Six More Weeks? The Deuce, You Say!

The Weather Service would not commit yesterday. You might get a foot of snow. Or maybe about four inches. Who can say?


You bastards.

So, turns out, it might have been a good idea to bestir ourselves after Perfesser Chaos' last fire call last night and plow out the driveway when we had only 11 inches.

Because Tractor-San is a game little thing, but we cannot even raise the blade high enough that it does not act as an anchor.

A man might come tomorrow to extract us. I'm not sure what it's going to cost us. We've actually jumped the queue on account of PK being a firefighter. Even though his substation is only about a quarter mile away, he can't get there fast enough on snowshoes to make the truck when the pager goes off. Depending on where I sink the yardstick, we've got between 18-22 inches, and are going nowhere.

Meanwhile, we still have power, there's oil in the tanks, wood in the shed, plenty of toilet paper, half a case of home brew, a whole case of Mexican Coca-Cola, two bottles of rum, 80 pounds of beef scrap for dogs, and a couple new Netflix on hand.

Four pairs of snowshoes, two pairs of skis, a case of toe warmers, and a gallon of gatorade.

Two feet of fresh powder sounds wonderful. What it really is is a shitload of work.

Sophia actually did some of the trail-breaking, but she is not particularly skilled at route-choosing, and tends to porpoise in aimless circles. Mostly it was up to Perfesser Chaos. The English shepherds were happy to hang back and let The Help perform this function.


Even where the trail was broken, the smaller ES had to porpoise to get through.


I only fell once. It's actually pretty hard to fall when the snow is over your knees, but the concealed tripwire brambles in the pasture finally had their say. Getting back up is not a straightforward exercise when one's skis are five-foot snow anchors. I got plenty of helpful advice on how to manage this task from the non-ski-wearing Peanut Gallery.

I think Cole might be carrying half his weight in snow dingles here. He also got to relive the testicle experience in gigantic ice form. It wasn't as good as he remembered.


Interesting that Barry White, who braved the same drifts, collected nothing. I think he repelled the dingles with force of will. He's never going to suffer that indignity again.

There were few game trails apparent, and only in protected lee areas. I'm hoping our trail-breaking will be a boon to the wildlife -- except for the tiny tunnelers and the hibernators, a snow dump like this one makes hard times for wild creatures. Our route coincidentally connects the deer bedding area in the pines on our north boundary with our neighbor's unharvested cornfield to the west. I figure that by February, that corn is forfeit to the local Bambis. I filled two feeders with safflower seeds and black oil sunflower, and hung out some more suet.

I opened the window for the turkeys to come out. Yeah, I was just messin' with 'em. They knew it, and did not take the bait.

Interesting that wild turkeys manage to survive even though their feet sometimes touch snow.

One hour of porpoising through snow higher than their backs has given us a houseful of very quiet dogs tonight.

Irregularly Scheduled Programming

Perfesser Chaos has hooked me with repeated contact buzzes on this highly-addictive British ... well, let's call it a "car" program.

Actually, what it is is bunch of entertaining man-boy idiots who are having way too good a time playing with toys that go vroom.

I particularly enjoyed their take this week on the question "Did communism ever produce a decent car?"



Check out the four-way race that is introduced at about the 4:05 mark.

If the show was filmed in the US (which it never could be, because American man-boy idiots do not know how to be entertaining -- they always just go for the dick joke) I'd say the second-place finisher was an English shepherd.

My guess is he's one of the dogs they call "working collies" in the UK, perhaps considered a border collie, perhaps not.

Double-Suspension of Disbelief

The six of us drove from the Bay Area to the only motel near a Central Valley town where there are more coursing hounds than anywhere else on the continent. Hell, there may be more hounds than humans, amid the glass-flat, engineer-squared, desert cotton fields forced green by water wrung from the Sierras.


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Three humans and three search and rescue dogs rolled out of bed at o-dark-thirty and met our long-time correspondent,* Dr. John Burchard, and his colleagues George Bell and Vicky Clarke at the blinking stoplight in "town," before driving out to the unplanted -- therefore unwatered -- fields near the irrigation ditch.

With them were an assortment of the fastest quadruped predators on the continent outside of the cheetah pen at the zoo.

It was already summer, and for the sake of both hounds and hares, all coursing needed to be done before the sun could begin its relentless scorching.

The SAR dogs presented a conundrum. It was too dangerous to leave them in the car. Would it work to bring them along? Vicky briefly fretted about our GSD partner, Mel. Her hounds had never met another dog who was not a sighthound. Would they make Mel to be a coyote and try to hunt her down?

Not to worry. Mel and the two English shepherds, Pip and Rikki, had one thing in common with the salukis -- courtly dog manners.


Vicky asked for this picture, as proof that Joey and Mojo had met a pointy-ear and not served her as a giant 'yote. The SAR dogs walked as part of the human "gallery" when we slip-coursed with George's greyhounds; when the salukis were released to free-course, the SAR dogs moved out a bit more. Rikki even flushed a hare and futilely chased it until the salukis took over.

In slip-coursing, the humans walk a line through the grass and light brush, hold hounds by the most ingeniously-constructed leash-collar contraption. When someone spots a hare, he shrieks RABBBIIIITT, the hounds surge forward, the handlers let go of the T-handle of the lead, and the wrist loop engages the deadman release -- it all takes less than a second, and the chase is on.

George handed me the lead of a massive greyhound named Lionheart. I felt as if a total stranger had just trustingly handed me the keys to a Bugatti with his baby inside.**

As we walked and scanned for hares, I asked him about the breeding of these real coursing greyhounds -- what characterized the bloodlines of dogs who still hunt the way their ancestors did before the invention of the alphabet?

We cross track-bred dogs with AKC greyhounds.

Coulda knocked me over with a saluki's ear feather.

Why do you do that?

Because it works.

My brain raced with more questions, but I dropped them, because George had just given the final answer to any sensible inquiry about why an expert might do something a certain way. And because someone screamed RABBBIIITTT, and the chase was on.

It was over in less than a minute. The hare escaped through a fence that was so far away I had failed to perceive it. The hounds were colored dots in the distance.

When they returned at a more reasonable lope, they were done. The first order of business was to thoroughly cool them.


George took the greys home, and it was time to free-course the salukis. Contrary to the armchair fancier folklore I'd been fed, they hunted by scent like any other dog until they (or Rikki) flushed a hare.

When Joey and Dark Lady were in pursuit, Mojo was most ingenious as he tried to get a look at its trajectory.



The salukis were not as fast, and did not run as far (edit: as far away -- they ran for longer over a more crazed course), as the greyhounds, but they turned and strategized and provided an exciting chase at least twice. My blood surged with adrenaline shared by hunters in wide desert places since the Bronze Age.

I would not have been in better company if I'd been invited to hunt from the Pharaoh's chariot.

No jackrabbits were harmed in the making of this morning of hunting.

We did do considerable damage to some chorizo and huevos at an excellent Mexican greasy spoon.

Then to George's house, to spend the late morning studying astonishing videos and high-speed photographs of sighthounds running, turning, spinning -- hyperextending their joints in ways that humans never imagined before Muybridge.

It was John who had, years before, presented such definitive evidence for the functional necessity of front dewclaws that I was compelled to discard every bit of lore I had been fed for decades about the practice of amputating them. (And just in time for our first litter of puppies to keep their God-given thumbs.)

As we viewed another amazing image, one of our hosts mentioned that the double suspension gallop was unique, among dogs, to the sighthounds.

All galloping animals have a moment in the collected phase of the gait when the beast is airborne.


A dog or cheetah capable of double-suspension is also airborne at full extension.

And apparently, everyone knows that only sighthounds can do this. Ken and Laura and I were conversing with two of the world's experts on animal locomotion, and they were quite clear on this point.

Except ... I fired up my laptop and starting looking for this:


Pip had just spent the morning being emphatically not a sighthound in the company of both of them. She is not structured anything like a sighthound, doesn't do a sighthound's job, and isn't remotely as fast as a sighthound.

There is undeniably air under each of her feet in this photograph.

QED. Sighthounds do not have a monopoly on the canine double-suspension gallop.

What was striking was how delighted both men were to see the photo. How happy they were to surrender what they knew in favor of the new information. A lovely demonstration of the scientific worldview, and beyond that the generosity and confidence of temperament that prefers a novel and messy truth to a tidy and coherent conviction.

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Pupdate. I'm putting together a photo gallery of non-sighthounds airborne at full extension, here.

Reviewing the excellent photos people have been sending me, I need to specify that what we need is sequential photos of the animal airborne at both collection and extension.

Like this fabulous coyote.

Otherwise, there's no way to know that the dog wasn't leaping out of a different gait.

You can send submissions to the surname of this blog's author spelled correctly AT zoominternet DOT net

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* I don't think the dogs had been writing to him, though he'd be one to read and answer graciously if they did.

** Begging the question, who puts a car seat into a Bugatti?

Black and White?

HT to Luisa for this five-part Slate article on Pepper, The Stolen Dog Who Changed American Science.

Read The Whole Thing.

Parts 4 and 5 are not yet up as I write this.

An observation about the effects of the Animal Welfare Act.

As many of you may have gleaned, I am not one of those people who think the only relevant thing about an animal is his or her capacity to feel physical pain.

A fixation on "freedom from pain" can become at best a distraction tactic from a thoughtful appreciation of the full scope of animal lives, and at worst, a self-serving justification for euphemasia -- killing a healthy animal who desperately wants to live and declaring it a kindness.

Nevertheless, if someone is going to subject an animal to pain and distress that is not in the animal's own best interest -- if he is going to use an animal for extrinsic ends -- then he is damned well obligated to mitigate that pain and distress as much as is humanly possible.

That's true of humane slaughter, of ethical hunting, and that's true of medical research.

I think an animal being used in this way has the right to demand this of its exploiter: If your ends require that you hurt me, you had damned well better hurt me as little as possible, even if it is inconvenient for you to take this trouble.

I think an animal being used in this way has the right to demand of the law of the land that its exploiter be held to this standard.

The Animal Welfare Act is intended to keep medical researchers honest. Because a white coat is not a substitute for a normally developed sense of empathy, or of perspective.

Real story. Our rooster, Henery Hawk, got his leg broken in an accident.

I had a decision to make in the moments after the accident: Do I attempt to repair the fracture and rehab the rooster, or do I break his neck right now and stop his pain?

I know this is shocking to people who have had only beloved pets, but that's the difference between livestock -- even livestock with a name -- and a pet. That stark decision.

I decided that it was likely that Henery would, if he could choose, choose to try to live. I may have made the wrong call from an animal welfare point of view. I may have been influenced by sentimentality and even aesthetics. But it was the choice I made: see if we can fix the rooster.

The fracture was a distal closed fracture of the tib-fib. (In a human, this would be a fracture of the two bones of the lower leg just above the ankle joint; in a chicken, the lower end of the drumstick, just before the scaly part of the leg.)

Tricky fracture to stabilize and splint -- mid-bone is much easier. But we did splint it -- Henery was a surprisingly cooperative patient -- and I moved him into a small cage with a heat lamp.

Went inside and got on the googles looking for some information about pain-control for a chicken -- what could I give him that would be safe and effective?

Try googling "chicken analgesia" or any number of other possibilities, and see what you find. Try google scholar. Hell, try Ask Jeeves.

What you will find is dick-all. Nobody knows how to control pain in a chicken. Or pigeon. Or even a parrot. Very few researchers have even considered the issue.

Now google "dog analgesia." The trouble there is sorting through the hits for your specific query. You'll have to narrow it down.

Birds are not covered by the Animal Welfare Act.

So why bother to learn anything about pain control for them? They're not getting any. The government doesn't force the issue.

Now here we have a Catch-22. Because chickens, ducks, pigeons, et. al. "bred for research" do not fall under the aegis of the Animal Welfare Act, no one is counting how many are used in research.

But in Europe, it is, according to one anti-vivisection organization, 650,000 per year.

If rates are comparable in the US -- that's a lot of birds.

And no legal authority in this country is forcing those who are using them as a means to an end to consider their welfare, even on the basest level of pain-control in the conscious animal.

So if you think that people who use animals on an industrial scale -- whether in agriculture or surrounded by the glowing halo of "science" -- can be left to their own devices when it comes to the welfare of their charges, think of Henery.

Henery and the late Pepper the Dalmatian have only two things in common: Flashy black-and-white coloration, and the indifference of the law of the land.

Henery's bones have healed. He's still not walking normally, and this is clearly an involvement in the ligaments at that joint. I cannot tell whether he's dealing with weakness or pain. If I could give him conscious pain control, that could tell us.

Millions of his species used in research for decades, and nobody has bothered to find out whether I could safely give him a friggin' aspirin, and whether that would help.

The Unbearable Cuteness of Being a Dog Trainer

Admit it. This is what you think we do all day.

One thing about working as a dog trainer -- cocktail party conversation.

Tell the random stranger at the awards banquet that you are an import manager or mechanical engineer, and usually not much goes forward from that.

Tell him you are a dermatologist or a dog trainer, and be prepared to hear his stories, endure his folklore, respond to a barrage of questions (most of which are more appropriately handled by a veterinarian -- and that goes for both dermatologists and dog trainers), and often have to deflect a demand for a free diagnosis of whatever is vaguely troubling him -- which you know he will ignore, because hey, what do you know?

There are people -- sometimes I think, everybody -- who would much rather bitch about their problems than solve them. Their mating call is "Yeah, but." I try to avoid the mistake of offering solutions in these cases, but still find myself sucked in when I am unwary. The correct response is to offer a business card and turn the conversation to something less incendiary, say, that jazzy new abortion clinic on the corner, or one's recent conversion to Mormonism.

Still, I suppose that's better than the engineer's wife who asked what I did for a living, and when I told her, responded with an enthusiastic "How cute!"

It would not occur to me to characterize anyone else's profession as "cute." I mean, assuming she is not a teddy bear stylist or greeting-card kitten photographer, say. And I still wouldn't say it to her face. Who can tell when it's been a bad day on the kitten ranch? Kitten bites get infected! Maybe the teddy bear boutique was besieged by crazed plushies in rut this week. One never knows.

I didn't ask Mrs. Cute what she did. It was apparent that the answer was not "diplomatic attache to Yemen," and was quite likely "nothing much."

Anyway, at the time I was carrying a client load that included some high-maintenance humans and a couple of fairly committed trainer-eating dogs. I'm sure Mrs. Cute did not conjure a 90-pound resource-guarding Weimaraner coming for my face when she pronounced on the nature of my career.

But it is little wonder that people have only the vaguest notion of what I do. Few people bother to train their own animals, and popular culture has provided very few, and very weird, images of what a dog trainer does at work.

The most common archetype is Barbara Woodhouse -- crazy as a sack of squirrels at best, and enough to scare the bejimmies out of most people contemplating going to a group class. If you are under 30, you may think you have never heard of this lady. Fear not; you've seen the parody a jillion times. It will never die.

Cesar Millan's television show comes close to a realistic portrayal of the kind of private counseling and one-on-one work that has been my kibble-and-butter for fourteen years. Cesar's clients are richer and on average loopier than mine. California, ya know. I do not look so good in a shortie wetsuit. I am not so willing as Cesar to take a bite -- don't know anyone else who is, actually. But I've met him, and he still had all his fingers. Neither of us typically solve all your dog problems in a 12-minute segment.

That fake dominatrix from England -- actress, not dog trainer. She's got the costume (for dominatrix, not dog trainer -- I mean, stilettos? Really?) but not the chops or attitude (mere bitchiness is not authority, Honey), and certainly not the knowledge. Anyway, a B&D mistress gets paid a lot more per hour, and who am I to say she hasn't earned it?

Possibly the best capture of the flavor and feel of working as a private dog trainer that I have ever seen in the "media" is in this short work of science fiction.

Fifteen years of bitching about work, and who knew? My husband actually heard something. It wasn't all "Blah blah blah KEN."

Hot Dog!

Quick, get an ax! These abused dogs are going to die of heatstroke any moment!

A SAR trainee called today to ask me about laws prohibiting people from leaving dogs in parked cars.

Seems she was harassed by a strip mall security guard. As often happens, he invented a law that prohibits leaving a dog in a car. Ever.

Right ...

It appears that a lot of busybodies have internalized the wrong lesson from decades of proselytizing about the dangers of leaving animals in cars that could become hot.

The lesson is "I disapprove of this for reasons I cannot fully articulate, therefore, there ought to be a law, therefore, there is one. Burn the witch!"

Some of those busybodies are charged with enforcing "the law." And if there isn't a law corresponding to what Mrs. Grundy wants to enforce, she'll make one up on the spot.

The net effect is, of course, to de facto ban dogs from leaving their owners' property via the power of urban legend. Since the dog isn't permitted inside the store or restaurant (dem dawgs all carries the Ebola, ya know, and eats babees), and towns are designed to preclude walking anywhere, there's no way an owner can take Buddy to the park for a quick walk and some fetch, then stop for milk and video on the way home. Oh hell, I'll just go to the store, Buddy can have a walk next week ...

Don't even get me started on the challenges of interstate road trips, if one were to live in fear of the nattering nabobs and their fantasy laws. No pet would ever go on vacation again. The rescue transport volunteer would be forced to take her freaked-out charge out on a leash so that they could both pee in the roadside bushes.

Daniel Pinkwater's encounter with the literally self-appointed humane enforcers in his town is, sad to say, not too unusual.

A friend of mine had a similar interaction with semi-officialdom in New Jersey about fifteen years ago. As a result, her border collie got to stay home in a crate for ten or more hours a day. Because, see, it was "cruel" to keep the dog in a crate in an open vehicle, parked under a shade tree, visible from her owner's office window, where she could be exercised four or more times a day, and trained intensively (borderline collie Nirvana) for an hour at lunch. My friend should have fought the "humane enforcers" who bullied her, but she believed what they told her about the law. It was a lie.

Here's the real scoop.

Thirteen states have laws specifically addressing leaving animals in parked cars.

Not a single one of these states has any kind of blanket prohibition.

In every single case, there is language to the effect that the animal must be in danger of suffering, disability, or death from the confinement. (Which makes every one of these laws superfluous, since presumably any kind of confinement that would cause such outcomes is covered under the regular cruelty statutes.)

Lessons?

1. Don't leave your animal in a vehicle if it is too hot or too cold for him to be safe and comfortable there. If he will escape when you leave the window open far enough for adequate air flow, either crate him or leave him home. (Sunroofs are great!) Check your vehicle frequently -- for temperature, and to ensure that some dimwit isn't breaking in to "save" your pooch. Don't leave highly excitable, fearful or defensive animals alone in vehicles; if you have no choice, make sure the animal rides in a crate that is covered or positioned so that he cannot see out or menace passers-by. Remember that an overexcited dog can go down hard in ambient temperatures that a calm dog won't even notice. Train your dog to have car manners even in your absence. Use some sense.

2. If you are harassed by anyone who claims that leaving your dog in the car is illegal, don't become defensive. Make Mrs. Grundy defend herself. Demand to see the law that she has conjured. Remember, your camera phone is your friend -- take video of the entire "conversation," and leave it running for the audio capture. If your vehicle has a thermometer that shows cabin temperature, take video of yourself entering the car, turning it on, and show the temperature on the readout. If Mrs. Grundy is a store employee or security person, get her supervisor out into the parking lot pronto. Don't leave your car and dog -- again, your cell phone is your friend. Demand to know why you, a customer, are being harassed, and ask whether the establishment would like to retain its customers or drive them away. If Mrs. Grundy is a cop or humane enforcement officer, get badge numbers and call the supervisor right there; tell them to come on out with a copy of the statute.

And remember, breaking into your car to "save" a perfectly content animal is still breaking and entering. Prosecute.