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

The view (and sounds) from the back of Labrador named Sugar are hilarious, especially the shakings following each successful retrieve.

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.

Tazy atop snowbank

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.

Moscow commuters smile at sleeping metro dog

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.

These photos of a Jack Russell puppy playing with a juvenile wild boar come from a Finnish photo site and were forwarded to a saluki list.

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

Training IDF dog

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.

click on image to open photo essay, then click on first image to enlarge and use right arrow to proceed. (Photos by Karen L. Myers)

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.

photo: Karen L. Myers

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).