Zamora Hills 2008

Zamora: the lift. All sheepdog trial photos by Sharon.

So I'm home this weekend coughing up a lung, and when I tell my cousin [the nurse] that I'm sure I have West Nile virus, she says it's probably not just West Nile but West Nile exacerbated by the avian flu and E. coli, and I should take a Motrin. "Call the waaahmbulance," she says. Odd that such a hostile, unfeeling person works in health care, but the ibuprofen has provided some relief, and on I bravely blog.

I missed the Slavens' Zamora Hills trial this year [see lung, above], but the most excellent Sharon has sent along some terrific photos:

The set-out person on horseback in the distance is Anna Guthrie, my trainer.

The handler's post is out of sight to the right of the photo. It's a big course, and range ewes will be range ewes. You can see the drive panels under the tail of the windmill.

At the cross drive panels.

Out of the creek bed and into the shedding ring we go.

In the shedding ring -- or maybe on the way to the pen. I love them slick-coats.

"Uh, now what?" Sharon writes: "At one point, three of the five decided to make a break for it, and jumped the fence. Once over, they apparently realized they had a dozen border collies to contend with, as opposed to just one." Dammit, Marge, I told you this was a bad idea!

Next year, I hope.

Thanks again to Sharon for the great photos (and to my cousin [the nurse], who is actually a wonderful person whom I love dearly. But you knew that).

Of E. coli, feedlots and slaughterhouses -- and the right way to raise beef

What is today's threat level? The Ethicurean knows.

The Ethicurean has an excellent roundup of news articles and information related to the recall of 143 million, repeat, 143 million pounds of beef from the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino, California. Ethicurean co-founder Bonnie Powell writes:

The meat industry in this country is broken from start to finish. We take ruminants and feed them grain their stomachs weren’t designed to eat, treating them like garbage disposals for our industrial leftovers; implant steroids so they’ll grow faster; feed them antibiotics so they can survive the poor diets and crowded feedlot conditions; then ship them to slaughterhouses where they are killed and processed at speeds that practically beg for bacterial contamination and worker injuries.

What we won't do to satisfy our appetites and save a buck. All hail cheap beef! Too bad, so sad about the downer cows and all, not to mention the maimed poultry-plant workers, but the important thing is that we pay less for our meals, right?

Except we don't really pay less.

So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways to be not cheap at all. While I stood in [the feedlot] pen, a dump truck pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of feed. The animals stepped up to the bunk for their lunch. The $1.60 a day [cost per animal] for three giant meals is a bargain only by the narrowest of calculations. It doesn't take into account, for example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance or food poisoning by E. coli or all the environmental costs associated with industrial corn.

For if you follow the corn from this bunk back to the fields where it grows, you will find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop. Keep going and you can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile ''dead zone.''

But you can go farther still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn all the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. [Steer] No.534 started life as part of a food chain that derived all its energy from the sun; now that corn constitutes such an important link in his food chain, he is the product of an industrial system powered by fossil fuel. (And in turn, defended by the military -- another uncounted cost of ''cheap'' food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might be possible to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to grow my steer to slaughter weight. Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine. [Source]

"What will it take to get Americans to stop eating beef that’s been marinated in E. coli and suffering?" wonders Powell.

I dunno. If not our consciences, what? Scary, mysterious diseases? The environmental cost? The 284 gallons of oil per feedlot steer? A drive past the Harris Ranch? You can smell that wretchedness for miles, even with the windows up and the vents closed:

Photo by Gary Kazanjian for The New York Times.

And the thing of it is, we know how to raise livestock the right way. The right way is good for the land, good for the animals and healthy for us humans. Here's the way it should be:

Photo by Richard Morgenstein for Morris Grassfed Beef.

And because there are stockdogs along, here's another photo by Richard Morgenstein, this one of Joe Morris and Everett Sparling moving cattle with dogs Socks, Lucky, Spade and Penny:



The Morrises aren't the only ones raising grassfed beef: check out Local Harvest to find ranchers near you. There is no need for the food we eat to be "marinated in E. coli and suffering."

[Also: keep in mind one of the oldest ways to get "free-range, grass-fed, organic, locally produced, locally harvested, sustainable, native, low-stress, low-impact, humanely slaughtered meat": by hunting it yourself.]

Edited to add: for two splendid essays on "cheap" food, the Chino, CA packing plant disgrace, and what effect Exxon Mobil's record profits have on the farmer, be sure to read Bill Fosher's Edgefield Sheep blog posts, The end of cheap food? and The further cost of cheap food. Impeccable reporting and excellent writing, as always.

Voyage of the Beagle

UPDATE: Edited for syntax. Content unchanged.

This most excellent graphic is from the folks at OBEYTHEPUREBREED.COM -- it's also available in Pug.

My first dog of my very own was a beagle. Field-trial bred, she had a chest like a wine cask, limpid eyes and a bay I hope to hear in heaven: it was a deep, beautiful, roaring aauuoooo that lasted endlessly between breaths, and according to neighbors could be heard at least a mile away. That bay was a sound with the power to change the course of a person's life, to make dog-haters and poodle-owners of some, and convince others that a well-lived life must at some point involve keeping a hound pack.

THESEUS
Go, one of you, find out the forester;
For now our observation is perform'd;
And since we have the vaward of the day,
My love shall hear the music of my hounds.
Uncouple in the western valley; let them go:
Dispatch, I say, and find the forester.
We will, fair queen, up to the mountain's top,
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

HIPPOLYTA
I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding: for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem'd all one mutual cry: I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

THESEUS
My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew'd, so sanded, and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee'd, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells,
Each under each. A cry more tuneable
Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn,
In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly:
Judge, when you hear.

Maybe sometime they'll set that play in the South, and the voices will sound just right.

My parents shuttled my beloved beagle and me to an obedience class run by one William Koehler and his assistant Bob Yankie [a fine hand with a dog -- he did the illustrations for Koehler's first book on dog training]. We "graduated" with a respectable score, but my girl was not an eager participant. Her tail was always down and her warm eyes unhappy, and an observer might have believed the talk that beagles are stubborn dogs, slow learners, and hard to train.

In fact, she may have been the smartest dog I've ever known. She learned like lightning, knew a million tricks, was quickly and absolutely housetrained, hit the back door with a paw to let us know she needed in or out, and never left the kitchen to visit the rest of the house, but at night when the coast was clear would slip across the hall into my brother's bedroom and sleep on his bed. During dinner she would choose a spot between my father's chair and mine and sit up with her forepaws against her chest, and she could hold that position for at least twenty minutes. She looked like one of those pear-shaped toys you can't knock over, her extra weight functioning as ballast.

Beagles can make fine agility dogs: Marietta Huber's Squiggles [on the left] earned a Mach11 and was on the gold medal-winning Mini team at the FCI World Championships in 1998. Squiggles was still enjoying the sport at 15. Beagles are great contraband-sniffing dogs, as demonstrated by the Beagle Brigade in airports across the U.S. The AQIS uses beagles, too, and in the private sector they sniff out termites, gas leaks and, of course, rabbits.

A beagle is all nose and appetite. My girl ran away from the cabin one summer afternoon and returned with her nose raw from glorious hours of sniffing. I'd like to say she came back because she loved us and was sorry in her good-natured way for causing a general panic, but I'm pretty sure she was just hungry.

The secret [food] to training a beagle [food] is finding the right [food] motivator [food]. "Fanatical about food (even after being fed)," says the AQIS, a description beagle lovers will recognize as massive understatement.

I cheered out loud when Uno [on the right, maintaining his boyish figure] won Best in Show last week at Westminster. CBS newsman Bob Schiefffer says he cheered, too, and his wife was so happy she cried. "Beagles are the best dogs that ever were," he stated in his commentary on Face the Nation. Will Uno's win trigger an increase in pet store/puppy mill beagle pups? I hope not -- I want to believe the breed is as popular as it's going to get. Marie over at K9 Solutions has more on the chances of a beagle population boom. If you think you'd like to add a beagle to your family and have decided on the rescue route, check out Beagles & Buddies in El Monte, SoCal and visit your local pound or all-breed rescue.

Me? I'm counting the days until retirement, a place in the country and a roo-rooing hound pack of my own. I heart beagles.

Lions, red knots and a valentine

UPDATE: Edited for syntax. Content unchanged.

Why you should always have your camera ready. Photo by Matthew Dickie.

I love that this happened at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Non est ad astra mollis e terris via [there is no easy path from the earth to the stars]:

JPL employees have been spotting mountain lions for years. The NASA laboratory is perched on 177 acres climbing the side of the San Gabriel Mountains into the open wilderness of the Angeles National Forest.

On its east side, the Arroyo Seco -- a stream that goes from dry to torrent depending on the weather -- courses out of the mountains onto a sandy flood basin behind the Devil's Gate dam.

Because mountain lions and other wildlife routinely follow streams, the Arroyo Seco is a natural corridor, funneling a 32-square-mile watershed down to a narrow cut -- where Dickie spotted the cougar[...]

One of several January sightings in the L.A. area: full story here.

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The red knot is an amazing little bird that migrates each year from South America to its nesting grounds in the Arctic. "A sixteen-year-old red knot has flown enough miles to get to the moon," says one birder. Grim news: some population models indicate that the species will be at or near extinction in 2010.

The knot's dependence on the eggs of the heavily harvested horseshoe crab has placed it at odds with another species -- humans. Conservation groups, lawmakers, fishermen, scientists, and ordinary citizens have all entered the debate. But even as our actions have imperiled the red knot, we can also preserve the species, by regulating the fishing industry and keeping clear of the beaches that the knots rely on during migration. Where nature ranks in our system of values will dictate how far we are willing to go to protect the red knot.

A master of long-distance aviation, the red knot makes one of the longest migratory trips of any bird -- 9,300 miles along the Atlantic flyway from its wintering grounds in southern South America to its high Arctic breeding grounds. The journey is so exhausting, it requires two to three stopovers for refueling. The horseshoe crab egg feast they will consume at Delaware Bay, is not just an indulgence -- it's absolutely crucial for the birds' survival. When the knots arrive at Delaware Bay, their bodies are half their starting weight, devoid of fat and even some muscle. Here, the red knot will take about two weeks to double its weight so it can continue its migration.

The red knot is a creature in peril. The U.S. Shorebird Conservation Plan lists the red knot as a "Species of High Concern," based on declining population trends and threats on non-breeding grounds. In the last 20 years red knots have declined from over 100,000 to less than 15,000. And in 2006, the knot was named a candidate for Endangered Species Act protection as an emergency measure to slow the rapid fall of its population. In the Delaware Bay, the knot has suffered a decline so severe that some experts predict the population stopping over at the bay could disappear within five years. [Source]

Bad news for the red knot: on Monday the New Jersey Marine Fisheries Council "lifted a state ban on horseshoe-crab harvesting and will allow a limited fishery in the Delaware Bay this spring."

Good news [possibly, we hope, all fingers crossed]: read more here about shoreland purchases by the Delmarva Ornithological Society Conservation Committee and The Conservation Fund.

Want to pitch in? Every dollar helps, and they take PayPal/credit cards: click here to go to the DOS donation page. It's too late for birds like the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, but maybe we can help save the red knot for our grandkids. We can try.

[The Nature program Crash: A Tale of Two Species is scheduled for a repeat this Saturday: check local listings.]

********

A day late, but I love it:

From Ironic Sans, a good blog linked to a good blog in the Nature Blog Network, now in the blogroll.

Great Backyard Bird Count

The photo to the left, one of my all-time favorite bird photos [see full size here], was taken by Mike McDowell of the most excellent Mike's Birding & Digiscoping Blog, where there's a reminder that this weekend -- February 15 - 18, 2008 -- is the Great Backyard [or wherever you happen to be] Bird Count.

Anyone can participate! Here's how:

1. Plan to count birds for at least 15 minutes during February 15–18, 2008. Count birds at as many places and on as many days as you like—just keep a separate list of counts for each day and/or location.


2. Count the greatest number of individuals of each species that you see together at any one time, and write it down. (You can get regional bird checklists here.)


3. Enter your results through our web page.

Get the bird book and the binocs, get outside and count them birds, people! [Horribly windy today below the mountain passes, but I'll be out and about, camera and notebook at the ready.]

Zamora Hills [and some dog show]

UPDATE: Edited for syntax. Content unchanged.

Michael and Bridget Slaven, both from County Tyrone, Ireland, settled in the hills west of Zamora, CA in the 1800s. The ranch now belongs to their grandson Bill Slaven, host of the Zamora Hills Sheepdog Trial. Click on the photos to make 'em bigger.

Take along a pair of binoculars. The range ewes are set out on a ridge maybe 700 yards distant, and the sheepdog won't be able to see them as he walks with his handler to the post. The dog -- a working border collie -- will run more than half a mile to reach the top. The hills all around are vast and green and empty: it's beautiful countryside, not great for crops, but good for sheep and cattle.

The Slaven family's Zamora Hills Sheepdog Trial is one of the best-known in North America. The dog that wins won't earn points towards a title, since the USBCHA shuns such nonsense, but everyone at the trial will know what that dog is made of. The judge this year is Jack Knox, and with any luck I'll be there with bells on to watch part of it. [Probably Sunday, given the drive and all. Look for a pug.]

If you are going to be anywhere near Northern California from February 15th through the 18th, pack the folding chairs, sunblock and binoculars and follow the directions to Zamora Hills:

Directions to trial site: North on I-5, take Zamora exit, head west, 92B is about 1-1/2 miles from exit. Turn left and the ranch is the first place on the left. From Highway 505 – Take the Zamora exit and head east. Turn right on 92B (about 4 miles from exit).

First run is at 7:00 each morning -- Nursery and Pro-Novice dogs run on Monday. Food and drinks will be available at the trial site. There'll be fine handlers and dogs from as far away as Canada. Bill Berhow will be there: he and his good dog Pete won Soldier Hollow last year. Here are some shots from 2007.

The handler's post -- the Lombardi Tower -- is out of sight on the left. Sheep are set out on the far ridge, at about one o'clock from the orange post in the middle of the photo. There's a dry creek bed between the drive panels and the pen. Sheep are brought around the orange post (rather than around the handler's post) prior to the drive. The shedding ring is to the left of the pen.

The shedding ring is in the middle of the photo, marked with sawdust. The shed's done --- the dog is fetching the sheep to the pen. 2007 judge Bill Berhow is seated on the flatbed truck. The Lombardi Tower [named in honor of rancher Guido Lombardi, a long-time champion of the working border collie in California] is just to the right of the shedding ring.

Top young handler Haley Howard steps down from the tower as Diona [out of sight behind the sheep] brings the range ewes to the shedding ring. Legs at left belong to the judge -- I recognize the knee brace ;~)

End of the day, and Diona is about to put her sheep in the pen. The good ones make it look so easy.

***

Something else is coming up... oh, yeah. Westminster.

The announcer will say something about border collies being great sheepdogs. And smart. Tops in agility. He may say that this or that dog has an AKC "herding title," which means the dog was able to follow tame sheep down a fence line in a small arena. Three times! But the truth is that none of the border collies in the ring at Westminster can work stock. Not one is competitive in agility. Here, in a nutshell, is what the border collies at Westminster are bred for:

Head
The skull is broad and flat between the ears, slightly narrowing to the eye, with a pronounced stop [from Merriam-Webster: "the depression in the face of an animal at the junction of forehead and muzzle"], cheeks deep but not prominent. The muzzle tapering to the nose, is strong and the same length as the skull.

No, that isn't from the AKC standard, but it might as well be, since the conformation ring in the U.S. has all but surrendered to the Australia/New Zealand standard. [You can read more about the border collie and the AKC here.]

Breeding to the conformation standard of Oz means that a border collie pup without that pronounced stop will be sold to a pet home on a spay/neuter contract, no matter how excellent his health and how keen and biddable he may be. His good-looking littermate with the "perfect" stop -- the perhaps slightly more anxious, perhaps somewhat less intelligent pup with perhaps one or two very mild health issues -- is the one that will go on to win a championship, and he is the one that will stay in the gene pool. And so it goes, generation after generation. "This is the head I'm breeding for," I heard a woman at ringside announce the year border collies were "recognized." Her dogs won at Westminster.

Breeding to a conformation standard produces healthy, stable companion dogs by accident rather than design. This isn't meant to suggest that show breeders want to produce dogs with health issues and less-than-stellar temperaments, or that they don't take health and temperament into consideration. Of course they do. But the pronounced stop [among other characteristics described in the standard] is absolutely essential, because without it a border collie has no hope of success in the breed ring.

If the goal were simply to produce healthy, temperamentally sound companion dogs, breeders might take a page from guide dog experts and start crossing Labs with Goldens. They would breed pugs that don't need surgery in order to breath normally, and bulldogs that don't require C-sections to whelp. They would breed dachshunds and Bassets that don't develop back problems.

They might even give up the conceit that breeding for pronounced stops has no effect on working ability. The truth is that breeding for appearance eats working ability for breakfast. A good stockdog needs a finely calibrated set of tools to get the job done. A pronounced depression at the junction of the forehead and the muzzle ain't one of them.

Conformation-bred border collies are beautiful dogs, and no doubt fine companions, but the cookie-cutter structure, the matching fluffy coats and those pronounced stops have come at a considerable price. If you are lucky enough to be at the Zamora Hills trial next weekend, you'll see what the border collies at Westminster have lost.

The soft bigotry of low expectations suits the BCSA just fine

Action at an AKC "herding trial." There's a dog back there in that dust cloud, and this run earned a qualifying score: one leg towards an AKC "herding title." Identities protected, because honestly.

Back in 2006 the parent club of the AKC border collie announced a new title: Stockdog of Distinction. To qualify for this honor, an AKC-registered border collie had to earn herding championships from the AKC and either ASCA or the AHBA, as well as five points accumulated by placing in the top 20% at USBCHA Open trials. [That last requirement was quickly amended to read "an ISDS-style trial."]

From a BCSA Board Announcement dated January 14, 2008:

In the last few weeks, several questions have been raised about BCSA’s Stockdog Of Distinction (SOD) and SOD-Excellent awards; as well as on BCSA’s support of some USBCHA-sanctioned open field trials. A few members have contacted the BCSA board to express concern over or disagreement with these policies, and we are aware that there has been recent conversation on some email discussion lists about this topic.

Read the whole announcement here. Tragicomical gems:

3. What is the purpose of the SOD and SOD-X Award?
Because one of BCSA’s primary missions is to preserve the working heritage of our breed, the SOD award system is intended to highlight excellence in this area. It is meant to inspire BCSA members get out and compete in herding trials, which are a good metric to compare your breeding stock with that developed by other breeders. For many centuries, dog breeders have used shows and trials as a means for evaluating breeding stock and sharing knowledge.

4. Why does the SOD award require placement in Open classes at ISDS-style trials?
It was important that one component of the award be to require that a dog is proven in the open field, versus only competing in arena trials. The Border Collie is a highly developed working dog for this particular purpose, and the skill and instinct required to control livestock in a large area without the benefit of a fence line is very different from working in a small farm arena. Though AKC offers such style of work in the B course, AKC B courses are still relatively few and far between, and very small in scale as compared to ISDS-style trials. So, they are still not the best test of good Border Collie-style work. Thus, it was felt that to declare a dog truly a “Stockdog of Distinction”, it must prove its mettle in the traditional forum in which Border Collies have been tested for more than 100 years, the ISDS-style trial.

The fact that any of this has to be spelled out for members of a border collie club says more than I ever could about the AKC worldview. Ay Chihuahua.

More BCSA insights:

6. I’m concerned that BCSA is “promoting” USBCHA by encouraging members to compete in ISDS-style trials, when some prominent USBCHA members have expressed “anti-AKC” sentiments. Should BCSA be supporting an organization that does not offer reciprocal support back to us?
It is true that some USBCHA members are not supportive of our organization and do not feel that we share the same goals. But we beg to differ, we feel that the goals of both organizations are the same—to preserve and protect our breed, and to inspire Border Collie breeders to continue to develop excellence in the field, and sound, healthy, well-constructed dogs. And, not all USBCHA members and competitors are in disagreement with our club. So, it’s not fair to stigmatize an entire organization’s membership based upon a few outspoken individuals, and declare that we won’t cooperate with any of them.

No, no... go right ahead, stigmatize! All the USBCHA members I know think the AKC is worse than useless. And here, let me fix that for you: The goals of both organizations are the same??!!

Here are the objectives of the USBCHA:

to collect and preserve the history of the Border Collie dog, to promote the breed through obtaining, maintaining and disseminating information pertaining to their breeding and training as working dogs; to promote dog trials, exhibitions, publicity for the breed, and to work specifically for the improvement and preservation of Border Collies as working dogs.

The BCSA, on the other hand, promotes "a spirit of encouragement and learning for the membership in all Border Collie activities, including but not limited to: herding, obedience, agility, conformation, tracking, companion dogs, flyball, and therapy dogs," with "support and education offered to all in their equally worthy endeavors" -- which is lovely, but as different from the USBCHA's goals as chalk from cheese.

Either people breed their dogs for stockwork or they don't, and if they don't, you are going to have to keep the bar lower than dirt and keep your "herding trials" dumbed way down and make titles possible for dogs that aren't interested in stock unless you rub peanut butter on the ewes' tails, and yes, that's been done.

Doesn't perseverance count for anything? Isn't it terribly unfair to demand such a high level of, well, actual ability?

No. There won't always be fences.