is characteristic of many others and is showing it so clearly, showing what happens when you consistently and over time apply selection.
"This study illustrates the power of Darwinian selection with so much variation produced in such a short period of time. The evidence is very strong."
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http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=pkPNa4DBFHI
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Rottweiler destroyed for mauling owner may have been helping her
By Brie Zeltner, The Plain Dealer
May 18, 2010, 5:57PM
Courtesy Baker familyCarolyn Baker CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- A Rottweiler destroyed for mauling its 63-year-old owner in Cleveland Heights in February, may have been trying to help drag the woman to safety, after all.
Carolyn Baker collapsed in her driveway after a heart attack, Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller said Tuesday. The ailing woman had gone outside in only a nightgown to bring her 140-pound dog, Zeus, into the house.
The death was caused by a natural collapse, Miller said. "The dog was trying to help her, really. There were very few actual dog bites, it was mostly [signs of] pawing," he said.
Baker's family had said they believed Zeus was a hero, and the wounds were part of the 9-year-old dog's devoted rescue attempts. The family did not return phone calls Tuesday.
Baker's underlying heart disease was the main cause of her death, Miller said. She had suffered a recent stroke and heart attack, according to her family.
Hypothermia also contributed to Baker's death, Miller said. She was outside for several hours before the dog barked enough to wake a neighbor. Zeus was confined at Pepperidge Kennels in Bedford after the incident.
Cleveland Heights Municipal Court ordered the dog be destroyed on April 2, deeming it vicious and dangerous to society.
That decision was based on testimony from police officers and a neighbor, the dog's behavior report from the kennel, and from an oral report from a pathologist, listing '"severe dog bites" as contributing to her death.
While Miller said the description was accurate, he also said that the injuries the dog caused looked a lot worse than they actually were.
"It's our theory that she went down for a natural reason and then the dog was kind of tugging on her and some bleeding occurred that by itself may not have been fatal," Miller said.
Dr. Krista Pekarski, who completed the autopsy and gave the report, was not available for comment.
Cpt. Ron Salcer said the dog was deemed vicious based on the severity of Baker's wounds and because the dog regurgitated part of the woman's bra about a week after it was impounded.
"[It] shows that he was very aggressive if he would bite and chew to the point that he would take off her brassiere and swallow it," Salcer said.
The Baker family was notified of the court hearing where Zeus' fate was decided, but did not attend, said police Chief Martin Lentz.
Baker, who had suffered two strokes in the past 15 years, could move only slowly and with difficulty, her son Rinaldo said at the time of her death.
She did not usually bring the dog inside on her own and the family did not know she had left the house that night.
Baker's husband, Ricardo, found Carolyn Baker about 3 a.m. on Feb. 7. Depressions and blood in the snow marked a trail from the garage, where Zeus was being kept, to the back door, where she was found.
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By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
BATTLE GROUND, Wash.—Sue Foster knew what she needed to do when her border collie, Taff, was expelled from puppy school for herding the black Labs into a corner.
She rented some sheep.
Then she bought another border collie and rented some grazing land. Then she bought some sheep of her own. And a third border collie. Now, like the old lady who swallowed the fly, Ms. Foster keeps a llama to chase off the coyotes that threaten the lambs that go to market to finance the sheep that entertain her dogs.
Once upon a time, Americans got dogs for their sheep. Now they get sheep for their dogs. "I never dreamed it would go this far," says Ms. Foster, 56 years old.
Border collies, first bred along the frontier between England and Scotland, are compulsive herders, with instincts so intense they sometimes search for livestock behind the television when sheep appear on screen, says Geri Byrne, owner of the Border Collie Training Center, in Tulelake, Calif. Left unoccupied, they'll dig up the garden, chew up the doggie bed or persecute the cat.
Herding experts—yes, there is such a thing—say it's increasingly common for people who get border collies as pets to wind up renting or buying sheep just to keep their dogs busy. "It's something that's snowballing all the time," says Jack Knox, a Scottish-born shepherd who travels the U.S. giving herding clinics.
Each day, an average of 18 dogs visit Fido's Farm outside Olympia, Wash., their owners paying $15 per dog to practice on the farm's 200-head flock of sheep. Herding revenue at the farm is up 60% over the past five years, says owner Chris Soderstrom, who bought the farm in 2004.
"We get many people sent down here from the dog park in Seattle," says Ms. Soderstrom, 63 years old. "They need to get their dog a job." Newcomers get a 30-minute herding evaluation, to weed out biters and ovinophobes. One crucial test: Does the dog instinctively know it should circle around the sheep, not charge into the center of the flock?
Ms. Soderstrom runs the sheep-rental operation on the honor system. Owners sign in, noting how many dogs they brought. A map on the wall of a shed shows where flocks can be found that day—perhaps grazing in the clover field or the east lambing pasture.
Bob Hickman, a 69-year-old retired Army officer, is a regular at Fido's Farm. Mr. Hickman drove a Volvo station wagon and was living in Tacoma when he got his first border collie. Now he has four border collies, a house in the country and a 23-foot camper trailer he uses to transport his dogs to herding competitions.
"I try to come early to beat the crowd," he said during a recent visit to Fido's.
With that many dogs, his sheep-rental bills were getting so high that he cut a deal with Ms. Soderstrom to swap fence-building, deworming and other work for time with the flock.
Mr. Hickman trains his dogs at a variety of sheep-rental outfits. He doesn't want his dogs getting too accustomed to particular sheep. Sheep that spend too much time being herded become "dog-broke," nice for novices but boring for a more experienced dog and owner who want the challenge of wilder stock.
When faced with the reality that herding is deep in their dogs' DNA, many owners of border collies wind up on a farm, renting -- or buying -- their dogs some sheep. WSJ's Michael M. Phillips reports.
.Mr. Hickman likens herding to his old hobby, golf. Both are addictive, he says. And he wouldn't just play the same course over and over. "You get very good at that course, but if you leave that course you might not be able to handle it," he says.
Border collies, usually svelte, black-and-white dogs with pointed muzzles, control sheep with a relentless stare.
Using whistles and voice commands—"come by" for a clockwise run and "away to me" for counterclockwise—Mr. Hickman typically sends Mojo, his best herder, on a long, fast sweep to the far side of the sheep. The dog then turns back and approaches the flock in a crouch, head down and tail low, dropping to her belly if the sheep get too frightened. Gradually, she pushes the sheep back to Mr. Hickman.
A well-trained dog such as Mojo can split a few sheep off from the flock, drive them through gates and corral them into pens. A novice will send them fleeing in all directions, or even grab a mouthful of wool. When the work is done, Mr. Hickman quietly releases Mojo with the traditional command: "That'll do."
At sheepdog trials, handlers compete for cash and glory. The dogs have simpler needs.
"You don't have to treat the dogs with food," says Ms. Foster, 56, an expatriate Briton. "Their reward is the sheep." When Dot, her youngest dog, misbehaves by running straight into the flock, Ms. Foster penalizes her by standing between dog and sheep.
"They're my sheep—not hers," Ms. Foster explains.
Border collie
.Ms. Foster and her friend Karen Combs, whom she met outside of a PetSmart store, now own 48 sheep between them. They pay $500 a year to rent seven acres of grazing land, selling a few lambs to help defray the cost of feed and rent.
Ms. Combs, 64, owns a border collie-Australian shepherd mix and five border collies, one of which, Tex, she says suffered a nervous breakdown at six months of age. He was being drilled on challenging maneuvers and simply shut down, refusing to leave his handler's side. "He lost his confidence," Ms. Combs says. It took months for him to recover his will to herd.
More common are physical injuries, from unseen holes or collisions with sheep. Lisa Piccioni, an Oregon veterinarian certified in animal chiropractic, travels to sheepdog trials and clinics, adjusting canine spines as she goes.
"They're going to blow through the pain and not stop for it," she says.
Border collies appear willing to herd until they drop. In fact, they never appear to grow bored of organizing sheep. If they do, for an extra $5 dogs at Fido's Farm can also herd ducks.
Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com
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http://vimeo.com/2556048
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http://dogsinthenews.com/stories/070301a.php
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/04/war_dog
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/12/war_dog_ii
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BD, Great story. Amazing dog trainers, not just dogs. I've never been able to get the canine to wear the goggles much less jump from the plane. :-)
(http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/images/wardog2_0.jpg)
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8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-)
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http://wolfpark.org/
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http://tithenai.tumblr.com/post/3215186237/two-churches-located-across-the-street-from-each-other
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http://www.wimp.com/sheeplight/
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By MARK DERR
Ross MacDonald
Chauvet Cave in southern France houses the oldest representational paintings ever discovered. Created some 32,000 years ago, the 400-plus images of large grazing animals and the predators who hunted them form a multi-chambered Paleolithic bestiary. Many scholars believe that these paintings mark the emergence of a recognizably modern human consciousness. We feel that we know their creators, even though they are from a time and place as alien as another planet.
Dog historian Mark Derr discusses the story of how man's best friend came to be and how new scientific findings are changing our preconceived notions of the domesticated dog. He speaks with WSJ's Christina Tsuei.
What most intrigues many people about the cave, however, is not the artwork but a set of markings at once more human and more mysterious: the bare footprints of an 8- to 10-year-old torch-bearing boy left in the mud of a back chamber some 26,000 years ago—and, alongside one of them, the paw print of his traveling companion, variously identified as a wolf or a large dog.
Attributing that paw print to a dog or even to a socialized wolf has been controversial since it was first proposed a decade ago. It would push back by some 12,000 years the oldest dog on record. More than that: Along with a cascade of other new scientific findings, it could totally rewrite the story of man and dog and what they mean to each other.
For decades, the story told by science has been that today's dogs are the offspring of scavenger wolves who wandered into the villages established by early humans at the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago. This view emphasizes simple biological drive—to feed on human garbage, the scavenging wolf had to behave in a docile fashion toward humans. And—being human—we responded in kind, seeking out dogs for their obsequiousness and unconditional devotion.
As the story goes, these tame wolves bred with other tame wolves and became juvenilized. Think of them as wolves-lite, diminished in strength, stamina and brains. They resembled young wolves, with piebald coats, floppy ears and shorter, weaker jaws. Pleading whiners, they drowned their human marks in slavish devotion and unconditional love. Along the way, they lost their ability to kill and consume their prey.
But it was never clear, in this old account, just how we got from the scavenging wolf to the remarkable spectrum of dogs who have existed over time, from fell beasts trained to terrorize and kill people to creatures so timid that they flee their own shadows. The standard explanation was that once the dump-diver became a dog, humans took charge of its evolution through selective breeding, choosing those with desired traits and culling those who came up short.
This account is now falling apart in the face of new genetic analyses and recently discovered fossils. The emerging story sees humans and proto-dogs evolving together: We chose them, to be sure, but they chose us too, and our shared characteristics may well account for our seemingly unshakable mutual intimacy.
Dogs and humans are social beings who depend on cooperation for their survival and have an uncanny ability to understand each other in order to work together. Both wolves and humans brought unique, complementary talents to a relationship that was based not on subservience and intimidation but on mutual respect.
It seems that wolves and humans met on the trail of the large grazing animals that they both hunted, and the most social members of both species gravitated toward each other. Several scholars have even suggested that humans learned to hunt from wolves. At the least, camps with wolf sentinels had a competitive advantage over those without. And people whose socialized wolves would carry packs had an even greater advantage, since they could transport more supplies. Wolves benefited as well by gaining some relief from pup rearing, protection for themselves and their offspring, and a steadier food supply.
The relationship between dogs and humans has been so mutually beneficial and enduring that some scholars have suggested that we—dog and human—influenced each other's evolution.
The Chauvet Cave "dogwolf"—the term I use for a doglike, or highly socialized, wolf who kept company with humans—is controversial, but it cannot easily be dismissed. Over the past three years, it has been grouped convincingly with a number of similar animals that have been identified in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and the Altai Mountains in Southern Siberia, dating from 33,000 to 16,000 years ago.
Identification of these early dogs, combined with recent genetic evidence and a growing understanding of animals not as stimulus-response machines but as sentient beings, has broken the consensus model of dog domestication—leaving intact little more than the recognition of the grey wolf, Canis lupus, as progenitor of the dog. Everything else, it seems, is up for grabs.
According to the old view, the dog arose around 15,000 years ago in the Middle East. (Or in China, south of the Yangtze River, an alternate possible origin point added in the last decade in an attempt to reconcile archaeological evidence with emerging DNA evidence.)
The first major challenge to the consensus came in 1997, when an international team of biologists published a paper in the journal Science placing the origin of the dog as early as 135,000 years ago. Their date was based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on to offspring through females and is believed to change little from generation to generation; it allows scientists to calculate the time when populations or species separated genetically. This analysis suggested that wolves could have become dogs wherever in Eurasia they associated closely with early humans, and that even after the split was made, dogs and wolves continued to interbreed.
In short, because of their natural affinities, wherever and whenever wolves and humans met on the trail, some of them began to keep company. Often, when socialized wolves died, there were no others immediately available to replace them. But sometimes several socialized wolves would mate or a socialized female would mate with a "wild" wolf and then have her litter near the human camp. The pups would stay or go, according to their natures. This kind of arrangement could have continued for a considerable period. Any number of them could ultimately have produced dogwolves or dogs. Most of those lines would have vanished over time.
The DNA evidence remained controversial for years, even as most major studies placed the genetic separation of wolf and dog at earlier dates than those favored by archaeologists. Hard proof was slow to appear. The Chauvet Cave paw print once provided the only physical evidence for the existence of dogs before 15,000 years ago—and it was, at best, an indirect piece of support.
Then in 2008, Mietje Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science and the leader of an international team of scientists, re-examined fossil material excavated from Goyet Cave in Belgium in the late 19th century and announced the identification of a 31,700-year-old dog, a large and powerful animal who ate reindeer, musk oxen and horses. The dogwolf from Goyet Cave was a creature of the Aurignacian culture that had produced the art in Chauvet Cave.
Last July, another international team identified the remains of a 33,000-year-old "incipient dog" from the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. This month, Ms. Germonpré confirmed another find, this one in the Czech Republic, of the remains of a 26,000- to 27,000-year-old dog that had been buried with a bone in its mouth—perhaps to fuel it as it accompanied its human companion to the afterlife.
While the old consensus model held that the first dogs were small, these and other recently identified early dogs are large animals, often with shorter noses and broader faces than today's wolves. These early dogs appear in the camps of hunters of horses, reindeer, mammoths and other big game. From all appearances, they were pack animals, guards, hunters and companions. They are perhaps best viewed as the offspring of highly socialized wolves who had begun breeding in or near human camps.
Our view of domestication as a process has also begun to change, with recent research showing that, in dogs, alterations in only a small number of genes can have large effects in terms of size, shape and behavior. Far from being a product of the process of domestication, the mutations that separated early dogs from wolves may have arisen naturally in one or more small populations; the mutations were then perpetuated by humans through directed breeding. Geneticists have identified, for instance, a mutation in a single gene that appears to be responsible for smallness in dogs, and they have shown that the gene itself probably came from Middle Eastern wolves.
All of this suggests that it was common for highly socialized wolves and people to form alliances. It also leads logically to the conclusion that the first dogs were born on the move with bands of hunter-gatherers—not around semi-permanent pre-agricultural settlements. This may explain why it has proven so difficult to identify a time and place of domestication.
Taken together, these recent discoveries have led some scientists to conclude that the dog became an evolutionary inevitability as soon as humans met wolves. Highly social wolves and highly social humans started walking, playing and hunting together and never stopped. The dog is literally the wolf who stayed, who traded wolf society for human society.
Humans did wield a significant influence over dogs, of course, by using breeding to perpetuate mutations affecting their shape, size and physical abilities. Recent studies suggest that the dog has unique abilities among animals to follow human directions and that its capacity for understanding words can approach that of a two-year-old child. To various degrees, humans appear to have concentrated those and other characteristics and traits through selective breeding.
Since the advent of scientific breeding in the late 18th century, humans have altered the look and temperament of the dog more than they had over thousands of preceding years. A team of gene-sequencers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that the dog lost 4% of its genetic diversity during its initial separation from the wolf. Much greater losses have occurred as a result of modern breed formation, one result of which is the more than 400 inheritable diseases to which purebreds are uniquely vulnerable.
Recent genetic evidence has confirmed that certain basic types—pariah dogs, sight hounds, mastiffs, spitz-type dogs and small dogs—arose very early in the transformation of wolf to dog. These dogs adapted to their homelands and often had special talents as hunters, guards and eventually herders. These characteristics were often perpetuated over time.
Scientific breeders believed they could improve on nature by consolidating several similar types into one breed or isolating a few prize specimens from a larger population. In both cases, they relied on inbreeding to create and perpetuate the look and talents they wanted. With the advent of kennel clubs in the mid-19th century, the pace of breed creation picked up.
Breeders began to create dogs to fit the needs of the wealthy—from sporting dogs that could point and retrieve fowl, to little puppy-like lap dogs. The dog proved to be a wonderful animal for testing the skill of breeders, since it could be stretched in size from two to 200 pounds.
Purebred dogs were expensive commodities until after World War II, when they became symbols of arrival in the middle class. Increased demand led to increased breeding, often in puppy mills. The resulting dogs had health and behavior problems from bad breeding and the poor care of pregnant females and newborn puppies.
In some cases, the traits that breeders desire are inherited along with unwanted, debilitating conditions—such as when blindness and epilepsy accompany particular coat styles and eye colors. In many regards, the original, naturally occurring breeds were healthier and better at their appointed tasks than their purebred heirs.
But this is just the most recent chapter of a long tale. The tableau in the mud of Chauvet Cave is a stark reminder that dogs and humans have traveled together for tens of thousands of years, from ancient hunting camps to farms, ranches cities and suburbs—from the tropics to the poles. The relationship has endured not because dogs are juvenilized wolves but because they are dogs—our faithful companions.
—Mr. Derr's most recent book is "How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends."
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My martial arts teacher has a german police dog. This thing is the smartest dog I've ever seen.
The other day, his baby started crying upstairs. He told me he was tired and didn't immediately get up to go see what was wrong. After a minute or so, his dog walked up to him with the babies bottle in his mouth and dropped in on him.
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Impressive!
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WOOF,
http://earthsky.org/biodiversity/ancient-dog-skull-suggests-weve-lived-with-dogs-for-33000-years
Ancient dog skull suggests we’ve lived with dogs for 33,000 years
Image Credit: Nikolai D. Ovodov
A dog skull unearthed in a Siberian cave suggests that modern dogs may be descended from multiple ancestors.
A dog skull unearthed in a Siberian cave presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and suggests modern dogs may be descended from multiple ancestors.
A St. Bernard sure does look different from a dachshund ... and new evidence suggests that today's dogs might have originated from more than one ancient ancestor, contrary to what some DNA evidence previously has indicated. Photo credit: Soggydan
The ancient skull, preserved in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia for 33,000 years, presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with equally ancient dog remains from a cave in Belgium, indicates that domestication of dogs may have occurred repeatedly in different geographic locations rather than with a single domestication event.
Wild dogs didn’t go extinct in East Africa after all
In other words, today’s dogs might have originated from more than one ancient ancestor, contrary to what some DNA evidence previously has indicated.
'wolves have long thin snouts and their teeth are not crowded,' said Hodgins. Photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar
Greg Hodgins, a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory is co-author of the study that reported the find. He said:
Both the Belgian find and the Siberian find are domesticated species based on morphological characteristics. Essentially, wolves have long thin snouts and their teeth are not crowded, and domestication results in this shortening of the snout and widening of the jaws and crowding of the teeth.
The Altai Mountain skull is extraordinarily well preserved, said Hodgins, enabling scientists to make multiple measurements of the skull, teeth and mandibles that might not be possible on less well-preserved remains. Hodgins said:
The argument that it is domesticated is pretty solid. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t appear to be an ancestor of modern dogs.
The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the Siberian skull. They determined that the Siberian skull predates the last great ice age, which occurred between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago. Because the ice sheets severely disrupted life for humans and animals during this time, Hodgins believes neither the Belgian nor the Siberian lineages survived the severe conditions.
Image Credit: Nikolai D. Ovodov
However, the two skulls indicate that the domestication of dogs by humans occurred repeatedly throughout early human history at different geographical locations, which could mean that modern dogs have multiple ancestors rather than a single common ancestor. Hodgins said:
Typically we think of domestication as being cows, sheep and goats, things that produce food through meat or secondary agricultural products such as milk, cheese and wool and things like that.
Those are different relationships than humans may have with dogs. The dogs are not necessarily providing products or meat. They are probably providing protection, companionship and perhaps helping on the hunt. And it’s really interesting that this appears to have happened first out of all human relationships with animals.
Bottom line: A dog skull, preserved in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia for 33,000 years, presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with equally ancient dog remains from a cave in Belgium, indicates that domestication of dogs may have occurred repeatedly in different geographic locations rather than with a single domestication event.
P.C.
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In northern wisconsin a group of us just finished up with a wolf tracking intensive. basically two groups found usually 2 different wolf packs to follow on snow trails crossing roads and followed them for the day. In the evening we would share the events and observations of the time in the field. A kill site was found of a white tailed deer by one wolf later joined by 2 others. It was amazing this wolf chased in full tilt for 2 miles through thick trees, shrubs, galloping and bounding. At one point on this wolf's trail one could see there was a dead old growth pine laying down the wolf was approaching perpendicular at full speed. The wolf couldn't see over it, and chose to jump over this huge trunk leaping about 6 yards in distance. The danger at such high speeds of injury but full commitment to the hunt was impressive. It seemed the deer was taken by surprise as the deer was not running away at first, and when grabbed there was immediately huge patches of skin and soon blood and body rollovers in struggle.
The kill site brought in large amounts of scavengers. Fishers(large weasel), ravens, birds, red squirrels, red foxes, eagles.
Much of the week and when scouting for location of the packs is driving on roads and looking for the wolves tracks, urine or scat markings, along or crossing the roads.
It was quite fun to follow a trail that looked like one wolf in knee deep snow, then as they approached hunting areas one trail would split into 2 then 3 until sometimes 5-7 animals would be evident. Witnessing their coordinated movement and teamwork in the snow.
If all goes well, a few friends and I will be camping the next 3 days and following a wolf trail in snow to see what we see.
I am especially fascinated by the subject of the long time span of the human-wolf-dog relationship. Any interesting reading someone can point me to would great.
tim
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http://www.westminsterkennelclub.org/2012/results/bis/index.html
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Charlie "dog"?
This karate expert chimp was on Ripley's last night. Kind of cool.
They show him breaking boards with 360 degree spinning back kicks!
These animals are incredibly strong. I recall it was estimated a 150 chimp could do the equivalent of a 600 pound deadlift.
Needless to add about the poor laday whose face was literally ripped off a few year back:
http://www.thekaratechimp.com/resume.htm
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http://www.wmur.com/video/31030457/detail.html?Source=Taboola
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June 5, 2012, 12:38 p.m. ET
The Boxer and His Best Friend
As Manny Pacquiao Trains for Saturday's Fight, His Jack Russell Terrier Sticks by His Side.
By BEN COHEN
Boxing champion Manny Pacquiao's secret weapon may be a four-legged-friend. Every champion boxer has a trainer and promoter in his corner. But the prizefighter Manny Pacquiao also has someone else: a Jack Russell Terrier named Pacman.
LOS ANGELES—One morning last month, as Manny Pacquiao ran laps around a track at the University of Southern California, his dog, Pacman, yelped from the bleachers in frustration, his bone-shaped name tag jingling with every leap.
Pacman, the Jack Russell terrier, has been Manny Pacquiao's companion and training partner for four years.
"Sorry, Pacman," said his handler, Noel Lautengco. "You cannot run today."
As Pacquiao, the champion boxer, prepares for Saturday's welterweight bout against Timothy Bradley, the most enthusiasm evident from any member of his entourage came from the smallest one: his Jack Russell terrier.
The dog, who bears his owner's nickname, wasn't allowed off his leash to run with his master that day, as he normally does on streets and trails around Los Angeles. As the boxer did sit-ups and push-ups on a mat, the dog pulled at the leash. And when Pacquiao was finished, he attacked the boxer with his own signature combination of comical jumping and crazy licking.
"He's part of my team," said Pacquiao, the World Boxing Organization welterweight champion, who hasn't lost a fight since Pacman came into his life. "He's a special dog."
Pacman (the dog) lives in Los Angeles full time, where Pacquiao often trains. He typically travels to the Philippines when his owner works out there and joins him in Las Vegas for his fights, where he stays at the pet-friendly Mandalay Bay. He used to sleep with Pacquiao before the boxer realized he was allergic to the dog's hair.
On the morning jogs before Pacquiao's fights, Pacman is often by the boxer's side. Pacman has nearly passed out from climbing the hills in Baguio City and scurried after coyotes while sprinting ahead of Pacquiao in their frequent jogs up to the Hollywood sign.
This training camp hasn't been an ideal one for the pooch, however. Since his last fight, a majority decision over Juan Manuel Marquez in November, Pacquiao says he has eliminated distractions like gambling and drinking while sharpening his focus with daily Bible studies. Pacquiao hadn't trained since then, and neither had Pacman.
"I kind of feel like he's now the Woody in 'Toy Story,'" said Brian Livingston, a marathoner who paces Pacquiao. "He's become part of the menagerie."
The Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather boxing superfight may never happen, but Pacquiao says he ready and any stalling is from Mayweather's side. The boxer sat with WSJ's Lee Hawkins ahead of his fight against Timothy Bradley, this is a clip from that longer interview.
Before previous fights, Pacman wasn't just a mascot. He drove the fighter to train harder than ever by running ahead of the pack. "Nobody could keep up with that dog," said Freddie Roach, Pacquiao's trainer.
But this time, instead of darting around the Philippines in April, he stayed home and acquired an affinity for chicken kebabs and beef jerky. He still runs with Pacquiao, and his fitness has improved over the last month, but Pacman no longer pushes his owner's endurance. "He's getting old. He's become fat," Pacquiao said.
"Is he going to make weight?" asked Fred Sternburg, Pacquiao's media representative.
"This time," Pacquiao said, "he's overweight."
Other world-class fighters have embraced pets over the years. Boxing aficionados marvel about the time Mike Tyson filled a hotel room with pigeons. Floyd Patterson went on 4 a.m. runs with two German shepherds named Charlie Brown and Whitey. And for the Rumble in the Jungle with Muhammad Ali, George Foreman brought to Africa his own German Shepherd as a reliable running companion. He said his pet was his only friend after he lost and called his dogs "the best thing that's ever happened to me."
"I would not have been able to make it in my second career without my dogs," said Foreman, who now owns 11 German shepherds. "If you don't have a good dog, it's going to be the most lonesome training camp you'll ever have."
'He's part of my team,' said Pacquiao, the World Boxing Organization welterweight champion, who hasn't lost a fight since Pacman came into his life.
There are almost as many accounts of Pacman joining Team Pacquiao as there are legends about Pacquiao. No one can remember exactly when Pacman arrived—sometime in 2008, around Pacquiao's wins over David Diaz and Oscar De La Hoya—but it's certain the kinship started with Archie Banas, a friend who cooks for Pacquiao.
Banas picked Pacman, then named Amboy, from a litter of Jack Russell terriers. Banas said the puppies were direct descendants of Max, who played Milo in the 1994 film "The Mask." The late Jack Russell terrier's former owner, Joe McCarter, could not be sure about Pacman's lineage but said this was possible. Banas's wife wouldn't let him keep Amboy, so he gave the dog to Buboy Fernandez, Pacquiao's assistant trainer. Fernandez promptly renamed him Leonard. "He was sleeping on Buboy's tummy for three days," Banas recalled.
But then Pacquiao saw Leonard on a morning run and fell in love at first sight. There is some dispute over how the dog got his new name. Fernandez says he gave it to him; Pacquiao says he came up with the name himself.
Lautengco is Pacman's dog-sitter during camps. He takes temporary residence in a Hollywood motel—Pacman wakes him at 5 a.m. in a bed with a pink spread—and Lautengco sometimes finds unsavory presents waiting for him on his bath towel. "The hotel management is mad at him," he said. When he was a teething puppy, Lautengco says, Pacman scratched and clawed through three couches that Pacquiao replaced.
Pacquiao has his own history with canines. He adored his childhood dog until his estranged father reportedly cooked and ate him. Pacquiao declined to comment on this.
He now maintains Pacman as part of an entourage that the journalist Gary Andrew Poole wrote in his Pacquiao biography "could easily be called the most ridiculous in sports history." Livingston, the long-distance runner, met Pacquiao when they collided several years ago in Griffith Park, around the time Pacquiao's associates were urging him to find a pacesetter without a wagging tail. And yet Pacman hasn't disappeared since then.
"Manny likes to have this aura around him, and he's created this patchwork of people who are essentially a reflection of him," Livingston said. "Everybody serves a purpose. The dog is an extension of that."
Lautengco recently drove Pacman to USC as the sun was rising. Pacman soon learned he wouldn't be running with Pacquiao's posse and was so fussy that Lautengco took him outside the stadium to calm down.
"When I bring him to the track, he forgets me," Lautengco said. "His fun is to run with Manny."
Lautengco finally gave in and let his son take Pacman for a lap. Before long, they were galloping right behind Pacquiao. "He keeps up with him in the mountains and everything," said Kevin Hoskins, one of Pacquiao's sparring partners. "He runs better than me."
By the time Lautengco guided Pacman to Pacquiao—not until the dog sipped bottled water from Lautengco's cupped hands—the boxer was on a yoga mat strengthening his core. Pacman sat behind Pacquiao as he did them. When Pacquiao stood up and leaned over, Pacman jumped to his waist.
It was 8 a.m. and Pacman hadn't been let off his leash all morning. "Sometimes he chases squirrels," Pacquiao said.
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/momma-squirrel-breaks-bad.htm
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmGKtby43Oc&feature=related
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE-3aggrAHI
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Welcome Back, Wolves. Staying for Dinner?
By MATT RIDLEY..
The return of the wolf is one of the unexpected ecological bonuses of the modern era. So numerous are wolves that this fall Wisconsin and Wyoming have joined Idaho and Montana in opening wolf-hunting seasons for the first time in years. Minnesota follows suit next month; Michigan may do so next year. The reintroduced wolves of Yellowstone National Park have expanded to meet the expanding packs of Canada and northern Montana.
Is the return of predators a good thing? Depends on the meaning of 'good.
The same is happening in Europe. Wolf populations are rising in Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe, while in recent years wolves have recolonized France, Germany, Sweden and Norway, and have even been seen in Belgium and the Netherlands. Nor are wolves the only "apex predators" to boom in this way. In the U.S., bears and mountain lions are spreading, to joggers' dismay. Coyotes are reappearing even within cities like Chicago and Denver.
The effect of top predators on lesser predators, like foxes, raccoons and skunks, not to mention domestic cats, can be devastating. Wolves may kill deer and cows, but they also kill these smaller "mesopredators"—middle-of-the-food-chain carnivores. That may be good news for other creatures, especially birds. The very presence of large predators can intimidate the mesopredators: In the Bahamas, large groupers cause small ones to spend more time in hiding, allowing smaller reef fish to thrive.
In 1988 ecologists coined the term "mesopredator release" for the theory that the original disappearance of apex predators at the hand of human beings had caused a population boom in small opportunistic predators and omnivores. In Africa, for instance, baboons have boomed where leopards have been exterminated, to the detriment of antelopes as well as crops. In one marine case, overharvesting of Atlantic sharks caused an expansion in the number of rays, which in turn hurt the stocks of scallops.
Now, as exemplified by the wolf, top predators are returning little by little. This is due to legal protection and the increasing retreat of people to cities and suburbs (teenagers who play computer games would once have staked out wolf kills to protect the family's herd).
So is the return of top predators now suppressing rather than releasing mesopredators?
In parts of Europe, introduced American mink have harmed birds, water voles and other waterside wildlife. But now newly abundant predators of mink, once devastated by DDT, have caused mink populations to fall. In Finland sea eagles are hunting mink; in Britain otters are.
Complicating the picture, some species can be either apex predators or mesopredators. In Yellowstone National Park, coyotes are mesopredators that appear to have declined at the paws of wolves, which is good news for rodents and other creatures. But in suburbs the coyote is more like an apex predator, whose return lays waste the domestic cats that kill so many birds. Even in rural areas, the coyote is an efficient predator of foxes, skunks and badgers. So the arrival of coyotes in an area may be bad for rabbits but good for birds.
Likewise, raccoons are usually a classic mesopredator, but controlling their numbers in Florida to save turtle eggs from their depredations proved counterproductive, because egg-eating crabs then thrived.
Ecology is a complicated and unpredictable business. To test whether the revival of large predators is generally good news for ecosystems, Dr. Laura Prugh of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks is setting out to compare coyote, fox and lynx populations in an area with intensive wolf control, compared with nearby Denali National Park and Preserve, where wolf populations are intact. As she and her co-writers said in a recent paper, given what programs to control mesopredators cost, letting apex predators thrive may provide an "ecosystem service" by controlling them cheaply and more effectively.
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http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/67658-dogs-learn-language-differently-from-humans
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Can someone translate the Chinese here?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfQaPPKBYJk&NR=1&feature=endscreen
And is that an Akita playfighting with the lion?!?
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http://www.dogheirs.com/larne/posts/1880-faithful-dog-refuses-to-leave-his-owner-s-graveside-for-six-years
By Martha
September 12, 2012
Capitán stays faithfully on vigil by his owner's graveside. Photo credit: La Voz
For six years, a dog named Capitán has stayed by his owner's graveside in Villa Carlos Paz Cordoba, Argentina. Every day at 6pm, he lays by Miguel Guzmán's headstone, on faithful vigil.
The dog's remarkable story of loyalty began on March 24, 2006, when Miguel, who was Capitán's owner, passed away. As soon as Capitán realized Miguel was no longer at home, he left to search for him and miraculously managed to find Miguel's grave in the nearby cemetery. Since then, the dog has stayed by his deceased owner's side and refuses to return home.
Miguel had brought Capitán, a German Shepherd mix, home as a surprise for his son Damián in 2005. His wife Veronica told La Voz that when Capitán disappeared just after her husband’s death, she and her son searched for him, but were unable to find him. They thought he may have died or been adopted by another family.
But soon after, when Damien went to visit his father in the cemetery, there was Capitán! No one could explain how Capitán had discovered where Miguel was resting, but he had. The family had a joyful reunion but when they tried to bring Capitán home, he refused. Veronica and Miguel tried several times, but Capitán would not leave. He would sometimes follow them home for a short time, but then Capitán would always return to the cemetery.
The cemetery is now considered home for Capitán. According to cemetery director, Hector Baccega, the dog has earned the affection of precinct workers and cemetery caretakers, who make sure he is fed and kept up-to-date on his immunizations. At one point, Capitán had broken his front leg, so a vet was called over to give Capitán care.
Capitán will occassionally go to his old home to visit Veronica and Damien. However, Veronica said she has come to accept that Capitán does not want to stay home and that he wishes to stay close to his best friend. Damien, now 13, also recognizes Capitán is caring for his dad. Damien admits he had wanted to bring Capitán home to stay over the years, but knows the dog will want to return to his dad's side.
Hector Baccega said that Capitán walks with him through the cemetery every day, but when the early evening approaches, he goes to Miguel's tomb and lays down next to the headstone. Hector feels the amazing dog is sharing a valuable lesson with humans – to appreciate the memories of the dearly departed.
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Why Dogs Are Smarter Than Cats
A not-so-smart best friend? Experiments in language and cognition show Fido's (sporadic) brilliance.
By BRIAN HARE and VANESSA WOODS
With half as many neurons in their cerebral cortex as cats—and half the attitude, some would say—dogs are often taken to be the less intelligent domestic partner. While dogs drink out of the toilet, slavishly follow their master and need a chaperone to relieve themselves, cats hunt self-sufficiently and survey their empire with a regal gaze.
But cats betware-- Research in recent years has finally revealed the genius of dogs.
Like other language-trained animals—dolphins, parrots, bonobos—dogs can learn to respond to hundreds of spoken signals associated with different objects. What sets dogs apart is how they learn these words.
Cats can hold grudges and look like kings—but when it comes to memory, dogs get the pat on the head.
If you show a child a red block and a green block, and then ask for the chromium block, not the red block, most children will give you the green block, despite not knowing that the word "chromium" can refer to a shade of green. Children infer the name of the object. They know that you can't be referring to the red block.
In 2004, Juliane Kaminski from Britain's University of Portsmouth and her colleagues published the results of a similar experiment with a dog called Rico who knew the names of hundreds of objects.
Dr. Kaminski showed Rico an object that he had never seen before, along with seven other toys that he knew by name. Then she asked Rico to fetch a toy using a word that was new to him, like "Sigfried." Just like human tots with the word "chromium," Rico was immediately able to infer that "Sigfried" referred to the new toy. Since the report on Rico, several other dogs have also been shown to make inferences this way. Dogs are the only animals that have demonstrated this humanlike ability.
Based on the ability of cats to hold a grudge, you might think that they have better memories than dogs. Not so. Several years ago, Sylvain Fiset of Canada's University of Moncton and colleagues reported experiments in which a dog or cat watched while a researcher hid a reward in one of four boxes. After a delay, they were allowed to search for the treat. Cats started guessing after only one minute. But even after four minutes, dogs hadn't forgotten where they saw the food.
Still, dog owners should not be too smug. In 2010, Krista Macpherson and William Roberts of the University of Western Ontario published a study that tested navigational memory, in which dogs had to search for food in a maze with eight arms radiating out from a central position. The researchers then looked at rats previously given the same test. They beat dogs by a wide margin.
Even the dog's closest relative, the wolf, beat its cousin when food was placed on the opposite side of a fence, as shown in a 1982 study by Harry and Martha Frank of the University of Michigan. In 2001, Peter Pongrácz and colleagues from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary published a study with an important qualification to this earlier finding: When the experimenters showed dogs a human rounding the fence first, the dogs could solve the problem immediately.
This is the secret to the genius of dogs: It's when dogs join forces with us that they become special.
Nowhere is this clearer than when dogs are reading our gestures. Every dog owner has helped her dog find a lost ball or treat by pointing in the right direction. No other animal—not even our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees—can interpret our gestures as flexibly as dogs.
So are dogs smarter than cats? In a sense, but only if we cling to a linear scale of intelligence that places sea sponges at the bottom and humans at the top. Species are designed by nature to be good at different things.
And what might the genius of cats be? Possibly, that they just can't be bothered playing our silly games or giving us the satisfaction of discovering the extent of their intelligence.
—Dr. Hare is the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, and Ms. Woods is a research scientist at Duke University. This essay is adapted from their new book, "The Genius of Dogs," published by Dutton.
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http://www.dogheirs.com/dogheirs/posts/2744-disabled-veteran-asks-for-public-support-service-dog-faces-euthanasia-for-biting-woman-who-beat-him-with-metal-poles
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/sports/many-animal-lovers-now-see-american-kennel-club-as-an-outlier.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130210
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http://theoatmeal.com/comics/dog_paradox
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My favorite food was always prime rib too...though I rarely eat it these days....
http://news.yahoo.com/dogs-humans-evolved-together-study-suggests-190353779.html
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http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/news/canada/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com%2F2013%2F06%2F14%2Fbanff-motorcyclist-pursued-by-massive-grey-wolf-along-stretch-of-b-c-highway-takes-pictures
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http://www.indiandogs.com/
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Posted July 1, 2013 - 4:33pm Updated July 2, 2013 - 11:23am
Justices to consider Onion the dog's fate Wednesday
(http://www.reviewjournal.com/sites/default/files/field/image/8662716-2-150007.jpg)
COURTESY CHRISTOPHER SHAHAN
Jeremiah Eskew-Shahan is pictured with the family dog, Onion, in this undated family handout photo. The Lexus Project, an animal rights group based in New York, is trying to save Onion.
COURTESY CITY OF HENDERSON
Onion is housed at the Henderson Animal Care and Control Facility.
ONION HEARING
The 30-minute oral arguments on the fate of Onion will be at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Nevada Supreme Court in Carson City, 201 S. Carson St. But anyone interested in the legal debate can tune in and listen.
Oral arguments are streamed live on the Nevada Supreme Court website. The link to access the webcast will become active about five minutes before the arguments are scheduled to begin. The webcast is not archived, but a podcast of the arguments will be posted and archived on the webpage, usually by the end of the day of arguments.
By SEAN WHALEY
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL CAPITAL BUREAU
CARSON CITY — The Nevada Supreme Court often must decide matters of life and death, such as cases involving death row inmates.
Less common are such weighty matters involving the life of a dog.
That will be the case Wednesday when the full seven-member court considers the fate of a 6-year-old, 120-pound, tan and black mastiff mixed breed named Onion.
Henderson officials decided to euthanize Onion after he killed a 1-year-old boy in 2012. The Lexus Project, an animal rights group based in New York, is trying to save Onion and move him to a Colorado sanctuary.
Meanwhile, Onion awaits his fate as he remains in solitary confinement at the Henderson Animal Care and Control Facility.
Las Vegas animal rights advocate Gina Greisen, president of Nevada Voters for Animals, said she remains concerned that Onion has been kept in a cage for more than a year, without exercise or human interaction.
It could be several more months before the court rules on the case, she said.
Henderson city spokesman Bud Cranor said Onion is under constant care, supervised by trained professionals and overseen by a veterinarian who ensures he receives care and treatment required by law.
Greisen said city officials should have allowed the dog to go to a sanctuary rather than spend so much time and expense fighting the effort in court.
She said that she has seen owners appeal vicious dog decisions as far as District Court, but that a case going all the way to the state Supreme Court is rare.
The major legal issue in the case is whether Lexus Project president and co-founder Robin Mittasch has legal authority to act on Onion’s behalf though the project doesn’t own him.
A lower court ruled against the animal rights group, resulting in Lexus’ appeal. The state high court will hear oral arguments in the case and rule later.
The case has generated a lot of attention from the news media, particularly in Southern Nevada. But the dispute has not seen any legal involvement from other groups, either in favor of or in opposition to Onion’s fate.
And there is more than one canine fan on the court.
Chief Justice Kris Pickering has filed a voluntary disclosure indicating she donates to local and national humane societies and the Texas Border Collie Rescue, among other related groups.
Pickering said she disclosed the information should a party in the case wants to request that she recuse herself from the case. She said she has no bias in the matter.
Other justices are dog owners too.
“Some justices have dogs as their cherished pets, just as many other Nevadans do,” court spokesman Bill Gang said. “Their personal pet ownership, however, is not relevant to the legal issues involved in the case.”
HOW IT HAPPENED
The Henderson incident could not be more tragic.
According to court papers, on April 27, 2012, Jeremiah Eskew-Shahan was celebrating his birthday with his father, grandmother and other family members at their Henderson home.
Onion was celebrating a birthday too, and both received presents, including squeak toys for Onion, according to the appeal filed by attorneys for the Lexus Project.
Onion had become a family member as a puppy, serving as an emotional therapy dog to help Jeremiah’s grandmother, Elizabeth Keller, keep her spirits up while battling lung cancer.
Onion had been around Jeremiah all of his life and had never snapped or growled at the boy, the family said.
About 10 p.m., Keller was putting Jeremiah to bed but thought he wanted to say good night to Onion. Jeremiah tripped and fell onto Onion, who was resting in a dark room. Onion grabbed and shook Jeremiah.
The child was severely injured in the brief attack, including having the right side of his face torn from his forehead down to his chin. He died from his injuries.
An officer from Henderson Animal Care and Control arrived at the scene, and Keller signed a document giving ownership to the agency and allowing Onion to be euthanized as a vicious dog.
Keller, citing the chaos at the home when she signed the document, then asked the Lexus Project to get involved to try to save Onion’s life.
The Lexus Project created a trust for the benefit of Onion and sought a temporary restraining order in Clark County District Court to stop his death.
The efforts were rejected by District Judge Joanna Kishner in a ruling in 2012, but Onion’s future was put on hold pending the Supreme Court review.
The Nevada animal trust statute “permits any person having a demonstrated interest in the welfare of the animal beneficiary” to be appointed as trustee, the attorneys for Onion said in their appeal to the court.
Ownership is not required, they argue.
HENDERSON: PUBLIC SAFETY ISSUE
The Henderson city attorney’s office said in its response that the court does not even have jurisdiction over the dispute because Lexus is not an aggrieved party in the matter.
“Because Lexus has never, and cannot now establish any right in the dog, it cannot possibly demonstrate that its personal or property rights were adversely affected by any ruling made by the District Court,” the response said.
The Henderson officials’ response said the dog continued to show aggression when being examined by the city veterinarian.
Cranor said that although there are costs and time involved in continuing with the case rather than simply releasing the dog to Lexus, the overriding issue is public safety.
There is a concern that the dog could remain a public safety threat even if it was released to a sanctuary, he said.
MORE GRIEF PREDICTED
But Lexus general counsel and co-founder Richard Rosenthal said nothing can be gained by putting Onion to death.
“The death of a child is an absolute tragedy, but it was an accident, not an intentional attack,” he said.
Euthanizing Onion will only cause the family to grieve all over again, Rosenthal said.
“The family raised the dog from 4 or 5 weeks old. His death will only exacerbate their pain,” he said.
If there was the potential to place the dog with another family, then the decision by the city of Henderson might have merit, Rosenthal said.
But the plan for Onion is to let him live out his days with other animals, he said.
Contact Capital Bureau reporter Sean Whaley at swhaley@reviewjournal.com or 775-687-3900.
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http://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/the-tragedy-of-wolf-dogs
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http://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/the-tragedy-of-wolf-dogs
At a crime scene course I attended, I saw the photos taken of an adult female victim of three wolf hybrids. They killed and partially devoured her in front of her 10 year old son.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2jViqMnnK4&feature=player_embedded
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ah oh. One of my dogs is dalmation mix and some have thought the other half might be pointer. We just neutered him.....I wonder what he is thinking. :-o
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/family-dogs-take-on-wolf-pack-in-wrigley-n-w-t-1.2449967
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Dogs were the pets of hunters and cats were the pets of farmers:
http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-bones-offer-peek-history-cats-china-101105721.html
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I'll have to show that to my wife :lol:
Here's this about how foxes hunt in the snow http://www.edisproduction.de/2013/11/19/fox-hunting-under-snow-in-an-incredible-way/
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And we were worried about the children... Legal pot of course is sold in all forms of food now too. What could go wrong...
Dogs' pot poisoning soars as pets dig through trash, stash
http://www.sfchronicle.com/pets/article/Dogs-pot-poisoning-soars-as-pets-dig-through-5102991.php
Dr. Jill Chase examines Baby, a pug, at Ocean Beach Veterinary Clinic. Chase's Tibetan terrier was in a coma for three days after finding cannabis-infused butter in a neighbor's trash.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJlyMFCX9CA&feature=youtu.be
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I wonder what the owl was really "thinking". Friend or foe? I don't know.
If the pooch had been smaller :-o
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2468601/posts
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O15DXv3Vwg&sns=em
Hat tip to Frankie Liles.
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Dogs Helped Drive Mammoths To Their Graves, New Study Suggests
| By David Grimm
Posted: 06/01/2014 10:11 am EDT Updated: 06/01/2014 10:59 am EDT
Print Article
MAMMOTHS
It’s known as the mammoth cemetery for good reason. Along the banks of a Siberian river not far from the Arctic Ocean lie thousands of bones, most of them belonging to the giant, shaggy relatives of today’s elephants. A new study argues that such mysterious graveyards were not the results of a natural catastrophe, but rather the work of early human hunters—who may have had help from some of the world’s first dogs.
“This is the first time that someone’s gone out on a limb and suggested something different than what we thought before,” says Angela Perri, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and an expert on dog domestication. “But it’s still very speculative at this stage.”
Study author Pat Shipman first became interested in what she calls “mammoth megasites” in 2009. About 30 such spots have been unearthed in central Europe and North Asia, some with tens of thousands of bones packed tightly on top of each other across areas as small as 60 square meters. The massive tusks and femurs of mammoths jut out among the remains of wild horses, deer, foxes, and other animals. “They’re crazy sites,” says Shipman, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. “The sheer number of dead mammoths is astounding.” More than 160 of the tusked goliaths lie in the mammoth cemetery—a site known as Berelekh—alone.
How did they get there? Some scientists think it was an act of nature—perhaps a flood that swept dozens of animals to a particular spot, or an unlucky herd that fell through thin ice. But recent evidence has suggested that people may to be blame. Shipman says the mammoth megasites begin to appear about 44,000 years ago, just about the time that modern humans entered this part of the world. What’s more, archaeologists have found evidence of huts made of mammoth bones at some of these locations, as well as cuts and burn marks on the bones that could only have been made by people.
To get a clearer picture, Shipman combed through the literature on more than a dozen mammoth megasites, paying particular attention to the age and sex of the mammoths unearthed there. She then compared these demographics with those seen with the deaths of large numbers of elephants, the mammoth’s closest living relative. Natural disasters such as droughts kill the youngest and oldest elephants, but other sudden die-offs—such as a herd falling through ice or a cull of elephants to control their population—kill indiscriminately, leaving behind the carcasses of young and old, male and female. Elephant hunters, meanwhile, tend to kill each animal in a different place. “To my surprise, hardly anything matched these patterns,” Shipman says of the mammoth bones. What’s more, the dating on the bones indicated that they had been laid down over hundreds of years. That suggests that the animals were killed over and over in the same spot over many generations, she reports in Quaternary International. “There’s something that’s drawing them to that location.”
Shipman says the data point to a scenario in which humans killed the mammoths, but not in the way people do today. Instead of culling them or hunting them across vast plains, ancient peoples may have ambushed the creatures. The reason so many bones are found in the same location may be that these spots were ideal for such ambushes. Perhaps they were surrounded by thick brush, in which spear-hurling humans could hide, or maybe they lay along a commonly traveled migration route. Shipman also thinks the hunters may have had some help from dogs.
It’s still unclear exactly when or where dogs became domesticated, but some recent archaeological evidence suggests it may have happened around the same time and place as the mammoth megasites. A skull recovered from a cave in southern Belgium, for example, has both wolf- and doglike features, and it dates to about 32,000 years ago. Though genetic evidence indicates that this animal may not have been an ancestor of today’s dogs, the find suggests that the process of canine domestication could have begun tens of thousands of years ago. Significantly, Shipman says, similar skulls have been found among the mammoth bones at several megasites. Many of the skulls bear healed fractures, a possible indication that these animals were cared for by humans.
Shipman speculates that the mammoth megasites may be the first significant evidence of a cooperative relationship between man and dog. The canines could have corralled the mammoths at the ambush sites and held the prey in place while human hunters moved in for the kill, Shipman says. Once the mammoths were dead, the dogs could have protected the sites from scavengers. “All of that mammoth meat would have brought predators from miles around,” she says. In return, the humans may have provided these canines with food and protection. And slowly, a closer relationship may have begun to form.
Finding more large and strong doglike animals at these sites would support her hypothesis, Shipman says. Such finds will be necessary to convince archaeologists like Nicholas Conard that the new work is more than just a leap of faith. “I like it as an idea, but there’s no smoking gun,” says Conard, who works at the University of Tübingen in Germany and who has personally excavated mammoth megasites. Perri agrees. “We don’t know enough about what early dogs—or even the wolves of the time—looked like,” she says. “This is extrapolating from too few examples.” Still, Conard says, “there are so few ideas about how these sites formed, and what Shipman is arguing is possible and testable. It’s a move in the right direction.”
Original article:
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/05/did-dogs-help-drive-mammoths-their-graves
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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/sympathy-for-a-desert-dog/?_php=true&_type=blogs&emc=edit_th_20140901&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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https://www.facebook.com/AnimalistNetwork/videos/628835147259646/
A bit on the cutsie side and understates the aggro side of things, but I liked it anyway.
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http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0002513920
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/science/the-big-search-to-find-out-where-dogs-come-from.html?emc=edit_th_20160119&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cat-vs-dog-who-loves-humans-more_us_56af85a4e4b077d4fe8ed1ed?cps=gravity_2425_-8728984857001389433
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cat-vs-dog-who-loves-humans-more_us_56af85a4e4b077d4fe8ed1ed?cps=gravity_2425_-8728984857001389433
f
Dogs love you, cats are waiting for you to die so they can eat your face.
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I guess this could go under a law thread but perhaps ? it is more appropriate here:
As an owner of dogs I understand quite fully the emotional attachment we have and find it hard to accept they have no more value than simple property:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/13/frank-gaffney-obama-bono-migration-advocates-truly-blind-nature-enemy-facing/
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I'm thinking you must have intended a different thread , , , :lol:
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I didn't notice the wrong link got posted. I cannot find the correct link but the jist of the article is that a Georgia Supreme Court is to rule on a case the concerns the value of dogs was pets and loved ones.
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:lol:
That decision will be of interest here.
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Found the article about dog's value in the eyes of the law. No mention when the Ga. Supremes will rule on it though:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2016/04/12/how-much-is-a-pet-dog-worth-a-court-will-soon-decide/
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/oregon-court-cast-just-majorly-200050228.html
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(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/eyes.jpg)
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http://www.ksdk.com/mobile/article/news/local/black-lab-saves-family-of-5-from-burning-home/63-506405553
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https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21677188-it-rare-new-animal-species-emerge-front-scientists-eyes
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-exterminate-rats-on-an-island?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=22f4e491aa-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-22f4e491aa-67722509&ct=t%28EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_5_21_2018%29&mc_cid=22f4e491aa&mc_eid=806da67fcf
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(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2018/12/Screen-Shot-2018-12-23-at-12.47.20-PM.png?resize=491%2C600&ssl=1)
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That is very funny.
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if anyone interested:
https://www.petfinder.com/dog/joe-scarborough-43819350/nj/jersey-city/see-spot-rescued-nj708/
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http://www.startribune.com/sled-dog-racing-returns-to-lake-minnetonka-rekindling-a-decades-old-history/566655291/
Big event. 8 dogs pull each sled, they run 40 miles in 2.5 hours. They came right by the house. Not sure how to post our photos.
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"8 dogs pull each sled, they run 40 miles in 2.5 hours"
16 miles per hr for 2.5 hrs
lets see ,
record marathon 26 miles in ~ 2 hrs = 13 mi per hr
put not pulling a load !
and wearing super sneakers !
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"8 dogs pull each sled, they run 40 miles in 2.5 hours"
16 miles per hr for 2.5 hrs
lets see ,
record marathon 26 miles in ~ 2 hrs = 13 mi per hr
put not pulling a load !
and wearing super sneakers !
And running in deep soft snow, like running the marathon barefoot in deep, soft, bottomless sand on the beach.
The dogs work so hard some wondered if the weather was too warm for them, +10 F.
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=8fc2f809572f8c191fdc4f3783d25960_5e5e9050_5c797e5&selDate=20200303&goTo=A01&artid=2&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=washingtontimes-E-Editions&utm_source=washingtontimes&utm_content=Read-Button
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second
https://www.earthlymission.com/gps-tracking-shows-how-much-wolf-packs-avoid-each-others-range/
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/mom-thinks-baby-died-until-firefighters-say-family-dog-made-ultimate-sacrifice-to-save-her/ar-AA110Ziw?cvid=8231768e39db416f9d6aefb0fd7a9335
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Dogs are a gift from God to us!
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AMEN!