A spot of truth

There has been much written about the bad path of dog breeding.

Unfortunately, much of it has been written by the very people who are ruining dogs, to try to say that they aren't doing it wrong, that breeding unhealthy dogs that yap all day or who have bad tempers, is fine - so long as they win at the dog shows.

That Shaking Spear dude was right, it does often mean something when: The lady doth protest too much.

For Example, when looking through public domain photos of dogs, most of the bird dog photos were NOT of dogs on point or dogs fetching birds - they were show shots of posed dogs, or pet dogs.

For photos of bird dogs actually doing the work, what were the 2 close ups that I could find (in public domain), A poodle, and a cocker spaniel.

Now if you even know squat about bird dogs, you know those aren't common breeds among bird hunters. But it makes sense that these would be the only two breeds in public domain.

Why? A woman had inherited her parents things, including a box of photos. There was only one photo of the house she grew up in. The family took photos of each other, but almost none of the outside of the front of the house.

And the one photo of the house? The yard was covered in snow. I said that I didn't know it snowed there. She said that it didn't, it had only snowed once in 20 years. That being a rare event, they took a photo, but had no photos of the house as it normally was.

We photograph the unusual, the hunting poodle or cocker -but not so much the dogs that are the usual hunter's dogs.

But a great lot of the stuff out there on dogs, is propaganda by dog breeders, and the people who make money off of the status quo in dogs, and who fear change might upset their applecart.

Terrierman's blog tells it like it is.
http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com

Retrieverman is another good honest dog blog that I read.
http://retrieverman.workpress.com

Merged blogs

If you have been following along, you noticed that these started out as separate blogs, listing each other.

Then all the blogs were to be merge onto one site, but to help both reader swith phone screens and readers with full size screens, it was decided to have 2 blogs, and import weekly updates from other blogs that might not post as often.

But then, after moving the blogs, it was found that there was no (known) way to just check some post (the new ones) and move them. Trying it without this feature, resulted in the receiving blog, including this one, being deluged with duplicate posts.

It was then decided to move to wordpress,
http://doghome.wordpress.com/
since it was not suppose to duplicate posts.

I'm guessing it is set up to be signed out of between downloads. This was not done (easier on this end) resulting in up to 8 copies of each post (as each blog had previously received it's own archives back and many the other's archives too.

Well, of the about 500 posts. Less than 200 made the grade, the others are gone, (unless saved by their original site), but the about 200 post (dubbed the "un-dead archives" because they keep popping back up) are now old archives on different sites. Most of them are intact over an the Darling blog.

It has been nearly a month, and posts here have strayed way off topic - I guess with the idea that dog post will all go to the doghome.wordpress site.

What can I say? The dog topics will return - where I don't know, probably over at doghome.wordpress, until then, you might want to skip all the unbridled, personal, off topic, sometimes tipsy posts that are on some of the blogs - unless laughter is your thing, and you like to read off topic stuff.

New dog posts will start again, at:
http://doghome.wordpress.com/
you can go there and mark it as a favorite so you can find it again.

Off Topic PETA & Schools

Where I lived when I was a kid, dog fighting was not functionally illegal. One Animal Control person, once told me that it had been illegal back then, but not for attending a dog fight, only for organizing one - and the fine was so low, that the dog fight sponsors made more money in each minute of the fight than what that day's fines would be, and that shelter risked having one of their officers corrupted each time they sent him to the fight to issue a fine, so they never bothered.

Whatever the excuse, while private people might be arrested for animal cruelty, dog fights were held in public places. They were only advertised through word of mouth - but dead dogs, and blood splatters indicated where they were held - as well as the pit structures themselves.

In school, teachers very often ridiculed people who said anything in an animals defense.

For example:
At junior high age, we got a new school board and new principal - I don't know why, maybe new houses were built somewhere in the district and different people moved in? Maybe it had to do with new federal guidelines? I don't know, I was only a child then.

One of the new changes, was a new literature book.

The new literature book had stories about dog fighting - no not criticizing dog fights, but about dog fighting. And we were assigned stories that had dog fights in them.

Why? I don't know. When I complained to the teacher, she said that we had been reading "girl's stories" in the younger grades and now were going to read "boy's stories".

One of the boys in my class said that after the teacher had said that, he could not speak up about the gross subject of the stories, which he and some of the other boys had been planning on complaining about as a group. Young kids are so easily manipulated by teachers like that, aren't they?

One of the boys did complain and the literature teacher just got mad. The principal came, and spoke to some of us - he said the same sort of line the literature teacher had used - that some (none that I knew of) the students liked these stories and that it was their turn to get the stories they liked.

Cleverly, these stories were mixed in with sports stories. It became a problem for me, because the questions on the tests could not be answered by having read the story. I read some of those stories until I could almost quote them - but still couldn't get the answers right on the test.

Like, after the story, the quiz might say:
"The score was 6 to 0, and Joe hit a home run, what was the score at the end of the story?" Unless you knew how the game was scored, you couldn't answer the question.

It did help when one of the boy's explained that baseball was about the same as softball - we did play "softball" and what our PE teacher could "hardball" was what the books called "baseball".

Another kid gave me a good tip - don't bother to read the stories, because these quizzes were never about the stories. When I complained to the teacher - she said that I should call up male relatives and have them explain the rules to me.

Perhaps it was the whole point, but some of the kids who could not read (the teacher read the quiz out loud, and you just marked a, b, c , or d on a sheet of paper) did better than most of the other kids.

Something was going on. Mixed in with all of this was the dog fighting stories. It could be that this was a way of trying to toughen up the boys because it was assumed that they would become soldiers - perhaps somebody somewhere upstairs thought we were heading into some prolonged battle which would draft all the young guys?

Perhaps the new principal just wanted a higher percentage of students to pass - so the found out what the would-be flunkers wanted to read aobut, and then loaded the class in their favor?

One has to be careful about drumming empathy out of young people - even if they are going to go into battle, because they usually return from battle and have to become part of a non-war society again.

In high school not only did the science teacher have dissection of live pithed frogs, but some of the boys would steal the mice after class and take them out and torture the mice to death.

When I complained to the teacher, the teacher got mad, and said that ONE of the boys had said he wanted to grow up to be a researcher, and therefor the first thing we all needed to learn to get through college (this was high school) was not to feel sorry for animals.

Why were teachers actively working to destroy empathy in their students? I don't know. But a few of them were. Perhaps they came from a generation who lived on farms, where everybody raised animals, and then killed and ate them - so every child had to learn not to care about the animals they had to care for.

This is one of the reasons why I don't get bothered by PETA wanting to teach animal compassion in school - it is a counter balance to some of the other teachers like my biology and literature teachers.

But I am not a vegetarian, and although I don't hunt, I don't blog against it either - it would be too weird for someone who eats stockyard animals to complain about hunting - the wild animal at least are free until they die.

Off Topic - Sympathy or Empathy?

Although I might call it "empathy'" if it a feeling for others who are different from us;
and "sympathy" when it is a more verbal identifing with others who are alike - my use of those terms might not jive with proper useage.

But two different ways of broadening your sense of what is "self" do exist.

The expanding out from yourself - that I am calling "sympathy",
and the 'casting your forcefield' away from yourself to protect something not next to you - which I am calling "empathy" since I have to use two different terms to describe two different things.

I guess one could call them "empathy 1" and "empathy 2", but they feel like different things to me, so I stick different labels on them - even though it might be like settlers labeling bison as "buffalo" and wapiti as "elk". Using familiar terms, perhaps in a different way?

OFF TOPIC. PETA or the brutes?

Most children develop some type of empathy or sympathy. (Those who don't often end up in prison).

I'm not an authority on the subject, but just from having been a child in school, and listening to the other kids, I could hear when children began to have feelings for the plight of others.

IMO, the children who first started to feel empathy did so by feeling sorry for the plight of animals - children seem more able to say "That poor dog!" or "Oh, that kitty must hurt - help him!" before they can see suffering in other people.

I don't know why this is. Maybe because some of these children had hard lives and were abused and neglected, and told not to complain about how they were (not) cared for?

Perhaps because children can't usually acknowledge the truth of their own situation in relation to the rest of the world - children are hardwired to get over it, and move on, without feeling sorry for themselves or expecting things to be different?

Or maybe, it is in us, like with so many other species, to not feel too much for others of our own kind because there is a basic conflict and competition between people which we know does not exist with animals - we know that people control animals.

Whatever the reason, many children seem to first feel empathy towards animals. Sometimes people next feel empathy towards the plight of people in other lands, then people close to home, and only very last, towards themselves.

It is hard to see your own suffering, if you have suffered, and not wallow in it, so the mind frequently moves on over it. It is a defence mechanism. It sometimes takes professional help (counseling) for a person to understand the things closest to them and their own life.

Other children, IMO the ones who develop these feelings later in childhood sometimes not until teenage years, develop feelings of sympathy first towards those most like themselves.

They seem to grow their feelings by first identifying with others, and realizing that there are other people out there who are like they are. Only slowly do they spread their feelings out - sometimes not until they have grown grandchildren.

For some people, their sympathies are saved for those most like themselves. It is common to read posts where people clearly hate other people just for being different from themselves, or who hate even close relatives who have different opinions.

This kind of sympathy, where it is reserved for those who we identify with, is NOT strong enough to prevent holocausts, the mistreatment of animals on a vast scale, or the stratification of society and injustices within.

OFF TOPIC. not at either pole.

I am not an extreme person. This has upset some people where I have posted comments, because at first they read me as "one of us" and then get upset when I agree with THEIR opposition, or someone hates something that I posted, but then just loves something that I later post on some other aspect of dogs.

I am not at the extremes. From my viewpoint, both PETA and it's opposites are all extremes. Sometimes my opinions will be what you like to read, sometimes they might not be in agreement with you.

I post for myself and a few people, but everybody is free to read it. But I'm not posting to please everybody, so if you read something you don't like - just remember that you are really reading posts not directed at you (unless you are one of the people who I expect to read this).

When it comes to dog fighting - I am 100% against it, and it is pointless to argue for it, it isn't something that I like or have any use for.

But I understand how hard it must be for those people who, by the time they were teenagers, had already learned everything they are ever going to learn. Some people grew up with dog fighting, but learned better, other people still haven't been able to get away from how they were raised and to move on to other hobbies.

Backyard cloning

When a bunch of dogs all look the same, it is easy to think of them as different from other dogs - to think of them as a breed.

By isolating the in season female dogs, (during the time they are able to get pregnant), and only permitting a male dog who looks like the her, to breed with her, PEOPLE separate dogs into groups of dogs that look the same.

These inbred dogs can be marketed as a breed of dog, because they "breed true" - the puppies will grow up to look like their parents.

Gene Puddler?

Why not cross the breed line?
(Like in "We can cross the color line, if we want").

Despite what dog books might have lead you to believe, dogs are NOT naturally separated into different breeds.

Some people, after looking through one of the breed based dog books, have concluded that different breeds of dog are different species - they are not.

Left up to the dogs, they will (size permitting) consider themselves all dogs, and Dobermans and Poodles, Boxers and Bassets, Pit Bulls and Golden Retrievers, will happily have puppies with each other.

It is PEOPLE who separate dogs from the big dog-canine gene pool, into little gene puddles called breeds.

Peta Compares Them 2 KKK?

I was going to add my comments into this - there are reason's why I believe that Peta might have compared dog show breeders to the Klu Klux Klan, but then I thought about it, and decided that I didn't want to have to post an apology to the KKK for comparing them to show dog breeders.

Yes, my opinion of dog shows is that low.

What could I post about a group that restricts breeding each to others that look like them?

And don't try to tell me that pugs can't be bred to beagles because then the pugs couldn't do whatever they were bred to do. Or that crossing an American Cocker with a mini poodle would ruin the hunting abilities of either.

And inbreeding to fixate a look? Do I hear Dueling Banjos?

And selling puppies from 2 parent dogs that both carry the same harmful mutation? That's a c----y thing to do.

And 'selling' puppies with co-ownerships with the breeder? Selling puppies with a rubber band clause (the breeder gets the puppy back if she wants it)?

Let's not even get into the rest of it.

Mutts are okay too.

The Eugenics Theory

People thought that if only the very best individuals in a species were allowed to have any offspring/ babies, then, with each 'improved' generation, the species would improve.

Like many ideas that seem good on paper, eugenics was based on a simple understanding of the subject which it was trying to change, when, in fact, the subject which was being tampered with, had more complex factors than what were known to the designers of the new belief structure.

It reminds me of some social theories. As much as people might criticize some of those social theories, they were not evil works, just stupid works. It is in the hard application of such stupidity that evil creeps in.

For example, the Marxist idea, was (basically) that everybody would work at what they could do, and at a rate which they were able (according to their age, gender, health, abilities), and that these community made products would then be distributed, as needed, to all people.

That's not an evil idea, just a really really naive to the point of complete stupidity, idea.

Because most people are basically not going to work as hard to help others as they are to help themselves.

You can tell people things like "beyond what you need to live, you have to give up half of what you earn to help the community - and if you earn loads of money, then you can only keep 5% of what you make which is over the minimum amount. People will still work if you say that.

But if you say, work and then we will decide what to give you - people don't work well, and they aren't happy. They become hard to manage. People like to control their own lives, just as much as control freaks want to control other people's lives.

And that is where I believe the Nazi image most overlaps with the purebred dog club image.

I believe that: Like the Seinfeld episode "The Soup Nazi" who made everybody do it his way, or "No Soup for You!", the "dog nazis" refers, not just to eugenics, but to the control freak aspects of purebred dog breeding and dog shows.


For example:
A good show shepherd MUST have xxx kind of hind legs.
The winning dog's ears must stand up, not flop over.
The good dogs aren't white, or brindle, or red...

...all these little details that dog show judges look for, purebred breeders are suppose to produce in their puppies, and which are written down on paper and called "The Standards".

You wont choose the best herding dog, pet dog, or guard by looking at his color or what type of ears he has.

And , I believe, that it is this insistence that "WE KNOW BEST - YOU DO IT OUR WAY!" that gets people called "soup nazi", "dog nazi", or "fashion police".

Labels

I WONT be transferring my personal chatter or off topic posts to "darling you are doing it wrong" - with 3 columns and no stretch, people would have to scroll too much.

I like the sister site for archives because it has 3 columns - but I like this site because it is stretch to fit screen - but that would be bad if you are on a phone sized screen.

I still have brush ups to do.

Different sites have labelled their posts differently. So I had posts labelled "bunny", "rabbit", and "rabbits". It makes sense, if you write on "rabbitS" in the abstract to label the posts in the plural, but when you find a photo, it is of one rabbit - so the label is not in plural. If I didn't make them the same - I would have a long list of labels.

But the bunny posts were about pet bunnies, and the rabbit photos were often about rodents with long ears (lagomorphs) that eat crops (our fields of food). After a couple of days, I decided on a policy - they would be "bunny" labelled. So if you are looking for rabbit post, they are there, but bunny labelled.

I still have to go back and clump the Police dogs, Military dogs, Sniffer dogs, War dogs, and people tracking dogs. I am going to call them Patrol dogs, since I heard a policeman call them that once.

I guess, if you are a policeman, you don't call them "police dogs". He said it went with "patrol car", so "patrol dog". And different people with dogs in the Vietnam war called them "patrol dogs" because "the dogs went on patrol with us". So don't look for labels like "search and rescue", look for "Patrol".

It is easier to add labels than to remove them when there are lots of unneeded labels.

Also, some post had 3 different labels. A person reading from the label list would find the same post 3 times. Rarely, I allowed a post to have 2 labels, most all of them are allowed one label only.

More tranfers.

I spent time looking at new templates. Most of them are mostly the same as the ones that are in your blogger site under layout "pick a new template" and then pick new fonts and colors.

Some of them are different but not better. Some of them look better but don't download well. Some of the sites offered free templates, but were really just a bunch of ads.

I used a test blog to try out the new templates. Some of them did not translate well and had to be deleted as they weren't functioning. I found some that I liked, but nothing that had everything that I wanted.

If a template did have everything I wanted, it probably would have been slow to download - sometimes I have great speed and my site downloads here very fast.

But I did find the nice 3 column one over at the sister site - I will post the source (on the other site) if it did not transfer automatically.

The original idea of sister sites, was that this one would have all the new posts in long form, and then that trimmed posts would be sent to the other site - but that can't be done, as I can't find an easy way to do it. I could write off line and then post it twice. Now I am not sure what I'll do.

Blog tranfer tips.

It is easy to transfer blogs and merge them using the upload to your computer, and the download into new blog buttons in settings. The hard part is sorting through the blogs, deciding which posts to publish in the new blog.

One blog's edit page was pristine. No multiple copies of posts. No trash posts which were saved into draft form, instead of saved into draft and then deleted. No photos that weren't published because they needed cropping or had people in them, but were still hanging out in drafts where they would be uploaded.

Other blogs had stuffed edit pages, full of multiple forms of posts, removed but not deleted photos - they took lots of work.

Next time, I know, get the blogs really ready to go, before transferring them - you can upload the complete blog into a folder and save it, then clean up the edit pages in the blog, and upload that form of the blog into another folder, then down load the cleaned up version to the new blog, and then download the old form of the blog back to it's original site. Be sure to save them right.

Blog transfers.

Well, it looks like I got all the posts (that are going to be moved) moved.

I did NOT do a perfect job, a few things that shouldn't have been deleted, I deleted - they could have been retrieved, the originals were still there, but with different blogs all mixed together it would have been a lot more work than what it was worth.

Since the posts have been moved, they all have the same "from" name, so I could not re-sort them by which blog they were from - this caused other problems too. Series which should have had their time stamps changed so they would all be together were hard to sort out.

Following the idea of deleting un-necessary photos to make the archives more readable, when I came to a series of unrelated photos - I deleted most of them, only to figure out later that I should have altered the time stamps BEFORE moving them.

Not that any of this came with any directions. Which was really weird because when I first started to go through the edit files, I had this feeling that I had done this all before. Yet I don't think that I have ever moved blogs before.

If I had been paid to move a blog, I would remember that. I know that I had started blogs and then lost interest in them - but I don't recall ever moving a blog.

Yet, when I started to go through the edit page, I felt I had done this before. I started out with 25 post per page, but I remember what trouble that caused before - it saved on scrolling, but then, the computer would automatically return to page #1, and when you have nearly 600 posts, that's a lot of clicks, to get to post #500.

I remembered that before, I decided to keep doing it as I had been, until the number of posts per page would be even with where I was - but I overshot it and the drop down menu didn't include the size clumping that I needed. (Sorry that I can't make that clearer - it is hard for me to put felt things into words.)

So I though "I will look at the numbers on the drop down menu, and if they match with my memory, then I probably have merged and moved blogs before. They matched perfectly.

I could have simply remembered what the menu said, perhaps from some time looking at it? It was weird though, because I felt like I had done this before, I knew things that it would have taken far fetched conclusions to know - unless I had done it before.

But how could I have written blogs, weeded through them, and still transferred over 600 posts, yet not remembered the blogs? (It was nearly 500 posts this time, trimmed to 270).

I don't believe in ESP or channeling info. I have been taking some new easy to digest vitamins this week - maybe that is it, I will have to stop taking them.

The weirdness spilt over into other parts of my life. While walking, I came up with ideas for posts - but after I got home, I discarded the ideas as not fitting in with what I usually do. I seldom watch TV, but that night, I was so fed up with clicking old posts all day, I didn't want to blog, so I turned on the TV.

It was a movie that I had not seen, it was on a premium station for the first time, the movie had nothing in it which felt familiar, but the different elements that I had had thought of on my walk were in the movie. It was creepy.

Things like that have been happening this week.

Mrs Bucket

I grumble and laugh about dog shows.

How can it NOT be laughable?
The seriousness that dog show people put on about dog shows is funny to me. To listen to people quote their dog's great-great-great-grandpa's show history is funny to me. It's like that Mrs Bucket (I mean Bouquet).

I want to say "Relax a little, your taking the dog's pedigree a bit too seriously".

Sometimes I even want to say "Tell me that you don't really believe in this dog show stuff!"
But I can't say that at a show, so I smile and nod.

How can it NOT cause me to grumble?
I like dogs. It is that simple. I like dogs.

I don't like it when somebody tells me that they raise dogs, and then they say that they don't like dogs, they wouldn't have a dog, except they needed the tax write off.

I like to talk with people, but I don't like to hear about how to put all your dogs in cages stacked in one room where they will be out of the way.

I like dogs. I don't want to raise dogs as genetic experiments. I don't want to raise dogs as objects to enter into shows. I don't want to raise dogs for money.

When I go to dog shows, I am looking for other dog lovers, who also like people.
Gotta find better place to shop for friends.
It is stupid to go to a tropical island to look for polar bears, or to the arctic to look for macaws.