Got Goat?

Well, that was fast.

Actually, it's goats. You really don't want to try one goat.

No names yet.

Here's what we know about them:

They are twin sisters, eight weeks old.

They are 3/4 Saanen and 1/4 Nubian. These are good dairy breeds.

They are naturally polled and heterozygous for this trait (dominant trait; their sire is horned), and they both have wattles.

They've been wormed and vaccinated and were weaned last week. They were raised by their dam, not on artificial milk.

Their mother is Buttercup, a Saanen/Nubian cross:





The udder shot is standard when looking at dairy goats, no matter how strange it feels to point one's camera phone at a goat's ass. Her udder is actually much more symmetrical than it seems from the picture, which is not straight-on.

and their father is George, a Saanen:

His horns are scurs. Rosie thought his pee-midden was a wonderful rolling opportunity. Another reason to forgo owning a buck, at least for the immediate future.

The kids were not handled a lot, and are quite convinced that I'll most likely eat them in the morning. But it's also unacceptable for me to leave them entirely alone. They are less afraid of a human standing on the other side of a stall door than they are of a human lying down on a chaise lounge.

They can easily jump a dutch door. They can also rebound off fencing at least 5' off the ground, in the manner of Xena, Warrior Princess running around the walls of a room, but without the aid of wires and stuntwomen. They do not require a run-up for any of this. Thus, my decision to soft-release them starting in the foster dog pen, with its 6' kennel panels, was prescient and nearly insufficient. And gave me time to go construct the necessary stall modifications.

Any blade of grass outside the dog kennel is far more delectable than the one growing a centimeter away from it inside the dog kennel from the same plant. I did not know this. Also, the sweet feed I got as a bribe is either poison, or OMG, it's that kind of candy that creeps use to get little kids like us into their vans.


They are not identical. Pink collar girl has longer hair, a prettier face, and has (I think) nicer dairy conformation. Purple collar girl is whiter and has a shorter face and stockier build, though she is two pounds lighter. (34 v. 32 pounds) Pink collar girl is the boldest, the most vocal, and appears to be dominant. Purple collar girl has a cut under one eye, apparently the result of her objecting to weaning last week by sieving herself out of a pen.

There was a wether who was also for sale, but he was rather small, as was his dam. Since one of the possible jobs for a wether would be as a pack goat, I think I'll hold out for a nice big guy who could carry a lot of gear.

I've got some ideas for names, but am open to suggestions.

Hole in the Bucket

I swear I haven't forgotten about the more involved topics I've promised for this blog, including the forthcoming detailed reviews of research papers. This I will do when my brain works again.

Spring has become an infuriating exercise in juggling contingencies and also, not sleeping.

Will I be able to go back to Montana? When? For how long? So much depends on developments in the legal melodrama over which we have no influence.

When my SLOH elected to become worse than useless for a month or so, during the busiest time of year on a farm -- because he did not want to miss any of the putative cross-country ski season earlier in the year -- that did not improve the situation.

When I found that I had been demoted from invisible house elf to unpaid rush-hour chauffeur, and that this four-day assignment dragged on for three weeks, sucking up a tank of gas every other day and four hours every single workday -- four hours of prime daylight time, two of them out of the very middle of the productive day -- I was getting very close to violently offing someone from a short list that includes, but is not limited to, Yours Truly and the SLOH.

Did I mention that I've been having intermittently severe back and neck pain, and paresthesia in my hands, for over a month? Pain and paresthesia that becomes highly troublesome when I must drive, and excruciating when I'm jerking around in Pittsburgh* traffic? Pain and parasthesia that my new, now former, PCP declared didn't exist, since there was "nothing wrong" in my neck radiographs.

Am I sounding a bit cranky?

As of today I've quit the chauffeur gig, and this week finally visited a chiropractor who fixes backs -- as opposed to curing the common cold and/or diddling around and sucking the insurance and my bank account dry -- and got my head popped like a champagne cork. The temptation to barricade the driveway and cut the phone lines remains.

Cannot get sheep and goats until fences are in. Cannot get fences in until fence lines are clear. Cannot clear brush from fence lines with power tools because of tangled crapfest of six generations of broken, drooping, never-maintained, rusted, grown-into-trees fence wire. Cannot get to the crapfest of wire because of the brambles. Hole in the bucket.

I keep breaking and losing parts of Tractor-San, leading to further nesting hole-in-the-bucket scenarios. No sooner do I replace a missing turnbuckle on the right lift arm than I have to find and repair a fuel-tank leak. A tiller cannot be found for the beast for love nor money, so I paid a couple guys to plow and then till a 50' x 100' garden, which will be enough for this year.

On the poultry front, there are the 105 meat bird chicks, the 13 new eggers (straight run, so I've no idea how many will be the pullets I seek), still sixteen ducks. I would prefer fewer ducks. The guineas have all gone elsewhere -- the last of them traded for Delaware chicks. Henery Hawk the rooster is splinted up in sick bay with a distal fracture of his tib-fib.

And finally, Thursday night, Buffy II, Mother of The Brood, started hatching chicks:

More adorable Chookdonna and chick pix

She hatched out 7 of 11 eggs, which is okay for a first-timer. Sadly, only two of the blue Ameraucana eggs hatched -- all the failures were Ameraucanas, all the brown eggs hatched. Two of the non-hatchers that I rolled down the groundhog hole today exploded on the way down. Bwaa haa haaa haaa.

We know who the Baby Daddy is, but it's anyone's guess who da Momma is for any given chick. I was tickled to see the little coal-black ones, which I didn't expect. How they will feather out is a complete mystery.

I am absolutely delighted to watch her teach them what to eat, and call them to come nest in her voluminous feathers. So far she seems to be a good Broody, except that when she was setting the eggs she ate virtually nothing (despite food and water within reach) and she did not leave the nest to poop. This unsanitary habit may account for the failure of some of the eggs. If she fouls the nest on a second brood, I'll probably retire her from that role.

Right now the family is in the indoor portion of the dog kennel, a clean box stall with fresh wood chips on the floor. I'll set them loose to free-range with the rest when the chicks can move around well enough to negotiate the pop door.

On the dog front, first, Happy Birthday to Rosie and the Pistons. They are two years old today. This is something like an eighteenth birthday in dog terms. It's the age to start radiographing hips and thinking seriously about breeding a year or two from now, if that's an option on the table at all. It's the age at which one starts to think "Well, this is pretty much the dog that I'm going to have."

In the case of Rosie -- I can live with that. The crabapple doesn't roll very far from the tree.

Adorable Spike has entered adolescence -- as evidenced by his now constant notarized requests that Moe please kill him immediately -- and was abducted by aliens last week and returned sans huevos. I've had a couple applications on Spike, but they have not panned out -- he is looking for a great home.


* Land of civil engineers who graduated in the 10th percentile of their classes.

Continued

Clean, fed, vetted, warm, dry -- and in limbo for another two months.

The trial of Linda Kapsa has been continued until July.

News report here.

You can link to the defense motion and the prosecution's response (as a PDF) from the Billings Gazette page. (I can't say enough about the caliber of the coverage that the Billings Gazette has provided. These guys are shoring up my faith in the Fourth Estate.)

Two more months of institutional life for the 250+ English shepherds (and the three pugs, the mongrels, the cockatiels, chickens and cats).

While this is not great for the adult dogs, most continue to make behavioral progress because county custody is so much better than their former lives. For the puppies -- it's all bad. Because the puppies could have had totally normal lives if they'd been released so they grew up in foster care and were placed in permanent homes at the appropriate age. Instead, they cannot be taken out of the perimeter that contains them as living evidence. Volunteers must work with them as well as they can in an environment that can only be varied so much.

For the volunteers and county workers charged with doing their best for these sentient beings qua items of evidence -- well, imagine running a marathon through rain, snow, mud, and abuse by the spectators on the sidelines, and just as you approached the finish line, depleted, exhausted, sobbing, but exhilarated -- a race official pops out of nowhere and moves the line ten miles down the road. (Oh, and there will be heat and bugs and elevated invective for the rest of the race.)

Update -- HT to Vikki in Sweden -- As if two more months was not enough: Today's Billings Gazette

And more, here.

The New York Review of Each Others' Books

Over a decade ago, a colleague gave me an anthology of academic animal behavior papers dealing, allegedly, with issues of interest to companion animal trainers and owners.

Two editors. Two dozen or so contributors, including nine writing solely on cats, primates, or horses. The two editors are authors of twelve of the thirty papers.

And then there are the citations. Wilhelm cites Bertha who cites Inga who cites Wilhelm who cites Inga who cites Bertha. A regular Polish firing squad of citations.

Very cozy little club there.

See, here's how it goes in the darker corners of some universities. (And in private practice in certain fields, as we'll see.)

You submit your third-rate research to a third-rate, low-circulation journal in your tiny little area of specialization.

Make sure you copiously cite the work of the editor of the journal, as well as the work of every possible reviewer. Since the field is so small and unpopulated, and the whimsy of the editors is pretty easy for an insider to discern, it's not hard to guess who the reviewers will be.

The reviewers and editors have a vested interest in goosing their own cite stats. The editor needs to fill four issues a year of journal that may have fewer readers than contributors. That paper is gonna get published. Sure, a megalomaniac editor or reviewer may effectively re-write the thing, but it gets published with your name on it. And cited in the next round. The journal becomes a little credentialing vehicle in the battle for tenure, or just another semester's appointment as part-time visiting adjutant lecturer of thus'n'such.
(1)

And don't forget to cite yourself -- everything you've ever published. And one or two of the ponderous "classic" texts in the larger field that technically encompasses. The citations can be as gratuitous as you like. No one will check.

And what do you get in the end? A couple of dozen (at most) sub-sub-field insiders sitting around vigorously agreeing with one another, without having to perform any really original or difficult work, apply the scientific method with rigor, or meet broad peer review standards that are, well, standard in the scholarly world.

I can't tell you how many current and former academics, in fields ranging from the hardest sciences to the squidgiest humanities, have read what passes for a "paper" in the field of "companion animal behavior" and bitterly proclaimed themselves to have chosen the wrong discipline. Why did we sign up for all that hard work?

Case in point: the single paper in the anthology mentioned above that I found wildly interesting, provocative, rigorously designed, and potentially useful in a practical way is also the one whose author doesn't cite the editors or any of the other usual suspects in the rest of the volume, and is not cited in any of them. It seems to be well-embedded in a larger and more results-oriented field. (Though the author does rather copiously cite his own previous publications.)

Which brings me to the present-day, and what passes for "research" in the politicized world of "companion dog behavior modification."

This used to be called "dog training." Some hominids (2) still cling to this quaint terminology. (1542 -- "subject to discipline and instruction for the purpose of forming the character and developing the powers of, or making proficient in some occupation." Some hominids own the compact OED.) Its practitioners were judged by their success in "forming the character" and "making proficient," sometimes in formal tests and contests.

Such outcomes are now proclaimed irrelevant. Dog training has become politicized in the last decade to an extent that is unbelievable to an outside observer -- most particularly, the interested outside observer, the dog owner who just wants some advice on getting the damned dog to come when he’s called/pee outdoors/eschew leg-of-postal-worker. One large faction of the self-proclaimed revolutionists (let’s call them the Judean People’s Front) has taken up the mantle of “science.” Some of them even have university affiliations and postgraduate degrees in fields such as veterinary medicine and the sexual behavior of lizards.(3)

Why is this important? Because real dogs, and real owners, are looking for help. Because pseudo-science -- ideology cloaked in the vestments of science, but without its substance -- is being aggressively promoted as the only way for them to get that help, while the grunting empiricist hominid trainers are discounted by both pseudo-scientists and the media. Because the outcome of not getting effective help ranges from the tragedy of a dog whose full potential for achievement and dignity is squandered, to a dog who is killed because of training omissions, to a dog who seriously hurts a human because of training omissions.

The conclusions made by the researchers are not hiding away in those dark corners of universities and moldering in the pages of the seldom-read journals, as they would be if they dealt with, let’s say, philology. Because they purport to be directly relevant to human relationships with their pets, huge numbers of ordinary people are keenly interested in what they “prove.” An army of journalists, veterinarians, and non-academic “trainers” filter the conclusions in progressively simplistic ways before proclaiming Truth to their pet-owning clients. Most never read the original paper; those who do are frequently complicit in concealing the essential inadequacies of the “data” that allegedly supports the widely-reported conclusions.

Studies show ...

Rather than justifying their academic appointments or private practice fees by rigorously measuring the results of their interventions and objectively demonstrating the efficacy of their methods, (y'all can do that, right?) the Clan of Three Letters (PhD, DVM, JPF) now goes a huntin' for "data" that discredits the grunting, OED-reading, leather-leash-wielding, suspected Mexican hominids.

But the habit of intellectual sloth fostered by the ongoing sub-field circle-jerk means that the published "studies" don't hold up to even casual scrutiny from outside the circle. Not that alleged journalists, including "science" journalists, bother with even that in those few instances where the propaganda comes to outsider notice. Ralphing up a press release as "news coverage" is so much easier than reading the paper, much less applying basic logical analysis to the study design(4), methods, data analysis, and conclusions.

Hey, the journal already did all that, right? Dis here is peer reviewed.

See above.

In the next few months, Raised by Wolves will scrutinize a variety of papers and pronouncements from researchers and professional bodies that claim to provide solid data about dog behavior and how to change it through training. We’ll read and analyze the papers themselves, not the press releases or the gormless media buzz. We’ll hold the authors to the standards of objectivity, rigor, and evidence that any scientist should expect and welcome.

And we’ll always remember that This was in a journal, it must be credible is not a valid argument.



(1) Not that I am not positively oozing sympathy for the plight of any young academic seeking his or her sinecure, or just a paycheck for the next semester. You do what you gotta do, and geniuses must dance the dance with the hacks. The publish or perish two-step mentioned here is not one-one-hundredth as humiliating as the ass-kiss limbo. That said, it is just as much work to produce and publish crap as it is good stuff.

(2) Some hominids also cling to the word “hominid,” which we are now told is more properly “hominim.” Which is a homonym for homonym. Which is just too much for our tiny stone-chipping brains. And my spell-checker still rejects it, so there.

(3) No, I am not mocking the achievement of earning a degree in veterinary medicine, nor am scoffing at basic research into animal behavior. I am not a Republican, I totally get it about the volcano monitoring and fruit flies. But neither credential speaks to the problem of “How do get my dog to stop doing the things that drive me crazy, and consistently do the (reasonable) things that I expect of him?”

(4) I was forced kicking and screaming to take a class in methods (aka sadistics), despite the fact that my own post-graduate field of study was dangerously close to “humanities” rather than the “social science” that would be named in the degree -- which I did not complete. The professor for the class was mediocre, but his assistant was fantastic, great teacher. That methods class is the single most useful positive lesson I took away from six years of hazing.

If You Dont Save These Dogs We'll Kill This Chicken

Yes, that is a chest freezer acting as a backdrop.

For background, go to the comments section of my previous post:

So here's the deal.

If NESR receives checks and paypal donations totaling the amount of my one-ton feed order by June 30, Dale McNugget will earn a permanent sinecure among the laying hens here. I'll keep his picture on the blog

I will have the total on the feed order in a couple of weeks, but we are looking at between $ 210 and $250.

Contributions must be marked Montana Rescue -- SAVE DALE.

Otherwise -- coq a vin.

Put your money where your mouth is -- since none of you armchair chicken-lovers were willing to put up even an hour of fighting with barbed wire and multiflora rose

And yes, the headline both dates me and pays homage to The Greatest Magazine Cover in Human History.

I have been trying to get a frameable copy of this issue forever; no luck.

You Can't Eat Dale

I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thence all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats: and of such shall be my hire.

Genesis 30:32

I know why we have animals that look like this:

Evil-ass tiger at Doc Shepard's place. Does not validate Belyaev's results. This cat scared the crap out of me.

And this:

Mandelbrot goat. No kidding.

A lot has been made of the Belyaev experiments, and how spotting and neotenic features are genetically and biochemically linked to tame behavior. Sure. Fascinating. One of my favorite things that I ever learned about. But there's another route to piebald. Because we monkey-folk, visual foragers in the deepest recesses of our brains, absolutely fixate on one of these things that's doin' it's own thing...

So, my broiler chicks came in the mail Friday morning.

I picked them up at the PO and moved them into the Green Giant potato box in the basement. (Shout out to my homie Ray, who scored me these boxes from his store. Best brooders ever.)



Most chickens raised for meat are industrial hybrid crosses of proprietary inbred parent strains, mutant half-naked obese Frankenchickies that grow to slaughter size in only six weeks, and spontaneously drop dead shortly after that point, if they have managed to stay alive and up on their bloated feet that long.

They look like this:


And mostly what they do, besides grow like mung beans and look for a comfortable place to die, is eat and shit and stink.

After seeing these pathetic creatures at the county fair (4H meat pen class) for years, and reading the descriptions of what it's like to raise them from posters on the Backyard Chickens forum, I really did not want to go there. I'd be embarrassed to have anyone see them on my farm. I'd be ashamed to look at them myself.

But, you know, we don't just like chickens -- we like chicken. Tastes like chicken, it does.

At the recommendation of several posters on Backyard Chickens, we got these.

The colored range broilers, aka "freedom rangers," are also F1 hybrids, and are arguably "industrial," in that the parent strains are not generally available for producers to breed their own. But instead of being selected and "designed" to gain weight at unnatural speeds while protected from the elements and constantly fed, they are selected to grow about half as fast, to forage for themselves on pasture and display normal chicken behavior, all while keeping about the same feed-conversion ratio as the industrial birds.

They are the same varieties used to grow premium label rouge poultry in France.

I expect them to be delicious.

Back to domestication, and spotty critters. These guys come in several color morphs -- most of them will be mostly red or yellow feathered, a few will have other colors and patterns. Like many hybrids, they may not resemble either parent. I don't know. I haven't actually seen pictures of the parent strains.

I settled the McNuggets into their brooder, and several hours later my mother went down to visit them.

Overheard her alternately cooing over the box of chicks and arguing on the phone with my brother:

Oh no, these are egg-laying chickens, not eating chickens.

Uh, Mom, these are our meat birds. What would I do with 100 laying hens?

Oh no! I already started naming them! You can't eat Dale!

Here's Dale sticking out of the crowd:



Most of the chicks are a fairly uniform yellow or orange. A few have some indistinct darker markings. One has a smudgy dark face, thus named Pigpen. Only Dale has very distinct chipmunk markings. He, or she, stands out in the mass of 100. It's easy to convince oneself that Dale has more personality than the other 99 chicks, more expression, more intelligence.

He gets picked up more often than the other chicks, so unless he has a more flighty-than-average temperament, he's more likely to be friendly and tame.

If one of the plain yellow chicks actually had some unique and charming behavior, how would we know? Is it the same chick every time, or just something that the yellow chicks occasionally do?

So originally, it worked the other way 'round. The mutant yellow chick in the brood of chipmunk-striped ones that grew into a distinctive white or red hen. The puppy with some white on his chest amid the wolf-sable littermates. The calf with the star on her forehead. All got favored treatment for the mere fact that they stuck out of the crowd. Got named Spot or Goldie.

And then got to live long enough to have babies. Because you can't eat Dale.

Other predators notice difference, flash, spots too. That's probably why an owl took my "lilac" (silver-grey) guinea cock and left the natural-colored "pearl" cock. The lilac bird fairly glowed in the moonlight.

Humans started preserving the flashy animals when we domesticated them, and weren't just aiming our spears at the funny-looking one. We had to be in a position to protect them from other predators, too, a struggle that continues to be more difficult with flashy domesticants.

A species' natural coloring is natural because it works. A domesticated species' unnatural coloring also works, because the guys providing the food and protection fixate on it.

Nevertheless, we will most likely eat Dale.

Easter

Easter put her slim hand on the back of Wednesday's square gray hand. "I'm telling you," she said, "I'm doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf."

"And you wax fat and affluent in their worship and their love?" He said, dryly.

"Don't be an asshole." Suddenly she sounded very tired. She sipped her mochaccino.

"Serious question, m'dear. Certainly I would agree that millions upon millions of them give each other tokens in your name, and that they still practice all the rites of your festival, even down to hunting for hidden eggs. But how many of them know who you are? Eh? Excuse me miss?" This to their waitress.

She said, "You need another espresso?"

"No my dear, I was just wondering if you could solve a little argument we were having over here. My friend and I were disagreeing over what the word 'Easter' means. Would you happen to know?"

The girl stared at him as if green toads had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said "I don't know about any of that Christian stuff. I'm a pagan."

-- Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Have the faith, have the fun.