DOG BLOGS

Blogs I follow tend to follow fall into groups. One of those groups is animals, which is the longest and strangest spectrum of ideas and opinions. Part of that group is about dogs.

These are not your grandpa’s Terhune stories. One end of the continuum is safely anchored in reality, like the posts on Stephen Bodio’s “Querencia” (stephenbodio.blogspot.com) including Cat Urbigkit’s photos of her sheep-guarding Really Big Dogs, who enjoy sleeping on the sofa when they’re home. Steve and Libby Bodio raise and sell pups from gazehounds meant for hunting with hawks, generating another on-going stream of photos and stories. But even within the continuum of of Querencia, there is a span of assumptions from townie to country.

On his blog, http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/, Patrick Burns struggles to bring common sense to dog ownership. The most “grounded” of all the dog writers, he engages in the sport of “digging on the dogs,” by taking his terriers into the edges of farm fields so they can chase varmints down their holes. Then Patrick digs the varmint back out. Lately he has been digging the dirt on Crufts, the English dog show that is at the heart of the idea of “dogs with papers” indicating class status and prestige, even though the practice of inbreeding that sustains artificially defined “breeds” has resulted in a scandal: dogs that can’t walk, can’t breathe, and can’t reproduce without human intervention. Since the issuing of these “papers” and the “validating” shows are the source of a great deal of money, these dog breeders fight like badgers.

In the genetic scientific world there are two intriguing areas. One is investigations trying to understand the origins of dogs in paleohistory, which has resulted in some amazing research. For instance, ordinary red foxes were bred repeatedly for temperament, always selecting genes for tameness. In the end, the appearance of the foxes had morphed into near-dogs: ears that lapped over, tails carried differently. Evidently the characteristics of appearance and temperament were linked. The other is exploration of the dog genome itself.

In the beginning I used to carefully follow Boria Sax, whose writing about animals was informed by mythology and history. But then his H-Animal blog was invaded by officials of the Humane Society of the United States and now it’s another sentimental source of prescriptions from seemingly liberal but actually domineering assumptions, including an overwhelming preoccupation with cruelty. The HSUS has learned to co-opt people who think about animals by putting them on the payroll or giving out prizes.

Rather similarly, the National Animal Control Association has slid from deliberately being about officers in the field who respond to animal problems -- I know this because my boss founded the organization -- to being about maintaining a kennel properly. What happens over and over is that the stigma of being a “dog catcher” is so uncomfortable that the officers themselves plus their management try to redefine the field as cruelty investigation. In American society animals are innocent victims and that’s all there is to it.

Consequently, there has been a fuss over a recent story about pye dogs in a Mexican border reservation town, Duroville, especially in a trailer court with a lot of transient occupants who keep big fierce dogs in lieu of dependable law enforcement, dogs which feed themselves out of uncollected garbage. A dedicated program there is doing for the dogs what organizations have been doing for cats for quite some time: catching them, sterilizing them and returning them. The idea is that social and economic forces keep the area saturated with dogs, but why not let them reduce naturally over a period of years instead of kicking up a ruckus by impounding or shooting them?

Responders are split between assuming that the dogs are vicious, feral, and therefore dangerous and those who are shocked, SHOCKED that not all dogs are owned, licensed, and confined to yards. They persist in thinking that “all dogs” are one way or another, never that dogs respond to context or vary among themselves. And always the moral overtone: good dogs versus bad dogs, because they don’t quite dare say good people versus bad people, which is what they really mean. Of course, the humans in this place are regularly caught, imprisoned, and deported.

The local law enforcement tried to explain that many of the people and dogs concerned are from Mexico, where dogs are a tribe interwoven with the human tribe, who feed themselves on open land coyote-style, when there aren’t people around, but hook-up with humans when it’s convenient. (This is usually a cat strategy.) But in a trailer court with high human density, though there are probably lots of rats, the economy doesn’t work out.

For pure weirdness, quite self-consciously and unapologetically so, the winner has got to be from the “theory” community which is often expressed in art. http://www.antennae.org.uk/ melds together taxidermy, art, sex, concepts, philosophy in such an unsettling way that I would caution you not to open the site if you are from the soft and cuddly end of the scale. As they say on 2blowhards, NSFW. (Not Suitable For Worksites) Double exposing photos of people performing intimate acts over photos of animals engaged in the same acts , creating people who are covered with fur, assembling chimeras by combining parts of different animals, scrambling the expected by putting eyes or mouths in strange places -- it’s all very unsettling.

Bob Scriver used to make “fur-bearing fish” by putting a mink hide on a mounted trout. We all know jackalopes and some people have been to the Long Island, Washington, novelty emporium where there is a disconcerting “waterbeing” assembled of fish, monkey and “other” parts. In fact, after WWII (which I don’t think is incidental since war so vividly exposes our animal aspect) there was a fashion for lamps made out of the legs of deer or snap purses made from the scrotums of mountain sheep. Maybe it seemed more natural among the Blackfeet, who always used every part of the buffalo, though not for such modern items as lamps or change purses.

Clearly, these enterprises are inquiries into our relationship with animals. Many thinkers comment on how much difficulty we are having with BEING animals ourselves, especially when some animals (including the human ones) defy control, even when we are trying to control their suffering. We even escape ourselves. We cannot even keep our own species fed and sheltered. We cannot even keep from killing each other. We cannot stop our suffering.