Tag: dogs
Pit Bulls: Man’s Best Friend Or Deadly Weapon?

Pit Bulls: Man’s Best Friend Or Deadly Weapon?

To give you some idea, I once kept eight beagles in my back yard. When my wife complained, I’d tell her to choose which ones needed to go. It was a pure bluff: some were prize-winning field trial hounds, others house pets. However, they all had eager, loving hearts, and she knew all their names.

But for all my foolhardy animal passions, I have never harbored a pit bull. Nor would I. Just as beagles are obsessed with tracking rabbits, pit bulls are preoccupied with fighting. It’s in their genes. They aren’t so much protective as simply belligerent.

Alas, that’s what some people like about them. Others appear simply naïve about what the animals are capable of. Statistics show that pit bulls are involved in four out of five—eighty percent—of fatal human attacks. (Only beagles and basset hounds have never been implicated.)

So here’s my story: three weeks ago, I was walking my two big dogs in a city park. Jessie and Maggie are a Great Pyrenees and a Great Pyrenees/Anatolian cross. Both are shepherd’s dogs historically bred to fight wolves. Weighing roughly 120 pounds, mine spent their first eight years guarding our farm against coyotes and cow-chasing dogs. Mostly they guarded cats, of which they’re fond, and farm animals generally.

Jesse appears to think he’s the king/boss dog of the world, which in his quite limited experience, seems true. I once saw him pitch into two coyotes pestering my neighbor’s goats. He shook one, threw it, and then started after the second, which took off at warp speed while its companion skulked away. Then Jesse picked up a goat kid and carried it unharmed to the herd.

Another time, he protected my wife from a charging mama cow. She wanted no part of him.

Nobody taught him these things; they’re what Great Pyrenees do. Jesse’s consort Maggie fears just one thing: him. Otherwise, she’s equally powerful and more aggressive. Maggie simply will not abide a challenge. It’s the Anatolian in her, a Turkish breed inclined to be territorial. When they were younger, they spent a lot of time play-fighting—perfecting their moves.

People they like in their aloof way; children, they love. Even so, everything else being equal, I wouldn’t keep these dogs in the city. But I couldn’t abandon them after nine years, and they’ve adjusted. Our backyard fence is impregnable, the gates padlocked shut. We walk several miles together every day. Maggie needed some persuading that dogs we encounter aren’t looking for trouble, but she’s intelligent and I’m large enough to restrain them, so all is well.

So there we were in Allsopp Park near the end of our outing. As we passed a playground crowded with small children on a sunny afternoon, I saw a large pit bull, unleashed and dead-heading toward us with unmistakably aggressive intent. I called for somebody to control him. But nobody there owned him, so nobody acted.

There were no preliminaries. The pit launched directly for Maggie’s throat. Wrong move. He got nothing but a mouthful of thick fur. In a flash, she’d seized his ear in her jaws, thrown her leg over, and pinned the crazy SOB to the ground. No way was she going to let him get back up.

Jesse tore into his hamstring.

A sane dog would have surrendered. But this was a pit bull.

Ordinarily, I could have pulled my dogs away. But not with a furious death grip on an 80 pound dog. I was afraid they were going to maim or kill him in front of the children and their mothers. Luckily, one fellow took Jesse’s leash and tried to pull him away as I tugged Maggie in the opposite direction.

Another young father grabbed the pit’s collar and lifted him off the ground without getting bitten — above and beyond the call of duty. A third guy produced a leash, and led the dog away with its terrified owner, a girl about twelve who’d left the front door open and had been chasing her dog across the park.

Maggie’s face was covered in blood, none of it hers. Disaster had been averted. My dogs were excited and happy: Is it supper time yet?

But what if I’d been walking dachshunds or cocker spaniels? What if nobody was there to help? It wasn’t the poor girl’s fault, the blame lay with whoever left a child alone with a deadly weapon.

So let the pit bull-fancier’s rationalizations begin. I believe I’ve heard them all. What they basically amount to, as one friend put it, is “Gee, he never killed a child before.”

Possibly this breed has a place in today’s world, although I can’t think what it is. Like smoking or riding a motorcycle without a helmet, owning a pit bull should be seen as anti-social and stupid.

It wouldn’t trouble me if it were illegal.

IMAGE: Flickr / Vincent Perrone

A Cat’s Defense Against Neuroeconomics

A Cat’s Defense Against Neuroeconomics

People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines…. [S]uch people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.
–Voltaire

In the popular imagination, there are dog people and cat people, although one rarely encounters them in real life. Me, I’m leery of anybody who dislikes dogs, although it’s necessary to make allowances for people with bad childhood experiences. Cat-haters are almost invariably men. Probably cats are properly spooked around them.

But do domestic animals love us back? Most pet owners find it an absurd question. What could be more obvious than a dog’s joy at welcoming us home after an absence? Than a cat’s curling up and purring in our laps?

For the longest time, strict behaviorists clung to pseudo-scientific fundamentalism claiming that talking about animals’ emotions was sentimental nonsense. Psuedo-science, as Carl Safina points out in his wonderful book “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel,” precisely because it required ignoring almost everything we know about their anatomy, evolutionary history and observed behavior.

“So, do other animals have human emotions?” he asks. “Yes, they do. Do humans have animal emotions? Yes; they’re largely the same. Fear, aggression, well-being, anxiety, and pleasure are the emotions of shared brain structures and shared chemistries, originated in shared ancestry.”

Enter now one Prof. Paul Zak, advertised as something called a “neuroeconomist”—a term hinting at mumbo-jumbo to me—who recently undertook an experiment to determine which domestic animal loves us best. Dogs? Or cats?

Judging by his Wikipedia profile, Zak is a handsome rascal who makes a handsome living advising corporate clients that we’d be better off if we went around acting like a bunch of Italians, with lots of hugging and kissing each other’s cheeks. He’s probably right too, although your mileage may differ.

Zak’s book, “The Moral Molecule” expounds upon the wonders of oxytocin, a neurotransmitter that gives people the warm-fuzzies when people they love (or attractive Italians) embrace them. He goes on TV a lot.

Anyway, at the request of BBC-TV, the professor set out to determine which species got the biggest oxytocin boost after ten minutes of being dandled by their owners, dogs or cats. So he assembled ten of each at his laboratory, took saliva samples, instructed their owners to play with them, and then took more saliva samples, which he analyzed for the happy hormone.

According to Elyse Wanshel’s summary in the Huffington Post, “Canines were proven to love us Homo sapiens five times more than their feline counterparts.”

That’s right, cat lovers, dogs rule!

Except, you know what? I don’t have a Phd in neuroeconomics but I do have an unusual orange tabby cat named Albert. His nickname is “The Orange Dog,” on account of how he’s the smallest member of our security team—consisting of two Great Pyrenees, a German shepherd, and Albert.

Albert has many unusual personality traits. Besides preferring canine company, he’s been known sit atop fence posts to let Mount Nebo the horse nuzzle him. The other horses, no. He wanders among cows as if they were as inert as hay bales. He’s totally devoted to me, perching on the arm of my chair watching ballgames, and lying on my chest at bedtime purring.

Then he retires to the bathroom towel closet, fishes open the spring-loaded door and lets it thump shut behind him. Around 5 AM—thump—he’s up and out the door. Many afternoons he accompanies my wife, five dogs and me on an hour-long walk around the pastures to my neighbor’s hay barn, rubbing on the dogs’ legs and panting like a little lion. Sometimes he stays the night out there hunting mice. A country cat, Albert’s wise to coyotes.

I’m absurdly fond of him, and the feeling’s clearly mutual.

However, Albert has two significant phobias: cars and strangers. He vanishes when company comes, keeps the house under surveillance from an undisclosed location and materializes after they’ve gone.

So carry him to a laboratory, let a stranger take a saliva sample, play with him for ten minutes and then let the stranger mess with him again?

Our basset hound Daisy would be fine with that. She loves riding in the car, has never met a stranger and pretty much drools all day anyway.

Elevated oxytocin levels? Albert would be a week forgiving such an indignity. He might bite. So would most cats.
What a farcical experiment. The moral molecule indeed!

So what does Albert feel when he’s lying there on my chest? I think basically what I feel: security, contentment, and deep affection.

Photo: A cat is seen in a window of a mud house. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

Endorse This: The Diagnostic Dogs

Endorse This: The Diagnostic Dogs

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Researchers in Britain have trained dogs for a remarkable project: Using the canine sense of smell — far more powerful than any machine — to help doctors save lives.

Watch this segment on how man’s greatest companion is finding yet a new role — as an expert in medicine.

Video via Reuters.

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You Don’t Domesticate Cats — Cats Domesticate You

You Don’t Domesticate Cats — Cats Domesticate You

As one who has rarely owned fewer than a half-dozen dogs and cats, people who don’t like pets make me uneasy. Often it’s about control issues. The sheer otherness of domestic animals offends their self-importance. How dare a mere cat ignore them?

Equally common are worries about cleanliness. No, you don’t know where that dog’s nose has been, but probably somewhere you wouldn’t put your own. Dogs, see, have very different opinions about what smells good. Even we country folk sometimes wish they weren’t so fond of fresh cow pies.  

But if you’re too fastidious for dogs, you’re too picky for me. A house without hair on the sofa cushions and scratch marks on the legs is as barren as a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Today’s subject, however, is felis domesticus, the ordinary house cat. Writing in Slate, David Grimm outlines an amusing dispute among academic scientists about whether or not the world’s most popular house pet is a domestic animal. As usual, it’s partly semantic. What exactly does “domestic” mean?

“Our feline companions don’t really need us, after all,” writes Grimm.

They can hunt for themselves, and they go feral without human contact.” Indeed, quite a few cats live wild, a threat to songbird populations that lifestyle commissars like to blame on house pets—at least partly, one suspects, because scolding cats themselves is so futile.

Cats appear quite indifferent to human wishes much of the time. That’s partly because, unlike dogs, they read your body language instead of your face. But it’s that sphinx-like quality that lends resonance to the argument.

Professor Wes Warren is a Washington University biologist who participated in a recent study tracing specific genome changes that distinguish the Near Eastern wildcat from my orange tabby friends, Albert and Martin—aka Inspector Clouseau and Kato the Houseboy.

Professor Warren is of the non-domesticated school, pointing out that house cats hunt small rodents as effectively as their wild ancestors, while dogs can’t fend for themselves in the wild. (Actually, I used to have a three-beagle pack that caught and ate rabbits and field rats all the time, but that’s a quibble.)

Dog breeds are among the oldest and most sophisticated forms of human bio-engineering. Dogs began following hunter-gatherer tribes contemporaneous with the discovery of fire. They’ve been selectively bred for centuries to perform an amazing variety of jobs from guarding livestock (my Great Pyrenees) to holding down couches (the basset hounds).

Cats arrived many thousands of years later with the development of agriculture, volunteering to do pest control in the granaries of ancient Egypt. As they were already awfully good at the one thing humans needed them for, cats have always been treated more like independent contractors—rodent control consultants, if you will.

Cats hunt, therefore they are. Unlike dogs, they’ve pretty much been in control of their own genome. Selective breeding came late, and mainly for cosmetic rather than behavioral reasons.

Even so, other scientists, such as Oxford University’s Greger Larson, think it’s foolish to call cats “semi-domesticated.”

“I’ve got two cats at home, and they’re as domesticated as any animal on earth,” he told Grimm. “There are homes where cats just sit on the couch, ignoring the dogs and primates that should be a major threat to them. That’s asking a lot of a wild carnivore.”

Which brings us back to my cats, Albert and Martin. The first time Albert met Maggie, our aggressive 110-lb. Anatolian-Great Pyrenees cross, she stuck her muzzle in his face and he jumped on her head. He was 12 weeks old. She adopted him as an honorary puppy, and that was that.

Albert’s other nickname is “The Orange Dog,” on account of his spending much of his time with our three-dog security team and other decidedly un-catlike behaviors. Such as following me out into the pasture to check on the cows and coming when he’s called—often on the run.

One time, I got really angry with the big dogs for picking on my wife’s elderly basset hound. I ran at them, intending to give somebody a swift kick. Albert ran with me, fluffed-up, back arched and bouncing sideways—ready to throw down. If there was going to be a fight, The Orange Dog had my back.

Domesticated? Many dogs wouldn’t do that.

Albert gave me a nasty bite the first time he discovered young Martin in my lap—a tiny abandoned kitten the dogs found in the woods. You’d never know it to watch Inspector Clouseau and Kato the Houseboy play-brawling now.

But here’s the thing: it was entirely their decision, an aspect of feline behavior the professors appear to have ignored. Fortunately, their demands are quite simple: in, out, feed me, pet me.

They are largely benign little tyrants, but make no mistake: Cats train people, not the other way around.

Photo courtesy of the author.