Sweet Jeebus on a dinosaur [with Finals vids and Dewi Tweed goodness]

Because actual scientists are just big old snobs. jesus horses by wullagaru for threadless.

For decade after weary decade there have been chuckleheads claiming that working border collies aren't all that, and who needs a real stockdog nowadays, anyway, and oh — remember to buy a pup from my non-working kennel! It's such an unoriginal, predictable sort of background noise that by now most people with working stockdogs simply tune it out.

Retrieverman is the latest to troll these waters, with a post entitled, of all things, Intellectual honesty on the effects of trials and shows. [H/T: For the Pit Bulls.] The one bit of intellectual honesty you'll find in his post is this admission: "I know next to nothing about actual herding trials."

And I'll be darned if he doesn't proceed to write paragraph after paragraph demonstrating just how little he knows about working stockdogs and actual herding trials. Seriously, I can't wait for his "Don't know much about geology" post.

A few points. First: nice to know that the press coverage of the USBCHA Finals has made an impact. Working border collies are amazing dogs, and it can't be repeated often enough that the border collie's brains and biddability and athleticism are a direct result of rigorous selection for stockwork, as opposed to rigorous selection for a pronounced stop.

Point Two: if you think the following comment by BC Board moderator Eileen Stein is "the funniest bullshit [you've] ever seen," you might be as ignorant of working stockdogs as Retriever Man:

[Border collies] are like Alaskan Huskies in that they are bred to a working standard rather than an appearance standard, and they are a breed rather than a type in that they have been bred to that working standard long enough that they almost always meet that working standard better than any other kind of dog.
[...]
Alaskan Huskies don't have a registry and border collies do -- that's the only significant difference.

I think the part he missed is that working sheepdogs and racing huskies are bred for different purposes, but who the hell knows. And not that racing husky people concern themselves with bloodlines or anything like that.

Point Three: there is nothing esoteric about a USBCHA sheepdog trial. Any stockdog remotely deserving of the description should be able to gather stock, drive the stock to specific areas, and help sort and pen the stock. This isn't rocket science: I've seen Lhasa Apsos manage it in a small corral with tame sheep — which, I should emphasize, doesn't mean that Lhasa Apsos represent the gold standard of stock work, however proud of their efforts you may be. A really good stockdog will be able to accomplish those tasks in wide-open, unfamiliar terrain, in an efficient manner, with unfamiliar stock. That's what a USBCHA sheepdog trial tests, and if that's hard to understand, I'm Lady Gaga.

Finally, if you'd like to see some of the best stockdogs in North America demonstrating their prowess in September's 2010 National Sheepdog Finals [and I would dearly love to watch some of those runs again], head over to the Finals Web Cast page and sign up for their pay-per-view. As Heather Nadelman reports, "You can skip around in the video and watch it in chunks at your leisure — the clock only ticks against your purchased hours if you're logged into the player." At 400-some yards the Belle Grove trial field was smallish [to this westerner], but the sheep were plenty challenging and the best work was awesome. Yes, I'm looking at you, Riggs and Patrick Shanahan :~)))

*************

This isn't from our Finals, but what a nice vid it is: Richard Millichap's most awesome Dewi Tweed gathers sheep in the Welsh mountains. Enjoy! [For those interested in the border collie's "genetic bottleneck," Kinloch has a link to Tweed's pedigree, with the inbreeding coefficient numbers listed for his ISDS parents and grandparents.]

Stay classy, Brampton bureaucrats

For real.

The Brampton dogs are back home at last, safe and sound. Check out the happy photo of Ines Branco with her dog Brittany, the, um, so obviously not a pit bull, from the Brampton Guardian:


An independent veterinarian took one look at the two mixed breeds and said to the geniuses at Brampton Animal Control and City Hall, "Holy crap, anyone with enough neurons to make a synapse can tell these dogs aren't pit bulls. They aren't purebred anything. I can't believe you had to pay an 'outside expert' to tell you this. You must be dumber than a box of hammers. Give the dogs back already. Oh, and get over yourselves. Mean people suck."

Of course, the officials of Brampton couldn't just hand over the dogs and say, "We screwed up. Sorry." For pure spite, dishonesty and a last-minute dollop of abuse of power, it's hard to beat this:

Despite the vet’s ruling, as part of the agreement with the city, the owners had to agree to allow the dogs to be designated “potentially dangerous” and they must wear muzzles when out in public.

Branco paid the $50 for a license and picked up Brittany, but was shocked when he found out he would have to post a big red sign on his fence declaring a “dangerous dog” lives at the home.

“I have never seen anything like that in Brampton before,” Branco said.

Remember, these two dogs were never, not once, accused of running loose, accused of bothering neighbors, or accused of harming or threatening to harm a soul.

Do the Brampton bureaucrats have any idea how this makes them look? News flash, Brampton officials: whenever people see the sign [and I hope it's photographed and shared around the world], they'll be thinking about how cruel and stupid and malicious you are.

Here's a blank, folks. Feeling creative? Knock yourselves out ;~)

Click to embiggen.

Dogs still at risk in Brampton

Remember those two dogs in Brampton, Ontario? The dogs that 1) have never harmed or threatened to harm anyone; 2) have never been the subject of complaint by neighbors; 3) have never escaped from their yards or been found wandering loose; 4) have licenses and law-abiding owners; and 5) are by all accounts friendly, much-loved companions?

Yeah, those two: the ones facing execution for the crime of living in Ontario while having a short coat and a wide-ish skull.

The execution has been postponed, but the families are barred from visiting or even glimpsing their pets, and their family vet is likewise barred from checking on the dogs, which have been locked up for the better part of a month. [Habeas canis, anyone?]

On Saturday demonstrators rallied in support of the families and their dogs, and the bureaucrats are now "moving forward very cautiously."

The goal is to find a solution that works for everyone in the best way possible while respecting the legislation.

"Respecting the legislation" — Gah, I love that. Because defying a piece of crap legislation simply isn't done! Unless, of course, you happen to have a backbone and a shred of integrity.

For updates on the fate of the dogs in Brampton, keep an eye on the following blogs:
One Bark at a Time
KC Dog Blog
Social Mange

Edited to add a new bog covering this story: Brindle Stick. The more coverage of Ontario's epic BSL failure the better, sez I. Thanks to Lori for the heads up.

Brampton officials forget to pull heads in before shutting window. Again.

These two dogs are on death row in Brampton. Crime: not a damn thing. They're nice dogs, with loving - and very worried - owners. Brampton sez they're ticking time bombs, though, on account of being "pit bulls." So Brampton officials have to kill them. It's the law.

How on earth [a commenter wonders] can a city veterinarian, in good conscience, euthanize a healthy dog that 1) has never harmed or threatened to harm anyone; 2) has never been the subject of complaint by neighbors; 3) has never escaped from his yard or been found wandering loose; 4) has a license and a law-abiding owner; and 5) is by all accounts a friendly, much-loved companion?

How can animal control officers justify entering a family's home and taking possession of such a dog?

How can city bureaucrats justify their willingness to inflict such cruelty on a dog and such anguish on law-abiding citizens?

Beats the hell out of me. But it's apparently business as usual in the Ontario city of Brampton: two families are sick with worry and two dogs have been impounded and may be killed, and killed soon, because of Brampton's canine version of the one-drop rule. Doesn't matter if Momma Dog was a Boxer and Dad was an AmBull mix: there might be some pit bull blood in there somewhere, and we can't have that.

Seems Brampton didn't get the memo that ignorance, hysteria and urban legend are terrible grounds for legislation; and Brampton officials lack the balls, the brains and the integrity to take a stand against a crappy law that hurts citizens, kills good dogs and wastes the taxpayers' hard-earned money. And that's where things stand tonight, in 2010, in Ontario, Canada.


H/T: One Bark at a Time

Related:
From Brent's awesome KC Dog Blog: The Problems with BSL - Brampton, Ontario Edition [be sure to check out the links]

They don't call it the Athens of East Central Missouri for nothing

Honest to God, Aldermen of Troy, just pretend you have enough neurons to make a synapse and admit you don't know what you're talking about.

In an unanimous vote Monday evening, the Troy Board of Aldermen passed an ordinance prohibiting the ownership of pit bulls within the City of Troy. This followed several complaints of these dogs running loose and a fatal attack on a pet dog by two pit bulls.

In the ordinance, the board of aldermen 'finds that pit bull dogs are dangerous and potentially hazardous to the community because the breed possesses characteristics of aggression, strength, gameness, viciousness, predaceousness, unpredictability and savageness not possessed by other breeds of dog.'

The ordinance further defines the "pit bull dog" the Staffordshire bull terrier, American pit bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier breed and any mixed breed of dog which contains an element of these breeds.

"Contains an element"? Based on what? DNA? Pedigree? A brindle coat? The One Drop Rule for dogs? Paging Dr. Science!

Read the whole big bag o' stupidity here.

Related: Almost too absurd to be true

I speak illegal alien

And I belong to la raza, just like all my relatives in... wait for it — U.S. law enforcement and the U.S. military! And education and entertainment and medicine, OMG, how scary is that. We're everywhere!

It's enough to scare Tom, G. Gordon, Rush and Newt right out of their wits.

What if a white man had said what SCOTUS nominee Maria, er, Sonia Sotomayor blah blah blah blah blah?

Get back to me on that after there have been latinas from hardscrabble backgrounds, and only latinas from hardscrabble backgrounds, on SCOTUS for... gee, I dunno, say the better part of two centuries. Sheesh.


In other news, Tom Goldstein of the most excellent SCOTUSblog has actually studied each and every one of Judge Sotomayor’s race-related cases. From his SCOTUSblog post:

In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She particulated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.

Read Goldstein's complete post here.

Next-to-last word goes to Peggy Noonan: "Republicans, let's play grown-up."

And last word to Matt Yglesias:

Conservatives ought to picture an anti-abortion, gun-owning, married, male, prosperous, Cuban-American small businessman living in the suburbs of Miami. Picture him reacting to the news of Sotomayor’s nomination. Perhaps he’s happy in some sense to contemplate a Latina on the bench, but perhaps not. Either way, the guy’s still a solid conservative. Now picture him listening to G. Gordon Liddy say “I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, ‘the race.’” That’s not going to play well.

[Oh, and it's So-toe-m'YORE, Mark. Easy-peasy.]

Related:
A Sotomayor core dump
Sonia Sotomayor and Identity Formation
Losing the Crucial “White People With Spanish Last Names” Vote
They Can't Help Themselves

Greenwald on hate-mongering

The most excellent Glenn Greenwald writes about bigotry, stereotypes and slaughter:

Obviously, there is nothing at all wrong with discussing incidents of violence, including those committed by Muslims or Arabs. But when those are the only incidents one discusses to the exclusion of all others, and when one highlights those incidents over and over, there is obviously a point being made by the person engaging in that behavior. It would be as if someone created a website for the purpose of posting every story of every actual crime committed by African-Americans, or by Jews, or other minorities, but no others. There are such sites, of course, but one never hears about them, because they are white supremacist sites outside of the mainstream.
[...]
If there is a prevailing view of Arabs and Muslims as hopelessly primitive savages, is it really all that bothersome if we slaughter lots of them? One could even say it's their fault for having brought it on themselves.

Related:
*John Walcott: Truth is not subjective

Worse than Vick

Because they pay lip service to the dog/human bond, and at the same damn time help to arrange a massacre.

Because they have a script. Because they've spent years rehearsing it.

"I think the HSUS is now permanently on my shit list[...] What utterly scummy, disgusting, hypocritical behavior."
[John Sibley]

Because Sue Sternberg is their pit bull "expert."

Because they don't know squat about dog behavior, and don't care to learn.

Because ACOs and/or shelter workers in Wilkes County, NC were forced to kill 146 dogs, including some 60 puppies, in a single day. Because a foster home that had nursed sick puppies to health was ordered to return the pups for killing. Because the pup in the post below never had a chance.

And because Wayne Pacelle, John Goodwin and other HSUS apparatchiks didn't "euthanize" a single dog themselves. Wayne and John didn't even have to watch. Michael Vick, take note: you are not in their league when it comes to killing dogs.

Who gets to do the awful deed; the dirty work? The low-wage shelter workers who have no say in the matter; usually the same people who have cared for these dogs, who've gotten to know the dogs and have seen for themselves how truly wonderful most of them are. How are they feeling right now? I think I know. [Bad Rap]

Mighty "humane" of you in every respect, wasn't it, HSUS? How proud and happy you must be. Here's one you missed:

Former Vick fighting dog Hector just aced his Therapy Dog certification. [Screen grab of Hector with Roo Yori in July 2008.]

Blog posts from blogs with spot-on coverage:

Numb [Bad Rap]
HSUS and the Ongoing Campaign to Kill "Rescued" Bust Dogs [YesBiscuit!]
HSUS in its own words. [B-More Bulldogs]
Court Order Issued to Euthanize Seized Dogs [Best Friends]
The Death of Hope at HSUS [Nathan Winograd at No-Kill Nation]
Dogs get death sentence [John Sibley]
TIME TO TAKE THE 'HUMANE' OUT OF HSUS [Caveat]
The answer is "kill", now what's the question? [KC Dog Blog]
Of all the things I'm glad I'm not [Save the pit bull, save the world.]

The "H" in HSUS? It stands for hypocrisy.

This tyke is too dangerous to live, says "expert" John Goodwin of the HSUS, who explains that "re-training" this puppy to prepare it for adoption would be "very difficult and expensive." I'm serious — he actually said that. John Goodwin makes Michael Vick look like a piker, if you ask me. This pup is one of 127 dogs [including some 60 puppies] slated to be killed following a dogfight bust in North Carolina.

It may be too late, but call and fax anyway. Tell these officials that it's dead wrong to kill dogs without evaluating them, without allowing anyone to speak on their behalf. Tell them to listen to real experts — the ones that have offered to help these dogs.

Please call and fax.

Wilkes County Board of Commissioners
110 North Street
Wilksboro, NC 28697
Phone: 336-651-7346
Fax: 336) 651-7568

Wilkes County Attorney Tony Triplett
Vannoy, Colvard, Triplett & Vannoy
922 C Street
P.O. Box 1388
North Wilkesboro, NC 28659
Phone: 336-667-7201
Fax: 336-838-7250
E-mail: ttriplett@vannoylaw.com

District Attorney Tom Horner
500 Courthouse Drive Suite 2022
Wilkesboro, NC 28697
Phone: 336-667-6361 or 667-2994
Fax: 336 667-7999

What just fries me about all this is that if you want to talk about dogs with psychological issues, abused dogs with enough crazy to make them "very difficult" to rehab — fearful, unsocialized dogs that need patient, compassionate, experienced caretakers — consider the dogs rescued from puppy-millers. Dogs like these.

You ever hear the HSUS call for the mass killing of mill-rescues? Hellz no. But that pit bull puppy in the photo up above? The HSUS wants some poor ACO to kill that pup and dozens like him. Sixty pups...!

And you know what else makes me so mad I could puke? The HSUS uses pit bulls to raise money. "Help us care for the Vick dogs! No, wait — the Vick dogs should all be killed! But send us money anyway! Look, here's a picture of a sad pit bull."

The HSUS makes my skin crawl. They're lobbyists, all right: lobbyists for the mass slaughter of good dogs.

Related posts:
What a terrible crime! We must execute the victims at once.
Straight dope on pit bull rescue

PETA wins coveted ALA "Doublethink" Award

The American Language Association has announced the winner of its coveted "Doublethink" Award, presented to the individual or group which best illustrates the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and fervently believing both. From today's press release:

"The American Language Association is pleased to award this year's Doublethink to PETA. PETA members simultaneously believe

1) that all pit bull-type dogs should be killed by animal control workers rather than evaluated on an individual basis and offered for adoption — thereby promoting not merely a type of profiling based entirely on appearance, but a form of canine "genocide" as well; and

2) that the American Kennel Club, a dog registry and dog show licensing group, is similar to the Ku Klux Klan, a hate group with 'a record of terrorism, violence, and lynching to intimidate, murder, and oppress African Americans, Jews and other minorities and to intimidate and oppose Roman Catholics and labor unions.'

"The ALA further wishes to recognize PETA's imaginative use of Ku Klux Klan imagery and ideology during Black History Month — an action that helped to corroborate PETA's true-believer syndrome in the view of the judges.

"This is the second time that PETA has received an ALA award. Founder Ingrid Newkirk was honored in 1989 with the "Most Inaccurate Definition" Award for defining symbiosis as 'enjoyment at a distance.'"

Pit bull... er, "pit bull" attacks

"The captured dog was a male pit bull." And I'm Vladimir Putin. Screen grab from The Indy Channel.

Speaking of regional differences: Selma over at Caveat has a nice collection of "pit bull" photos. If it has lop ears, four feet and a short coat... But what do I know? Maybe those animals are subspecies of pit bull. Pitbull americanus floridensis. P. a. californicus. As opposed to, I dunno, Canis lupus familiaris.

I particularly remember the dogs below, from a tragic case in Virginia. [The parents were charged with murder.] I commented on PBF:

There were no witnesses -- parents were upstairs. In their condemned home [sigh].

The doctor quoted in the article trots out the old bite-strength myth: "[Pit bulls are] definitely one of the stronger breeds their bite strength is probably the strongest; six to seven times that of a German Shepard." [It's shepherd, for crying out loud! You'd think a newsroom would have SpellCheck.] Strange to read the doctor's words, and then look at the small, malnourished animals:

The breed-bashers and breed-banners can't quite define exactly what a pit bull is, but they by God know one when they see it. And if this reminds you just a wee bit of the One-Drop Rule, well, you're not alone.


Related posts:
Dog bites and bite force
Bite force links from PubMed
“Dangerous breeds,” dog bite statistics, and the Merritt Clifton report

Ingrid Newkirk hopes your dog gets cancer

Not just Ingrid Newkirk, and not just any cancer, either.

Ingrid Newkirk of PETA and R. Rex Parris, the Mayor of Lancaster, California, both hope your dogs get bone sarcoma. Bone cancer, for crissakes! It's the law. Move out of town, minority scum, or we'll kill your Rottweilers and your pit bulls! Ingrid says: I love this law! Let's kill all the pit bulls!

This just in: when you slap a mandatory spay/neuter law on a breed like the Rottweiler [and in 2009, what society hacks off body parts as punishment?], you are sentencing dogs to death by cancer. Don't believe me? Here's the PubMed abstract. Excerpt:

Risk for bone sarcoma was significantly influenced by age at gonadectomy. Male and female [Rottweilers] that underwent gonadectomy before 1 year of age had an approximate one in four lifetime risk for bone sarcoma and were significantly more likely to develop bone sarcoma than dogs that were sexually intact.

What part of these findings don't Ingrid Newkirk and Mayor R. Rex Parris understand?

Seriously, people — bone cancer. One in four Rotties will suffer from it, if spayed or neutered before a year of age. [Other large breeds are also at risk.] Lancaster wants them all "fixed" before they're four months old.

It should be glaringly obvious by now that Newkirk, the so-called "animal rights" pooh-bah, doesn't give a rat's patoot about dogs. She wants them gone from our lives, one breed at a time or in bunches, by lingering deaths or quick ones, by stealth or by whatever canine version of Jim Crow she can espouse.

And Mayor R. Rex Parris doesn't give a rat's patoot about his law-abiding fellow citizens. He's happy as a clam to impose a death sentence on their dogs and subject families to the anguish of losing a friendly companion to confiscation or cancer. Maybe you shouldn't have let your tattoo show when you took the dog for a walk, eh? Maybe your son shouldn't have dressed like a normal middle-school student the last time he was in the front yard playing with your new Rott mix, eh? That'll teach you. Lancaster doesn't want your kind.

And for the record: When Newkirk says, among other truthinesses, "Pits and pit mixes are responsible for more attacks than other dogs - not just fatal attacks, but ones in which an eye or limb or self-confidence is lost for life," she's lying through her teeth. She's talking out of her elbow. She has no verifiable studies — because there aren't any — to back up her rant o' crazy. Don't take my word for it: pick up the phone, you folks who call yourselves journalists, and run Newkirk's nutty quotes by the real experts at the CDC and the AVMA.


What sort of mayor writes a bad law with the intention of wielding it selectively against people he doesn't like? What sort of person tells lies in order to have good dogs taken from their families and put to death?

[And why, oh why is anyone still listening to PETA?]

"Dogs deserve justice" — the irony, it burns!


Related:
PETA wants to kill my dogs -- and yours
Dogs white people like

The worst...! bloggers...! in the woooorld...!!

How the mighty have fallen! [Shut up, S. J. Perelman.] The Los Angeles Times used to be a splendid, not merely solvent but proud and prize-winning newspaper with money to burn and a worldwide staff of excellent reporters. Today the paper is a wan tabloid on the edge of bankruptcy. Most of the journalists are gone. Drifting in their wake: a shuffle of press-release collectors, some of whom love love love animals. Their blog at the Times is called L.A. Unleashed, and it's so horribly, painfully bad that I could beat my head on rocks.

David Foster Wallace describes the phenomenon: "the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved."

Unleashed operates like this: Post a press release. Count comments. Repeat. "What do you think -- is PETA right on or out of line?" I know fourteen-year-olds who can track down facts and ask sharper questions than these people. Blogging doesn't relieve you of the responsibility to be honest and knowledgeable about a subject. Blogging means you should be more honest and more knowledgeable.

Is Unleashed the worst blog on earth? It's quite possibly the worst blog published under the aegis of a major newspaper, or what used to be a major newspaper. I suspect the bloggers are paid per comment and poked with sharp sticks for attempting what reporters in the old days called "research." They are that fact-averse.

Bill Fosher:

[I]t seems that the approach is to do one-source, non-critical stories. If anything, the approach to blunting this seems to be to do a follow up story that provides the same level of credulity and obsequiousness to the opposing view a day or two later.

Efforts at synthesizing information, critical analysis, and good old fashioned truth squadding are down the toilet...

Can you imagine Jim Murray as an Unleashed blogger? OMG, I have to go scrub my brain with bleach now. Rest in peace, L.A. Times. I knew you when you were a real newspaper [weeps].

Dammit, dammit, dammit

Wrong and wronger.

I could beat my head on rocks. Two dogs killed a man this afternoon in a dusty, unincorporated little 'burb off the 60 Freeway west of Riverside. A family lost their grandfather the week before Christmas. And the torch-and-pitchfork crowd of breed-banners will bring of the stupid, as they always do, and make me fear for my good dogs.

Like most fatal dog attacks, today's was "a perfect storm of bad human-canine interactions — the wrong dog, the wrong background, the wrong history in the hands of the wrong person in the wrong environmental situation." [That's Randall Lockwood's concise definition, from this article.]

The first hundred or so Google News results were all "SoCal grandfather mauled to death by pit bulls," and the story, with that headline, ran on news websites from Los Angeles to Houston, Jerusalem and Australia. Thanks so much, AP. Just before midnight the dependable Riverside Press-Enterprise ran their [vastly superior] report:

Rubidoux man mauled to death by own dogs

Two dogs mauled their 60-year-old owner to death Friday afternoon when he stepped into the backyard of his Rubidoux home to smoke, officials said.

Gerald Adelmund was declared dead at the cream-colored house in the 5700 block of Kenwood Place after deputies pulled him inside, said Riverside County sheriff's Sgt. Dennis Gutierrez.

"This is an unfortunate, very tragic accident," Gutierrez said.

He said he did not know why the dogs attacked Adelmund or who dragged him into the house.

The dogs were described as a 4-year-old, 107-pound male, part pit bull and part mastiff, and a 52-pound female pit bull, about 6.

The dogs were euthanized Friday by the Riverside County Department of Animal Services, with the permission of Adelmund's relatives, and are being tested for rabies, said Animal Services spokesman John Welsh.

The family also authorized euthanizing the female's nine puppies, but it wasn't clear Friday if the puppies had been killed, Welsh said.
[...]
Other neighbors said they have been afraid of the dogs for months and described them as vicious.

Josie Peña, who lives in the house behind Adelmund's on 29th Street, said that two small pit bulls the family bought a few months ago fought each other, and would growl and snap at her family through the chain-link fence that divides their property.

She said Adelmund's large male, which he owned for years, was always playful but became more aggressive when the other dogs arrived.

"I haven't gone out in my backyard for three months because I can't stand the way they are," Peña said.

So we have a backyard breeder, several backyard dogs [unsocialized, untrained, iffy temperaments], nine puppies: the wrong dogs, "the wrong background, the wrong history in the hands of the wrong person in the wrong environmental situation." What a needless tragedy. And while there is never a "better" time for such misery — the week before Christmas. Damn.

What a terrible crime! We must execute the victims at once.

And they did. The ironically named Humane Society of Houston, Texas took in 187 dogs after undercover agents and other investigators broke up "what officials described as one of the largest dogfighting rings in the country," and killed all 187. No experts were consulted and no temperament tests were administered ["[a]lthough some were not aggressive toward people"] — almost as if the Houston Humane Society were living in a parallel universe where the Michael Vick story got no airplay. Unbelievable.

So, to review: pit bulls bred to fight are among the most human-friendly dogs on earth. Many pit bulls bred to fight don't want to fight. Pit bulls that don't get along with other dogs can, with basic management, be great companions even in a multi-pet household.

Check out the poor dog in the photo: starving, ill, submissive and friendly, wagging his whole rear end at the photographer. [Photo from Texas Department of Public Safety via the NYT.] This dog isn't a monster. He isn't a separate species. He's on the small side: in good health he'd probably weigh under 40 lb, like most gamebred pit bulls. He's a friendly dog in desperate need of some good care. There are excellent foster homes in Texas and around the country that would have been glad to help this dog. Houston Humane killed him.

Ah, but they've chosen to devote their time and resources to "nice, adoptable" dogs. Isn't that best?

Sure. Let's kill all senior dogs, all shy dogs, all dogs over 20 lb, and all dogs that would be kicked off Cute Overload. Better yet, let's kill all stray cats and dogs and give the money we spend on animal shelters to homeless people. While we're at it, we can give all we own to the poor and eliminate funding for other scientific research until a cure is found for cancer. See how this argument spins on and on? So I adopted a pit bull instead of a "nice, worthy" dog — I didn't mail a check to Oxfam this month, either. Anything else you'd like to lecture me about?

Seriously, Houston Humane people — when you have knowledgeable rescue groups and experienced foster homes volunteering to help take dogs off your hands, and you tell those groups to take a hike, give us a break with the "death was more pleasant than what they had to exist for" excuses. You know better.

As for the dogfighters themselves — according to the NY Times article, they're hardly the upstanding citizens you read about in the Stratton books. But then, they never were.

In between screaming obscenities at the animals locked in combat, Sergeant Manning said, the participants smoked marijuana, popped pills, made side deals about things like selling cocaine and fencing stolen property, and, always, talked about dogs.
[...]
The fight usually ended when a dog refused to cross a line in the center of the ring to confront the opponent, known as “standing the line.” Such dogs were usually drowned or bludgeoned to death the next day, officials said.

“These guys take it very personally,” Sergeant Manning said. “It’s a reflection on them.”

Most of the dogs seized were kept outside in muddy yards, chained to axles sunk in the ground, with only six feet of tether and no shelter, beyond, in some cases, a toppled plastic 40-gallon barrel. All suffered from multiple parasites, veterinarians said.

And Houston Humane couldn't find it in their heart of hearts to let even one of those 187 dogs live. You've raised that "blame the victim" bar to a whole new level, Houston "Humane."

Indifference to the truth is worse than lying: BSL and the curse of false equivalencies

The truth is not "somewhere in the middle."

Here is the truth about breed-specific legislation, from veterinary animal behaviorist Dr. Karen Overall: "Breed specific laws are not based in science. [Laws] banning breeds will not make you safer, and the illusion that they will do so is dangerous to humans and unfair to dogs."

The facts back her up. So why are various city councils so determined to ignore the science? Because it's easier to imagine that the truth is somewhere in the middle. It requires less courage and a lot less work. Russell Baker — quoted by the late, great Molly Ivins back in 1987, so help me, and things haven't gotten better — explains how "balance" works. Boldface is mine:

In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk. Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won't work? We give you another who says they will.

The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.

And here is Ivins herself [both quotes from her book Who Let the Dogs In?]:

The American press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing points of view. Thus, if the press presents the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done the full measure of its journalistic duty.

This tendency has been aggravated in recent years by a noticeable trend to substitute people who speak from a right-wing ideological perspective for those who know something about a given subject. Thus, we see, night after night, on MacNeil/Lehrer or Nightline, people who don't know jack about Iran or Nicaragua or arms control, but who are ready to tear up the pea patch in defense of the proposition that Ronald Reagan is a Great Leader beset by comsymps. They have nothing to offer in the way of facts or insight; they are presented as a way of keeping the networks from being charged with bias by people who are replete with bias and resistant to fact. The justification for putting them on the air is that "they represent a point of view."

The odd thing about these television discussions designed to "get all sides of the issue" is that they do not feature a spectrum of people with different views on reality: Rather, they frequently give us a face-off between those who see reality and those who have missed it entirely. In the name of objectivity, we are getting fantasyland.

Now imagine a city council meeting, which shouldn't be too much of a leap. Members of the city council are 1) debating whether to ban certain dogs based not on their behavior or temperament but on their physical appearance, and 2) turning their backs on the concerns of law-abiding citizens whose good dogs have never harmed or threatened to harm anyone.

There are two opposing points of view.

• Strongly opposed to breed bans are the real experts at the CDC; the AVMA; the authors of A Community Approach to Dog Bite Prevention; and virtually every competent dog-trainer, veterinary animal behaviorist and humane organization in North America.


• In favor of breed banning: someone who quotes an odd "study" lacking citations and footnotes and filled with misspellings, misstatements and some of the nuttiest dog behavior analysis since Thurber's mother.

And the city council, if it is sufficiently replete with bias and resistant to fact [not all of them are, thank God], will pat itself on the back for its "balance" and cast its deciding vote in favor of those who have missed reality entirely.

"We create our own reality," as the man said. The truth is somewhere in the middle! So we ignore science, we fill law-abiding citizens with anguish, and when we feel like it, we confiscate and kill their good dogs.

*************

Those who like to keep their bullshit detectors honed might want to check out the links in the Vagabond Scholar's posts on Faulty Argument Patterns and False Equivalencies. H/T to Batocchio for the Molly Ivins lead.

[Universal B.S. Detector Watch from Gizmodo.]

Come down off that ledge, Selma!

B-Rock's birth cert. Click for big.

Selma, as we both know, you can't cure stupid. For instance, there will always be people who are convinced that Barack Obama is an Arab terrorist. Along similar lines, there will always be people convinced that "pit bulls" pose a unique threat [and by "pit bulls" these poor souls mean all dogs of maybe two dozen breeds, and mongrels that resemble one of those breeds]. Gosh, there's even a

highly aggressive behaviour unique to pit bulls, not exhibited by any other type or breed of dog

which is, um, about as truthful and accurate as Barack Obama's "birth certificate" from Kenyatown, Kenya, shown at the top of this post.

Furthermore,

pit bulls have a tendency to be unpredictable and [...] even apparently docile pit bulls may attack without warning or provocation.

Sweet Jebus. Nope, you can't cure stupid. The Ontario [Canada] Court of Appeals decision [the one stating that a ban on "pit bulls" will somehow protect Canadians from dog bites] is total, absolute, unadulterated batshit craziness. But change will come. Judicial batshitocity will eventually be revealed for the ignorant, bigoted nonsense it is, and "pit bulls" will survive their detractors. Remember the Netherlands...!

From the mixed-up files of the court of FUBAR —

Salem Village, Massachusetts, 1692: nineteen convicted witches are executed; at least four women accused of witchcraft die in prison; a four-year-old girl is accused of witchcraft and imprisoned for eight months; an elderly man is pressed to death; and two dogs are executed — hanged — as suspected accomplices of witches. Witchcraft hysteria comes to a screeching halt when the governor's wife is rumored to be a witch and the governor says, "You people? Are insane. Go home."

Fast forward to 2008 -- Salem is the Wicca capital of the known universe. Witch City.

Washington, D.C., 1857: Chief Justice Roger Taney rules that once and future slave Dred Scott is shit out of luck, since he has no standing to sue for his freedom in federal court.

[U]nder the terms of the U.S. Constitution, blacks were not — and never could be — citizens of the United States. At the time of the Constitution's ratification, Taney wrote, blacks were "regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit."

Fast forward to 2008: the black guy is going to win the election for president. Also: pit bulls will survive.

West Coast of the U.S., 1942: Civilian Exclusion Order No. 346 states that all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, are to report to assembly centers, where they will live until being moved to permanent "Relocation Centers." The L.A. Times editorializes:

A viper is nonetheless a viper whenever the egg is hatched - so a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents - grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.

Fast-forward to 2008: the L.A. Times has endorsed Obama for the presidency, Muslim dad [and Kenyatown birth cert] notwithstanding.

Pit bulls will survive the Ontario nightmare. Pit bulls will survive because the culture of fear and ignorance is circling the drain, and because more and more smart, principled people own pit bulls and know them and love them. C'mon inside now, Selma -- we'll have some tea, hug the dogs, take yoga breaths and look at FrogDog's puppy photos.

[Huge, huge thanks to Selma -- Caveat -- for her tireless efforts on behalf of justice and basic sanity north of the border. Elle a besoin d’être consolée.]

Related:

Ohio

Child killed by dog in Ontario, Canada

Other BSL posts

"My friends, I googled her"

The vetting of the person who might be, as the cliche goes, "a heartbeat from the presidency" consisted of a Google search conducted the day before the pick was announced. Apparently. And by people who had never heard of MySpace. I'm not making this up.

"I really hope McCain did his homework," said David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush. "I cannot stifle a growing sense of unease that he didn't."

On Monday, the McCain campaign dispatched lawyers to Alaska in a move described as an attempt to manage a growing crowd of journalists who have traveled there to inspect Palin's background. But the move raises the impression that the McCain campaign didn't know everything about his No. 2 and is now racing to learn what it can while trying to avoid tough questions about the Arizona senator's decision-making process. [Source.]

We're pretty familiar with the Arizona senator's decision-making process now, thanks.

"Fundamentally, of course, this is about McCain. And the real issue here is what this slapdash decision says about his judgment." Time to play the "attempts by the left to destroy her" card: 3... 2... 1...

"Here's a story for all the defenders of the pit bull"

Dear L.A. Times Unleashed:

Thank you so, so much for the touching story of Angel the pit bull! If it weren't for stories like this, we pit bull defenders would always wonder if our pets might "turn" on us like furry time bombs. Thanks to you, we finally have proof that our dogs are happy and friendly and deserve to live! We defenders of the pit bull can't thank you enough for posting this story just for us! And not to nag or anything, but could your editors print "a story for all the defenders of Mexicans" sometime? That would totally rock. Thanks again!

PETA wants vegan message on border fence

Because when you are an illiterate Mayan Indian from Guatemala and you have risked your life to escape the desperate poverty, the political corruption and the human rights atrocities in Central America and are finally within reach of the only hope of a better life that you will ever, ever have, the one thing guaranteed to make you want to turn around and walk all the way home is the prospect of being forced to subsist on Happy Meals for the rest of your life, since there are apparently no fruits, vegetables, beans or tortillas in the entire U. S. of A.

I'm sure any connection between this latest publicity stunt and the fact that PETA is, like, 99.9% white is pure coincidence.