Damn sad news [x3]

A wolf may have killed a young woman in Alaska. Operative word: "may."

Authorities were in an Alaska Peninsula village Tuesday investigating whether a 32-year-old schoolteacher, found dead off a road leading out of town, was killed in a wolf attack, according to state and local officials.

Read the rest here, at the Iditarod-covering ADN.

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This next item is so stupid and so hateful that I can barely comprehend it. Former UK pol Kenneth Baker explains how he came to introduce the execrable legislation known as the Dangerous Dog Act, with a few yuks along the way:

The animal lobbies were very divided on the issue of controlling dangerous dogs. The Kennel Club supported the idea of pit bulls being put down. They did not register pit bulls as one of their recognized breeds and felt that as fighting dogs they have no place in our society. The RSPCA, while having no love of pit bulls, shrank from the physical elimination of the breed, preferring instead that the dogs should be neutered and then die out over time as the breed became extinct. Furthermore the RSPCA used the opportunity to raise its cherished aim of the introduction of a dog licensing system - which I opposed. I was not in the business of legislating to control chihuahuas when I wanted to rid the country of pit bulls. The vets were also reluctant to destroy pit bulls en masse, believing that this went against their version of the Hippocratic Oath. But one dog expert assured me that "All pit bulls go mad". Unlike any other recognized breed they were unpredictable and could not reliably trained. Steering a course acceptable to all these differing viewpoints strained patience as well as imagination, and I knew that whatever course of action I took I would be attacked by one group or another.

On May 22 I announced to the House of Commons my intention to introduce legislation to ban the breeding and ownership of pit bull terriers and other dogs bred especially for fighting. I then embarked on further meetings with the animal interest group which, in addition to the RSPCA and the Kennel Club, included the Joint Advisory Committee on Pets in Society, the Canine Defence League (now Dogs Trust), the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and the British Veterinary Association. The issues we debated included whether to identify dogs by implanting Micro-chips under their skin, or by tattooing them. This led to humorous exchanges about exactly who would volunteer to tattoo a pit bull's inside leg, and whether the dog's tattoo should match that of the owner. Would pit bulls have 'love' and 'hate' inscribed on each knuckle.

On 10 June I introduced the Dangerous Dogs Bill in the House of Commons.

Ignorance, prejudice and stereotypes — and as always, it really isn't about the dogs, is it? Wonder who the cretin was who told Baker that "all pit bulls go mad." Wonder whether that "dog expert" even existed. Most of all, I wonder how a hack as stupid and vicious as Baker gets elected in the first place. Read more at Beverley Cuddy's Cold Wet Nose Blog.

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This story is just heartbreaking.

A do-it-yourself animal rescuer keeping 60 dogs penned inside her 750-square-foot East County house was arrested today on suspicion of animal cruelty and neglect.

Authorities found the canines — mostly boxers and Chihuahuas, along with a few small terriers — in dirty cages stacked throughout 65-year-old Alice Via’s two-bedroom Moreno Avenue home, Dan DeSousa of San Diego County Animal Services said.

“Many of the dogs have skin conditions, upper respiratory disease or other illnesses,” DeSousa said. “In addition, most … have injuries to their feet and noses from trying to escape from their crates.”

Animal Control Officer Mitchell Levy says the dogs were stacked in crates at least two high throughout the home. "A lot of them had no water. A lot of them had feces, a lot of them had two-, three-day old vomit in them. It's an unusual situation."

The news comes as a big shock to others in the rescue community. They say Via had such a good reputation for rescuing dogs, that she was allowed to take animals from local shelters.

"They start with the best of intentions. They think they can provide the best home for these dogs, but obviously this person got overwhelmed," says Lt. Dan DeSousa.
[...]
Operators with other rescues say Via had recently contacted them asking for help and wanting foster homes for some of her dogs. [source]

On the one hand, this woman is a textbook example of a 501(c)(3) rescue that is indistinguishable from a case of hoarding. On the other hand, if comments on news sites can be believed, she placed a number of dogs in loving homes and no doubt saved many from death, though what will happen to the dogs now remains to be seen. She's not a Michael Vick. I don't think she belongs in prison. Bad enough that she might be prevented from keeping a dog or cat for the rest of her life. “'She got way in over her head,' [Dan DeSousa of San Diego County Animal Services said, in a masterpiece of understatement]. 'She had nobody to help her.'” Maybe the rescues she contacted will step in and help her now.

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.

Link liberation: scary wolf stories

Ernest Thompson Seton: Wolf Study. Pen and ink with water color (1896).

I first read Seton's Lobo, the King of Currumpaw when I was eight or nine [thanks, Uncle Rudy, for the gift of Wild Animals I Have Known], and I can still recite parts of that story from memory.

A lion shorn of his strength, an eagle robbed of his freedom, or a dove bereft of his mate, all die, it is said, of a broken heart; and who will aver that this grim bandit could bear the three-fold brunt, heart-whole? This only I know, that when the morning dawned, he was lying there still in his position of calm repose, but his spirit was gone—the old king-wolf was dead.

I took the chain from his neck, a cowboy helped me to carry him to the shed where lay the remains of Blanca, and as we laid him beside her, the cattle-man exclaimed: "There, you would come to her, now you are together again."

That account of a great wolf's life and death just killed me. A couple years ago PBS ran a show about Lobo and Seton, called The Wolf that Changed America. [You can watch video selections here.] The website has a collection of related images, and when I saw the photo Seton took of Lobo at the end, the real Lobo, with each leg in a horrible trap, I actually broke down and cried.

Yes, I'm a child of the suburbs. [The very first subdivision to spring up in the midst of Pleasantville's fields and orange groves, but still.]

Like grizzlies, wolves fascinate and frighten me all at once.

These two stories are both hair-raising, and true, and they don't have happy endings.

Gros Ventre wolves kill 3 dogs [this article broke my heart]

Wolf kills hunting hound


Related:
Watch out, wolves of Idaho – the Becker dogs are ready to rumble [Edited to add: check out the follow-up post's beautiful photos.]
Dr. L. David Mech's International Wolf Center.
Cat Urbigkit's Wolf Watch.
Off Endangered List, but What Animal Is It Now?

Iberian Wolf

Spaniard José Luis Rodríguez took this photograph with a Hasselblad, whoa. Rodríguez is the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Read more from the Natural History Museum [UK]. H/T: Le Divan Fumoir Bohémien.

New books: Wolves, and a parrot

Querencia blogger Cat Urbigkit has a new book out: Yellowstone Wolves: A Chronicle of the Animal, the People, and the Politics. Cat and her family raise sheep and cattle in western Wyoming and she has been following the wolf situation in that area for years. [Click on Wolf Watch at this link to read more.] Stephen Bodio of Querencia has written an excellent post about Cat's book, which he reviews in his spirit wolf voice. I kid ;~) Yellowstone Wolves looks like a good read.

Another new release: scientist Irene M. Pepperberg has written a book about her decades-long partnership with Alex, the famous parrot who died last year at the age of 31. From today's NY Times review:

Her book movingly combines the scientific detail of a researcher, intent on showing with “statistical confidence” that Alex “did indeed have this or that cognitive ability,” with the affectionate understanding that children (and children’s books about animals) instinctively possess: that “animals know more than we think, and think a great deal more than we know.” While her training as a scientist keeps her from lapsing into sentimentality, her love for her longtime avian colleague keeps her from sounding like a stuffy academic.

Read the whole review here. The book is Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence — and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process.

"Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf?"

Transhumance festival in the foothills of the French Alps.

As Capt. Obvious would say, people have strong feelings about wolves. Ranchers despair over livestock and pets lost. Environmentalists, who are sometimes ranchers as well, want some protection for large predators. Politicians want news coverage; hunters want wolfskins; animal rightists want attention, etc.

Livestock guardian dogs are familiar to anyone who raises sheep in North America, and in Europe shepherds have turned to flock guardians as well ["returned" might be a better word, since many livestock guardian breeds were developed in Europe]. Now, in a strange twist, dogs guarding flocks on the border between France and Italy are being killed — not by wolves, but by human predators.

The French have an expression – entre chiens et loups– between the dogs and the wolves. It is a fanciful way of describing the twilight, the mysterious and uncertain time between day and night.

In the beautiful summer pastures of the Maurienne region of the French Alps, something mysterious, and wicked, has been happening in the twilight hours. The events are uncertain but one thing is clear. This is, literally, a story about dogs and wolves.

Since the start of the year, 17 sheepdogs have been poisoned in the mountains of the Maurienne range, which rise to more than 9,000ft, just inside the French frontier with Italy. The dogs have often died in great agony. They include several of the Patou or Pyrenean mountain breed – enormous, white, misleadingly cuddly-looking dogs, which are trained to give their lives, if necessary, to defend sheep from wolves.

In related news [huge suckage, this], some of the livestock guradian dogs are attacking tourists, and shepherds are being sued in the wake of ruined holidays:

Jean-Luc Renaud was on a mountain-walking holiday when he saw a bloodstained Belgian tourist staggering towards him. “His shorts were torn and he had been bitten badly in both buttocks,” Mr Renaud told The Times. “He was in a state of complete shock.”

The Belgian had fallen victim to a notoriously ferocious breed of mountain dog brought into the French Alps to defend sheep from wolves.

The attacks are driving holidaymakers away and are splitting the community against a backdrop of controversy over the reintroduction of the wolf in France. To add to the row, shepherds have been taken to court by wounded holidaymakers and 17 dogs have been poisoned in the Maurienne region of the Alps.

Read the full account [with comments] here.

Wolves, coyotes and LGDs

Wolf concept .02 by Chris Do and the BL:ND team for Gap.

The wolf is a compelling, complicated presence in human history and evolution. He's more controversial these days than ever: some people pay to hear wolf packs howl on winter nights in Wyoming, while not that many miles away other people grit their teeth and curse when wolves kill sheep or a favorite dog.

The wolf's little cousin, the coyote, is one of my favorite creatures on earth. I was alone on a snowy trail in Yosemite once when three coyotes, big ones in thick winter coats, loped into a meadow maybe forty yards away, pointed their muzzles at the gray sky and whooped and shrieked like the devil incarnate. It was beautiful. Those three sounded like a dozen, loud and wild.

I love to hear coyotes sing when I know my animals are safe. The Daily Coyote melts my heart. But the suburban coyote that trots out of the Verdugo Hills and tries to carry off a toddler? Out of the C. latrans gene pool, you. The sheep-killing coyote? Toast. [Not that traps and bullets make a real dent in the coyote population: the irony here, I'm convinced, is that we're making the species stronger and smarter by killing the inept ones.]


Livestock guardian dogs, relatively new to North America, are old hands at protecting flocks of sheep from predation and other hazards:

"Kodiak, a livestock guard dog, stays with what's left of the flock of sheep he had protected from a barn fire near Carnation on Thursday. Kodiak's fur was singed while he stayed between the fire and the sheep, later running to a pond and sitting in mud." [Kodiak, a Great Pyrenees, belongs to Diane Pagel. Photo by Steve Ringman for the Seattle Times.]

Cat Urbigkit, Wyoming sheep rancher and author, has shared notes and photos of her LGDs with Stephen Bodio of Querencia: see the posts Flock Protectors and Coursing with Sheepdogs. I know zip about LGDs so can't comment on breed preferences in the U.S., but I've noticed that many flock owners prefer crossbreds. I think Maremmas are beautiful: you can read about Julie Poudrier's new Maremma — a rescue — here.

Meanwhile, to the northeast: is it a wolf? Is it a coyote? It's thriving, whatever it is, according to the NY Times:

Amid much fanfare this year, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service declared the western Great Lakes gray wolf successfully recovered from an encounter with extinction and officially removed it from the endangered species list. Under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, the wolf boomed in population to 4,000 in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin today, up from just several hundred in northern Minnesota in 1974.

But the victory celebration was premature, according to two evolutionary biologists, Jennifer A. Leonard of Uppsala University in Sweden and Robert K. Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles. The historic Great Lakes wolf did not return intact from the edge of oblivion. Instead, the scientists report in the online edition of the journal Biology Letters, it hybridized with gray wolves moving in from Canada, coyotes from the south and west and the hybrids born of that mixing.

Janet McNally of Minnesota writes that she needs six to eight LGDs at the minimum to keep her sheep safe from all that hybrid vigor. Click on Guardians at this link to read more about her crossbred LGDs.

Shepherd Bill Fosher notes the recent appearance of a wild wolf in Massachusetts, and suspects there will soon be "a movement to reintroduce this top-level predator into its former range in New England":

There's historical evidence that my part of New Hampshire was, in fact, home to wolves. So if there's going to be reintroduction, it will probably happen around me. I hope that the wildlife biologists have the common sense to work with livestock producers before the killing starts. The can have us working with them, or they can have us working against them. It's as simple as that, and it's entirely up to them.

For more information on wolves, see the following sites:

Dr. L. David Mech's International Wolf Center.

Cat Urbigkit's Wolf Watch.

For more on the coyote, see this detailed Wikipedia article, and check out the book by J. Frank Dobie, Voice of the Coyote. It's an old fave.