Craig Koshyk writes a great dog blog. Also: psychic moment!

CCraig Koshyk is a terrific writer/photographer and author of a book that must be on every dog person's wish list — Pointing Dogs, Volume One: The Continentals. To quote from Craig's website [and I get nuthin for this, by the way]:

It is a definitive guide to the versatile gundog breeds of Continental Europe, an in-depth study of the history, development and current status of the pointing dog, and it is a remarkable travelog of an incredible journey.

Written by a hunter for hunters, this volume provides detailed descriptions of all the pointing breeds from Continental Europe. It is illustrated with stunning images of hunting dogs doing what they were bred to do: hunt.

Back in 2008 I wrote:

If anyone has ever taken better photos of sporting dogs, real sporting dogs, I have yet to see them. Professional photographer and teacher Craig Koshyk takes wonderful photos of gun dogs — working portraits that make a person covet a keen Braque du Bourbonnais, or a Deutsch Drahthaar, or a Perdiguero de Burgos. The photos show what the outdoors feels like: see, for example, the wind in the photo of Craig's Uma with a ruffed grouse. Yes, Craig hunts over dogs of his own, and he knows what to look for.
[...]
[He has reorganized his website of photos] in the last week or so, and I know this because I can't find his photos of a dog I had fallen in love with: a gray, good-sized, wire-haired Eastern European dog.

Happy discovery: that dog is a Slovakian Rough-Haired Pointer. Craig just blogged about it today. Does he discuss the breed's history and its current stage of development? Does he comment on its hunting style, health issues, its temperament at work and at rest? Does he share some of his wonderful photos of the dogs afield? He does. And he's spent time in Slovakia, where he interviewed the secretary of the national breed club and watched a number of SRHPs hunt, which tends to give one an extra bit of credibility in addition to making readers insanely jealous. Have I mentioned that I love Craig's blog?

Once again, a hat tip to Andrew Campbell of The Regal Vizsla [now including handsome Jake, a young Pointer] for introducing me to Craig Koshyk's blog and photos.

Upper left: my latest fave, the Slovakian Rough-Haired Pointer. To see Craig Koshyk's actual photo of this beautiful dog, click here.

About Zanesville

Last week both Esquire and GQ published big stories on the Zanesville, Ohio zoo massacre. Read both articles, if you have time, but if you only have time for one [and even if you think you don't], read Esquire's version. Staff writer Chris Jones establishes a sense of unease, of dread and sorrow, and builds on it, and makes everything about that grim event very real and deeply affecting. Jones has said that he hoped to achieve the "spare beauty" of police reports from that night, and he has done that. He also wanted to write "something that would scare the shit out of people," and he's done that, too.

GQ's Chris Heath takes a different approach, and covers more ground. He writes about the police operation, details the life and misadventures of zoo owner Terry Thompson, and interviews others in Ohio who keep exotic animals. Heath's report is as thorough as anyone could wish, and would have been a perfectly tolerable effort, if only Chris Jones hadn't written such a corker of a piece on the same event for Esquire.


The following links have to do with 1) the work of creating a story, and 2) the race between GQ and Esquire to get a long-form Zanesville article in front of the magazine-buying public. Those not interested in the behavior of competing publishers and competitive journalists should probably give these links a miss.

Gawker: Why Did Esquire and GQ Both Publish Huge Zoo Massacre Stories on the Same Day?
Chris Jones of Esquire on His Zanesville Zoo Massacre Story 'Animals,' 'The Most Dramatic Story Of The Year'
Chris Jones on "Animals," his Zanesville Zoo massacre story [forum discussion, joined by the author]

And one more:
Dear Hollywood: Don’t forget Cincinnati Magazine’s Zanesville massacre story

Photo above: Sumatran tiger, ueno zoo tokyo japan, by children of the neon god on Flickr.

Seismology quote o' the day

The San Andreas Fault runs through Cajon Pass [lower left to upper right] in Southern California. See Lost Lake in the middle of the photo? Good place to bird — I saw a Purple Martin there last year. Photo by cocoi_m on Flickr.

A most excellent comment from geologist [specializing in tectonics] and science blogger Chris Rowan, on Twitter:

Anyone using the word 'overdue' automatically forfeits their right to be taken seriously.

Chris tells it: How to (and how not to) talk about earthquake hazards in the media. USGS seismologist Susan Hough, A+! Newsweek and "journalist" Simon Winchester, F- and dunce caps all around.

H/T: Ed Yong on Twitter.

Quote of the week

From Language Log:

I am sure I have said this before, but here I am saying it again, for the Guardian's editors to hear: you just cannot exaggerate the stupidity of the brigade of morons who carry on the "things they don't have words for" trope. (I should add that I hope it's stupidity. It may be worse than that: mere bullshit, written by sophisticated people who know they haven't looked for the relevant facts but couldn't care less.

Here, for good measure, is Language Log's 'No word for X' archive. Awesomesauce.

H/T, again: the most excellent and essential Ed "No one puts baby in a cohort!" Yong. I am so stealing for a tag line his "Nature! Hell yeah!" aside.

Well written

Jessa Gamble had a close and unforgettable encounter along a frozen lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories: read A Dead World at Sunset over at the science blog The Last Word On Nothing.

H/T: the most excellent and awesome science journalist Ed Yong, whose most excellent, awesome and totally addictive blog is essential reading in these parts.

American in Africa gets away with murder

"Elephant Skull, African Safari 2009, Botswana, Africa." Photo by godutchbaby on Flickr.

I love when I read something and think it's terrific, and a writer I admire like mad reads it and thinks it's terrific, too. The piece is The Hunted, by Jeffrey Goldberg, in this week's New Yorker.

To quote TNC: Check it out. It's a ripping good time.

"Dr Jalloh is the only vet in the country"

Abass Bangura and Forget.

Street clinic in Rokupa, East Freetown, August 2009.

Dr. Gudush Jalloh operating on a puppy with a hernia during one of his "street clinics" in Freetown.

First you notice the dogs. In all other ways Freetown is a West African city like any other, of red dust and raised cries, forty-degree heat and a year neatly segmented into two – hot and dry, hot and wet.

Today water tips from the sky. Beneath the canopy of a local store three street dogs and a man holding a briefcase stand and contemplate the rain. Another dog shelters beneath the umbrella of a cigarette seller. A fifth follows a woman across the street, literally dogging her footsteps, using her as a beacon to navigate the traffic and the floodwater.

In the dry season the kings of the city are the dogs. They weave through the crowds, lie in the roadside shade watching through slitted eyes, they circle and squabble, unite in the occasional frenzied dash. For the most part the people and the dogs exist on separate planes. The dogs ignore the people, who likewise step around and over them. On the road the drivers steer around reclining animals. This city has more street dogs than any I have known.

It is eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Torrents of water sluice off the hills and rush down the cross streets. The force of the rain has swept the traffic off the road, and now threatens the battered Peugeot ahead of me. Inside his clinic Dr Jalloh has placed his plans on hold, waits for me in his tiny surgery surrounded by dogs, waits for the rain to stop.The whole city waits for the rain to stop.
[...]
Dr Jalloh is the only vet in the country. No, that is not quite true. There are three government vets, employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. They wear rubber boots, but mostly deal with figures, with capacities, stock and yields. There are also a small number of charlatans. Gudush Jalloh is the only qualified vet in private practice. The single person in the country to whom you might bring your sick dog, cat, monkey or goat.

First must-read of spring break: The Last Vet. From Sierra Leone, Aminatta Forna writes about an extraordinarily dedicated veterinarian, about dogs, people, Africa and the West, and "considers why caring for animals is essential to being human." In Granta's Work issue -- H/T: 3 Quarks Daily.

Amarok

Random news articles from the RSS feed:

Idaho hunter takes 180-pound wolf, via The Oudoor Pressroom. Head and skin to the left, from an image by Shawn Gust for the Coeur d'Alene Press.

Sea Wolves are not Sea Dogs, by Heather Houlahan over at her Raised by Wolves blog: hands down the best thing I expect to read on the trainer-killed-by-orca tragedy.

As they say, read it and weep.

Calvin & Hobbes & Bill

On the fridge all these many years. The U.S. Postal Service will release a Calvin & Hobbes stamp in July; Mr. Watterson grants an interview: more here. Click for [very] big.

Sign on Big Bear Boulevard

And I had a camera! *Is proud*

"The stolen dog who changed American science"

LIFE photographer Stan Wayman took the photos above for a February 4, 1966 article called Concentration Camps for Dogs. The graphic images and the story of dog robbers selling pets to research labs helped bring about passage of the Animal Welfare Act in July of 1966.

On Monday Slate began a five-part series about the Animal Welfare Act and about a Dalmatian named Pepper, "the stolen dog who changed American science."

Pepper's journey in the summer of 1965 helped start a national media sensation and a broad panic over the theft of pets for biomedical research. Her death on an operating table in the Bronx would help animal welfare advocates break a long-standing stalemate in Congress and push through the most significant animal-protection bill in American history. At the same time, she became a martyr to the cardiology revolution at a crucial moment in its development. Pepper also represents a turning point in science, from an earlier age when animals for experiment would be plucked from the road or the river, to a new era of standardized, mass-produced organisms that can be shipped right to the laboratory door. In a five-part series to be published over the course of this week, Slate will explore her legacy.

"Dan Engber's part-reporting, part-storytelling, part-memoir of his own experiences testing animals (don't worry, not dogs) makes for a compelling read," sez the Daily Beast. Plenty compelling, but be warned that it's also a gut-wrenching story for anyone who loves dogs. And how depressing is it that in 2009 there are puppy mills as bad as anything Stan Wayman photographed for LIFE? Very, very depressing.

Death before doglessness!

Or so I hope. I'm from a long line of people who have shared their homes with all kinds of mutts and purebreds and have loved them from the back of the soul, and take it from us, a dogless life is scarcely worth living. Since elementary school I've been without a dog of my own for just one discombobulating month.

I spent most of the day inside with the new pup, scanning old family photos under his watchful eye. The flip side of the photo below lists my mother's name [she's the tall girl] and the dog's. [He was Pride, my great-aunt's collie. That's Pridey in the small photo above.] The kid sitting in the front apparently didn't merit recognition:


Fallen timber [firewood!] is a hallmark of our family snapshots. I could do a comprehensive photographic history of several generations of us at the cabin and never use a photo that didn't have somebody standing on, sitting on, or leaning against a fallen tree. With a dog.

My wonderful great-aunt is in the photo below, on the right. The dog was another one of hers. He's in a ton of photos.


All this is by way of introducing a newspaper article by Helen Elliott on the subject of doglessness. As she says, "A clean house and doing as you please are, frankly, overrated." Hat tip to Nag on the Lake, who sums up my feelings as well as anything: "I pity the dogless."

Verbing nouns

Screen grab [and H/T]: the most excellent swissmiss.

Whattaya mean, I can't use hemorrhage as a verb? Oh, sorry — haemorrhage. Too bad I didn't read the section on Americanisms before I took the quiz. You can test your language chops at The Economist's style guide for journalists, where gerunds get the respect they deserve and commas know their place. A sample:

In general, be concise.Try to be economical in your account or argument (“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out”—Voltaire). Similarly, try to be economical with words. “As a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give to your style.” (Sydney Smith) Raymond Mortimer put it even more crisply when commenting about Susan Sontag: “Her journalism, like a diamond, will sparkle more if it is cut.”

In other writing-about-language news: Barbara Wallraff has a fine new blog over at the Atlantic — check it out. [And for the record, Merriam-Webster says hemorrhage is a noun and a verb. *iz smug*]

I LOL'ed

From The Root, where you'll find some terrific writing from Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alice Walker and others, in a special section in honor of our President-Elect.

After the flood

Photos and related article at the NY Times.

SAFE

by Linda Bierds

Safe, we thought.
The floodwaters nestled
the arc of their udders, but no higher --
dewlaps, flanks, even the tips of the briskets,
dry. All day they stood
in the seascape meadow,
their square heads turned from the wind.
By evening they were dead.
Chill, we learned, not drowning,
killed them -- the milk vein
thick on the floor of the chest
filling with cold, stunning the heart.
We had entered the house, where silt water
sketched on the walls and doorways
a single age ring. When we looked back,
they had fallen, only the crests of their bodies
breaking the waterline. I remember
the wind and a passive light.
Then the jabber of black grackles
riding each shoulder's upturned blade.

[H/T Andrew Sullivan.]

Quote for the day

Gaston Phébus [1331-1391], Livre de la Chasse.

Ther is a saying emong hunters that he cannot be a gentleman whyche loveth not hawkyng and hunting, which I have hard old woodmen wel allow as an approved sentence among them. The like sayinge is that hee cannot be a gentleman whych loveth not a dogge.

Anonymous, The Institucion of a Gentleman, 1555.

From Southern Rockies Nature Blog, via Stephen Bodio's Querencia.

I've found my people

Library of the Abby of Saint Gall, the oldest library in Switzerland.

"My dear Selena,” I said, “to be always right is the claim of the charlatan, not of the Scholar. The mark of Scholarship is a fearless and unflinching readiness to modify theories in the light of new evidence.” [ Sarah Caudwell, The Sybil in Her Grave.]

I was no more than half a dozen lines into Lisa Gold's new blog, Research Maven, when I knew I'd struck pay dirt:

“The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.” — Samuel Johnson

I thought this famous Samuel Johnson quote would be an appropriate way to begin my blog. The problem is that Johnson never actually said this, despite the fact that you’ll find this attributed to him on a number of different quotation websites. None of these websites identified the original source of the Johnson quote, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

"Research is like treasure hunting, and to do it well you must be skeptical, curious, discriminating, persistent, and willing to look beneath the surface," writes Gold. Amen. Research Maven looks like a keeper.

Olympics in China: Colors I love

National Stadium in Beijing, designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Photo by Claro Cortes IV for Reuters.

Expect to be overwhelmed, writes Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NY Times architecture review of the stadium nicknamed the Bird's Nest. The stadium "has an intoxicating beauty that lingers in the imagination":

Great architecture can never be fully conveyed through a television screen, of course, and it saddens me that so many Americans will experience the building only via satellite[...] However the structure attests to China’s nationalistic ambitions, it is also an aesthetic triumph that should cement the nation’s reputation as a place where bold, creative gambles are unfolding every day.

My homie James Fallows is living in China and following the events in Beijing — Andrew Sullivan writes, "I'd bookmark Jim now if I were you if you want the best take on the Olympics." From today's post, Innocents Abroad:

Before coming here two years ago, I had been a pretty serious runner for many decades in the past. Never broke three hours in the Boston or Marine Corps marathons, but came close. (3:02, but who's counting.) Once insanely took part in a 24-hour relay marathon, in which teams of ten people took turns running a mile each on a track, around the clock -- and our goal was to average under 5:15 per mile over the whole period, though that was long ago.

Yet I have not found it sensible to run outside, even one time, in Shanghai or Beijing. Of course there were days when I could have done so. But on average??? That's what the indoor gym is for, with its illusion of filtered air.

Good luck to the NYT running team, and to the Olympics as a whole. And may America preserve the good parts of its touching "how bad can it be?" creed.

Read all of this most excellent post here.

Blog love

I am edgy, bold, informative, modern, unique and humorous. I am also a crappy, crappy photographer [weeps], but I hereby promise Pia that I will try to take dog and/or sheep photos every day to try to get better at it. Pia is the most excellent photographer of Just Another Dog Blog, home of Bella and Kate and some of the best dog photography on the web. Check out her photos...! I, on the other hand, can't even get a halfway decent snap of a rose unless there's zero wind and the light is good. [The rose is David Austin's Evelyn. Poor focus, blown-out whites, etc.]

Anyhow, it is now my pleasure to list several new-ish [to me], edgy, bold, informative, modern and unique dog blogs, with an emphasis this round on news, rescue, pibbles, and working sheepdogs.

Most excellent new-ish [to me] blogs:

The Border Collie Blogs. Link goes to my blog's right sidebar ;~) I'm so glad these folks are writing [and training and trialing]. Most are active stockdog handlers and stalwarts of the Border Collie Boards. Several are wonderful photographers, and all are terrific writers. Bloglandia is a better place because they are in it.

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Today's Arthur. Great photos, spare and wonderful writing, a quiet sense of responsibility, super dedication to rescue — this blog just rules. [Also, no romping-at-the-rainbow-bridge crap, doG forgive me.] Arthur's person is one of the good ones. I love this blog.

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Save the pit bull, save the world. Katie delivers terrific, heartfelt, super smart commentary on pit bulls and related topics: stupid people, scary BSL [but I repeat myself], puppy mill tykes that suffer for their breeders' sins, dog health, dogs in the news and the pit bulls she lives with and loves. An addictive, most excellent must-read.

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Smartdogs' Weblog. Take a look at the tag cloud on this site and you'll find everything from circus to science, with ethics featured prominently in the middle. A great recipe for a blog, if you ask me. If you missed an important story or a new research article, chances are Janeen has written it up. She'd be very good to work dogs with, I suspect, and very good to join for drinks and discussion afterward.

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Spotted Dog Farm. This blog was off-line for a bit, and I feared for the author. She's 1) working on a PhD related to dogfighting and 2) working as an animal control director at an unnamed location in the rural south. No rainbow bridges here, either, but much honesty about negligence and cruelty and heartache. There are a few victories to keep the broken-winged bird from dying outright, but suffering looms large. Things will change for the better -- we've seen that here -- but it won't happen in a day. [If anyone dares to complain that I should have posted a warning about "graphic" photos on the Spotted Dog Farm site, I shall spit ink. Forgive me for not keeping a Victorian fainting couch on my blog. It's 2008. Get a helmet.]

Well written

On Mary Scriver's prairiemary blog, a fine essay on symbiosis. Excerpt:

The business of animal control (or the function that we currently call by that name) is NOT to number, sterilize, and supervise every animal in America, but rather to work through problems as they arise. It is a great mistake to alienate and polarize whole populations of animal keepers and lovers, but it is often a mistake thrust upon animal control by over-reaching humane societies. The misunderstandings are fed by the narrowness of experience of many people, who only know about animals from television, their dinner plates, and maybe their childhood pets. The use of animal aggression for gaming and gambling, an ancient practice, is (and I’d say SHOULD be) hypocritically demonized in this country. (I have a hard time seeing the difference between Vick fighting dogs against each other and Vick himself courting concussion and joint damage in a football game.) But my prejudice is that we’d do more good to try to uncover the causes of such behavior than by simply passing laws. Education, the creating and pointing out of better ways, has got to be a big part of animal control.

She writes with such clarity. Read more of her work here. Her comment that "misunderstandings are fed by the narrowness of experience of many people, who only know about animals from television, their dinner plates, and maybe their childhood pets" reminds me of a comment by Donald McCaig:

[T]he laws that most affect America's dogs are often made by those who fear them, sentimentalize them, or are only interested in their suffering. Dogs and dog owners endure an ever more dog-hostile culture without a champion.

[Cue William Tell Overture, Nathan Winograd, Richard Avanzino...]