Hat tip to Piv.

Hat tip to Curmudgeonly & Skeptical via NothingVia via Vanderleun.

Heather Houlahan’s border collies demonstrate that possessive and hierarchical behavior is instinctive to dogs as well as people. Watch the hilarious slide-show.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Trapped for six hours in a house fire, a Belgian Malinois named Mia was able to open four doors by herself in order to find shelter in a bath tub. She survived unharmed to be reunited with her family.

Greenville (S.C.) News

2:10 video

Hat tip to Bird Dog via Karen L. Myers.

Jack Russell Terriers are small dogs who don’t know their own size, as this case from Eastern South Dakota demonstrates. The valor of this particular terrier attracted international attention, and one of the best accounts is the one from the British Daily Mail.

It was a David and Goliath style battle that few would have thought possible.

But with the odds stacked against him, Jack the plucky Jack Russel chased a deadly mountain lion high into a tree.

The cornered lion remained trapped above the ground before the Jack Russel was able to pounce a few minutes later.

Jack’s owner, Chad Strenge, witnessed the astonishing scenes while he was walking Jack on farmland in South Dakota.

The pair had been hunting when Mr Strenge heard Jack barking frantically several hundred yards away.

Thinking that his heel-biting Jack Russel – a breed known for their high energy levels- might have caught a squirrel, Mr Strenge raced to a patch of dense woodland.

Incredibly, the 150lb mountain lion was trapped high in the branches while 17lb Jack bayed for his blood below.

‘He trees cats all the time. I suppose he figured it was just a cat,’ said Mr Strenge. ...

Mr Strenge shot at the lion which knocked it from the tree. Jack then chased the lion over a short distance before Mr Strenge killed it with his gun.

Professor Jonathan Jenks, an expert on cougar migration, said hunters usually needed two or three hounds to chase a lion up a tree.

He said: ‘The cougar was probably not hungry enough to attack Jack.

‘It very well could have lost a territory and decided to take off from the Black Hills and head this way.’

Arden Petersen, of the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks department, said that no charges would be filed for shooting the animal.

People in South Dakota have the right to kill mountain lions which they feel are a threat to themselves, their livestock or their pets.

The lion was taken to South Dakota State University, where it will be studied.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

I won’t be getting a lot of blogging done on Saturday. Worse, I won’t even be hunting.

Karen and I are attending an all day dog symposium at the National Sporting Library. Most of the program is irresistibly interesting.

Karen took a few pictures of the dogs playing in the snow yesterday. Uhlan, the 7 month old Tazy, very nearly nailed a small snowbound doe, just before Karen came outside. In photos 9 & 10, he is running again through the track in the deep snow made shortly earlier by his pursuit of the deer. He couldn’t follow it once it got to the driveway and made it into the road. We have an electric fence that keeps our dogs inside the property.

Where exactly we are going to put more snow is not clear.

Andrei Poyarkov of the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow has been studying his city’s population of stray dogs for 30 years. FT.com has a very interesting article describing some of his conclusions.

What is particularly interesting is the way, as is sometimes the case with Europeans, the Russians fail to see the necessity of the American Protestant “capture, euthanize, and sterilize” tidy-everything-up ameliorist approach. Muscovites don’t mind living with stray dogs and are willing to stand aside and let Nature take its course, even in a city.

“With stray dogs, we’re witnessing a move backwards,” explains Poyarkov. “That is, to a wilder and less domesticated state, to a more ‘natural’ state.” As if to prove his point, strays do not have spotted coats, they rarely wag their tails and are wary of humans, showing no signs of ­affection towards them.

The stray dogs of Moscow are mentioned for the first time in the reports of the journalist and writer Vladimir Gilyarovsky in the latter half of the 19th century. But Poyarkov says they have been there as long as the city itself. They remain different from wolves, in particular because they exhibit pronounced “polymorphism” – a range of behavioural traits shaped in part by the “ecological niche” they occupy. And it is this ability to adapt that explains why the population density of strays is so much greater than that of wolves. “With several niches there are more resources and more opportunities.”

The dogs divide into four types, he says, which are determined by their character, how they forage for food, their level of socialisation to people and the ecological niche they inhabit.

Those that remain most comfortable with people Poyarkov calls “guard dogs”. Their territories tend to be garages, warehouses, hospitals and other fenced-in institutions, and they develop ties to the security guards from whom they receive food and whom they regard as masters. I’ve seen them in my neighbourhood near the front gate to the Central Clinical Hospital for Civil Aviation. When I pass on the other side with my dog they cross the street towards us, barking loudly.

“The second stage of becoming wild is where the dog is socialised to people in general, but not personally,” says Poyarkov. “These are the beggars and they are excellent psychologists.” He gives as an example a dog that appears to be dozing as throngs of people walk past, but who rears his head when an easy target comes into view: “The dog will come to a little old lady, start smiling and wagging his tail, and sure enough, he’ll get food.” These dogs not only smell who is carrying something tasty, but sense who will stop and feed them.

The beggars live in relatively small packs and are subordinate to leaders. If a dog is intelligent but occupies a low rank and does not get enough to eat, he will separate from the pack frequently to look for food. If he sees other dogs begging, he will watch and learn.

The third group comprises dogs that are somewhat socialised to people, but whose social interaction is directed almost exclusively towards other strays. Their main strategy for acquiring food is gathering scraps from the streets and the many open rubbish bins. During the Soviet period, the pickings were slim, which limited their population (as did a government policy of catching and killing them). But as Russia began to prosper in the post-Soviet years, official efforts to cull them fell away and, at the same time, many more choice offerings appeared in the bins. The strays flourished.

The last of Poyarkov’s groups are the wild dogs. “There are dogs living in the city that are not socialised to people. They know people, but view them as dangerous. Their range is extremely broad, and they are ­predators. They catch mice, rats and the occasional cat. They live in the city, but as a rule near industrial complexes, or in wooded parks. They are nocturnal and walk about when there are fewer people on the streets.”

Hat tip to Karen l. Myers.

(click on image to link to larger version on original site)

Haaretz has some fun tauntingly adopting a mock-PC tone while reporting an obviously successful profiling technique as officially denied.

Are IDF dogs trained to pounce all who say ‘God is great’ in Arabic?

The Israel Defense Forces has denied allegations that it trains its canines to attack anybody heard saying Allah Hu Akbar, Arabic for ‘God is great.’

Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi on Monday told the Knesset plenum that at a canine unit ceremony held the day before, parents of the soldiers witnessed demonstrations proving these allegations.

“IDF dogs are trained to pounce and attack any Arab who shouts Allah Hu Akbar, as a Pavlovian reaction,” said Tibi.

Karen went out yesterday in the middle of the storm and photographed Cadet (two year old Basset Bleu de Gascogne) and Uhlan (5 month old Kazakh Tazy) playing in the snow. She certainly got some spectacular action photos.

click on photo to link to photo essay

Our 11-week-old puppy, Uhlan, is a Tazy, whose mother is from Kazakhstan and whose father was bred in St. Petersburg, one generation removed from Kazakhstan.

Tazy is just the preferred name in Kazakhstan for the local version of Saluki, known earlier in the West as the Persian Greyhound.

Tribal dogs like ours are prized by sighthound enthusiasts for their strong natural hunting instincts. Karen’s photos of Uhlan in action demonstrate that this puppy may be a little too keen.

Daily Finance:

A woman from Northern China has just taken delivery of what has reportedly become the most expensive dog in the world for which she paid 4 million yuan, or about $600,000. ...

The millionairess has reportedly been searching for the perfect dog for years. This dog, which she spotted in Yushu made the grade. “Gold has a price,” she said, “But this Tibetan mastiff doesn’t.”

In China, this ancient breed goes by nicknames such as “Miraculous Beast”, “Number One Dog” and “Antique Dog.” Buddha and Genghis Khan kept them as companions. Marco Polo wrote of seeing them in the Orient. They are fabled to play a huge part in maintaining ecological balance (both spiritually and physically) in their native habitat, the Tibetan Plateau, where sadly, they are now quite rare. They are reputed to be one of the oldest breeds still in existence and archaeological evidence suggests they served as guard dogs in China as early as 1000 B.C..

With fewer than 160 pure bred descendants of the original Tibetan mastiffs currently in existence, these dogs are certainly rare. ...

Chinese dog-watchers are certainly a new phenomenon in a land where keeping dogs as pets was banned under the reign of Mao Zedong who described dog owners as time-wasters. Large dogs are still outlawed in Beijing where it is illegal to register a dog larger than 35 cms (13 inches). Dog ownership in general is reserved for the wealthier population in cities like Beijing, where the annual license fee can run as high as 1,000 yuan or ($150) – an astronomical sum for the city’s blue collar workers (textile workers’ salaries averaged averaged less than 20,000 yuan or $5,689 in 2008).

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

I was away from the keyboard yesterday, driving nearly 200 miles each way to pick up a seven-week-old puppy.

Last month, the renowned Saluki authority Gail Goodman sent me an email telling me that a retired Russian zoologist (living very near me—only about 200 miles away!) had just bred a litter of the rare Kazakh Tazys, which the serious connoisseurs of aboriginal coursing dogs, people like Gail herself and Steve Bodio, particularly admire for their hunting instinct and drive.

The fact that I have no experience in coursing and live in the East where we lack the kind of open spaces suitable for sighthounds easily found in New Mexico did not deter my friends from getting behind the idea that I needed to own one of these.

Tazy (or Tazi) is just another Asian term for the breed originally referred to in the West as the Persian Greyhound, but these days known as the Saluki (or Saluqi).

Naturally, I had only to look at puppy photos in order to succumb and place a deposit on one of these.

Yesterday, the fatal day arrived. Karen insisted that we go and pick up our Tazy immediately upon the breeder announcing that he was ready to leave his mother.

We wound up taking the same fawn-colored male with the black mask (with a little white on the nose) that originally made an impression on us in the puppy photos. A brother with a darker color struck me as a possible candidate, too, but the darker puppy struggled and was unhappy when picked up. Our original choice was quite content to be handled, and actually never even whined or cried all the way back.

Our Basset Bleu de Gascogne arrived already named Cadet, so we decided to stick with the military theme. Since Tazys are slender and fast running dogs of Asian origin, we decided his name ought to describe him as a type of light cavalry of Asian origin, so we are going to name the puppy Uhlan.

Tired from a long drive

A friend from the sporting literature community got in touch with me to inform me that a retired Russian zoologist who is a keen aficionado of aboriginal dogs had bred his first litter of Kazakh Tazis.

Tazis are hounds used for coursing, the pursuit of game using swift hounds which hunt by sight rather than by scent.

He will look like his mother as an adult

Tazi is really just one regional term for the saluki, probably the oldest type of domesticated dog.

Kazakhstan is renowned in coursing circles as the last refuge of native-bred saluki of first-rate hunting ability, unmixed with Western or show dog strains. A few enthusiasts have actually traveled to Central Asia in recent years in search of the canine equivalent of the Holy Grail.

Looking at photos of those puppies had the inevitable result, I succumbed and mailed in a deposit. The opportunity to own so rare and exotic a hunting dog is very unusual. Of course, house-breaking and trying to bring up a fierce aboriginal hunter from the steppes of Central Asia in a house full of cats and antiques is probably going to be a lot like trying to establish peace and order in the neighborhood of the Khyber Pass.

Kazakhstan looks upon tazis as an important cultural treasure

Hat tip to James Lileks.

2:26 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

One of those viral emails arrived today, at the end of a long succession of forwards, containing the amusing above photos, accompanied by the following text:

A fawn followed this beagle home—right through the doggie door—in the Bittinger, MD area. The owner came home to find the visitor had made himself right at home. This hit the 6 o’clock news big time

I was a little skeptical, but the story seems to be true.

Apparently, the home was really located in Accident, Maryland, asnd it happened last month, according to poster No. 10 in this Grantsville, Maryland forum. And the original photos can be found at the Deep Creek Times site here.

Hat tip to Candice Kobetz.

If you find blog postings filled with typos and a trifle incoherent today, it may have something to do with active interference by this 8 month old Basset Bleu de Gascogne, who got kicked out of his hunting pack, and who has moved in here. Try typing with this hanging onto your right arm!

Some of the dog books contend that blue bassets of Gascony, who barely survived the French Revolution, descend from the hounds bred by Gaston Phoebus, Comte de Foix, in the 14th century, whose lineage supposedly went even farther back to the famous white hounds bred by St. Hubert in the Ardennes in the 7th century.

If Cadet doesn’t start behaving, he’s soon going to find himself in a box, stamped and address labelled:

“Hubertus
Tueveren, Ardennes
Luxembourg”

4:08 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

From Steve Bodio.

AP reports that Cold War rivalries survive in the breeding of German Shepherds.

As the country celebrates 17 years of reunification on Wednesday, some animosities between the formerly communist East and capitalist West remain — and few are as doggedly contested as the fight over whose shepherds are superior.

One thing nobody denies is that in the more than four decades of Germany’s division, the dogs did develop different looks: Eastern shepherds are mostly dark gray or black, while the Western dogs have the better-known yellow-and-black appearance.

West German shepherds also have a characteristically sloped back, while their East German counterparts have a straighter back — which their proponents claim is less prone to the hip problems that can plague the breed. ...

Because of this, the claim for the better dog at times sounds more like a battle over moral superiority between the East and the West than breeder rivalry.

Grube called the claims from the East German breeders an “obvious case of Ostalgie” — a sentimental nostalgia about life in former East Germany, which went out of existence at reunification in 1990 at the end of the Cold War.

East German breeders get particularly upset when confronted with the widespread assumption that most of their dogs were used at the border to keep citizens from fleeing to the West.

“The army and the police only got the scum — the best ones went to dog lovers,” said Werner Dalm, the former government official for shepherd dog breeding in communist East Germany. However, he acknowledged that the East German army asked particularly for those “that could really bite well.”

Today, Dalm, who is still breeding shepherds at age 81 and is also convinced of the East German dogs’ superiority, believes that pure East German bloodlines are all but extinct.

“Since the unification in 1990, we’ve been mixing bloodlines,” he said. “Even my dogs don’t have pure East German pedigrees any longer.”

Whatever the truth, it does seem like the East German shepherd is making a comeback among the 75,000 members of the German Shepherds’ Club and even abroad.

“We get so many requests for our dogs, there’s an international wait list of several years,” said Schultze.

Telegraph:

Standing 6ft 5in (1.956 meters) on its hind legs and tipping the scales at 19st 10lb (276 lbs. = 125.19 kg.), Samson is a giant in every sense of the word. ...

He boasts a 59in (1.499 meter) chest and a 29in (.737 meter) neck, meaning he has to wear pony coats when it rains and has had to have an extra large collar fitted. The dog’s paws are almost the size of dinner plates.

While Samson’s awesome build is impressive enough for a fully grown dog, this huge hound is only three years old and will grow even more.

Julie Woods, 54 and her husband Ray, 65, whose last dog was a small terrier, spend £60 a month on dried food and turkey legs for Samson and take him on four two-mile walks a day.

Mrs Woods, from Boston, Lincs, said: “He’s a lovely dog whose bark is definitely worse than his bite. People are often intimidated when they first see him because he’s about the size of a small horse and very quick.

slideshow

Read the whole article.

In Manaia, New Zealand, when two ferocious pit bulls advanced menacingly toward a four year old in a group of five children, a Jack Russell Terrier named George gallantly launched a hopeless attack on the enormously larger dogs saving the children from being mauled.

Western Australian

John Wilmerding, in the Wall Street Journal, rhapsodizes over a pleasant enough America genre painting, dragging in the Ancient Greeks, and homing in unerringly on the real subtext of the painting: the sublimely important themes of race and inequality.

Following a period of renovation and curatorial research, “Eel Spearing at Setauket” (1845) by the American genre painter William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) has gone back on view at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. The star of the museum’s collection, the work is also generally acknowledged to be one of the classics in the history of American art. Why? Because it is both a beautiful and a significant painting. First is its formal beauty, the serene clarity of its composition, organized around its multiple pairings and reflections…

The structure is classical, consisting mainly of stable horizontals and verticals, along with the dominant triangle formed by paddle, boat and fishing spear, reminiscent of a Greek revival pediment dominant in American architecture at the time. The boat is centered in the nearground, parallel both to the picture plane and to the shoreline behind. In its solid volume and monumental stance the standing figure recalls the spirit of Greco-Roman statuary, such as that of the spearbearer. (Mount could have seen casts of ancient sculpture in his years of study in New York.) But the stillness, harmony and sense of equipoise are also an expression of nature’s hold on the American imagination in the mid-19th century, the country’s self-confident spirit, and Mount’s personal celebration of memory and meditation…

“Eel Spearing” appears to be apolitical, though its thoughtful mood and stable structure suit the sense of racial harmony. Mount achieves this by telling his story with characters marginalized in American society at the time—the child, the woman, the black. (Imagine how much more provocative his work would have been had the dominant figure been a black male.)

Wilmerding, astonishingly, overlooks the degree to which small dogs (not to mention: eels!) were not only marginalized in the wicked America of James K. Polk, but remain marginalized today.

Power to the pointy-eared terriers and the slimey anguilliformes!

The insensitive, of course, would say the painting merely represents a pleasant and nostalgic bucolic sporting idyll.

In the nine months since escaping her travel cage at Kennedy airport to answer the call of the wild, Vivi the wayward whippet has joined the Central Park coyote, high-rise tiger, Harlem Meer caiman and Molly the fugitive feline in New York’s ever-growing pantheon of urban animal legends.

She also was reported dozens of times, roaming cemeteries with other dogs, or hanging around stores in Queens, in some cases miles from the tarmac where she disappeared while awaiting a flight home to California on Feb. 15. A day earlier, she had won an award of merit at the annual Westminster Kennel Club show, the Super Bowl of dogdom.

Vivi’s owners, Jil Walton and Paul Lepiane, offered a reward for Vivi’s return but kept a low profile. This week, their lawyer, Joyce Randazzo, said they still hope to recover the sleek, 4-year-old brindle and white whippet, known formally as Champion Bohem C’est la Vie, and the reward, an unspecified amount, still stands.

According to a map published Nov. 18 by The New York Times, Vivi was reported at more than 45 different locations prior to Aug. 7, when the sightings suddenly stopped, raising fears that she might be dead or had left the area.

Richard Gentles, director of administration for Animal Care and Control of New York City, said his organization dispatched rescue teams after “five or six calls” on Vivi in the past couple of months, but all proved negative.

“For a dog like that to be able to survive this long would be very difficult unless somebody picked it up,” he said. “I hope it’s true that somebody has the dog and doesn’t recognize it. It does happen.”

Meanwhile, the search continues, and on Wednesday, a volunteer group that devotes itself to finding Vivi reported a new lead — an anonymous caller who had seen her neighbor with a dog that resembled the elusive canine.

Read the whole thing.