The Legend of Uno and Duo

Here's a little change, which I hope some viewers will find amusing.  It might be called 'parable as legend.'

http://youtu.be/DQz1mJxju0U

The Dog Is from Where?

An intellectual battle rages between researchers centered around the UCLA lab of evolutionary biologist Robert K. Wayne and the Royal Institute of Biology, Stockholm lab of Pier Savolainen for pinpointing in time and space the origin of the dog.  Savolainen and his colleagues place the first dogs in the ‘area south of the Yangtze River” not before 16,000 years ago.  Their findings are based on mitochondrial DNA studies, and the last few times out, they have engaged in all manner of mental contortions to keep their first dogs from breaking free of their geographic isolation. 

Wayne and his colleagues end up looking at the Middle East wolf with significant contributions from European and Chinese wolves, going back 40,000 or more years.  Their estimates are based on scans of the entire genome, especially of the nuclear DNA (from both parents, whereas mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother and the Y chromosome from the father.  

Now comes in PLoS One a study of the Y chromosome in wolves and dogs, including village dogs from the Middle East and the Area South of the Yangtze.   Sarah K. Brown of the University of California, Davis, author of the study, says the evidence points to three major patrilineal clades--in Africa, the Middle East, and the area south of the Yangtze, with the latter being the primary center of domestication, based on its higher levels of diversity.    Furthermore, she says that all European and modern North American breeds fall within that clade.  

A persistent bias in all these genetical analyses assumes that the highest genetic diversity is found at a point of origin; indeed, the statistical analysis the researchers use is based on that assumption.  Another built-in bias assumes that an expanding population radiated out evenly from the place of origin.

Both assumptions have been shown to be inaccurate, but they persist in part because statistically they must and in part because the results are what the researchers want to prove their point.    They do not.  

For all we currently know the founding dog population--or its descendants--could have been decimated by war, disease, or the influx of a few favored dogs--or masses of dogs.    Mitochondrial diversity can be increased by preferential keeping of breeding females for food production, as was apparently done in the Area South of the Yangtze River.  It can also increase through expansion of the dog population in an environment where it is relatively isolated from large-scale infusions of fresh blood that might overwhelm the native stock.  

If the dog was born on the move, we would initially expect a smallish population formed by inbreeding and outcrossing to other dogwolves and wild wolves--in other words breeding with what was available.  In How the Dog Became the Dog, I suggest that the important regions for that kind of mixing and matching were where various game and migration routes met, like the area of the Black and Caspian Seas and the Caucasus Mountains and the region of the Altai Mountains and Amur River headwaters.  A population of Middle Eastern dogwolves on the move with Homo sapiens from the area that is now the Persian Gulf passed through, even lingered in the former on its way to residence in the latter in the neighborhood of 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.    

As the ice sheets of the last glacial advance retreated the descendants of these people were on the move again--east, south and back to the west.  At least one of those movements would have brought dogs to the Area South of the Yangtze sometime after 16,000 years ago and probably closer to less than 10,000 years ago.  Impossible?  

A signal problem with the Area South of the Yangtze River is an apparent dearth of wolves and people, two essential ingredients in formation of the dog, until the dog appears 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, and it’s not for a lack of digging.  Another questions involves how dogs would exit the region in time to catch the great migration into the America’s beginning by many current estimates before 16,000 years ago, not to mention the rest of Asia and Europe.  

For now, it would be nice to see some village dog samples from northern China and Mongolia and more from the Carpathian Mountains and the Caspian and Caucasus region.


Read an excellent analysis at The Retriever, Dog, & Wildlife.

Chesapeake Bay retriever [final]

A reader named Matthew Phillips contacted me with a question about the origins of the Chesapeake Bay retriever, specifically whether it had any Native American dog heritage.  I would run his query, but there are technical difficulties.  I would answer him privately, but he left no email address.  He apparently has already queried retrieverman, who is the authority on these breed histories.  There is a legend that Catahoula leopard dogs have Native American dogs in their ancestry, and similar arguments are sometimes made about various of the curs.  The Chesapeake Bay retriever is at base a St. Johns water dog, I believe, a cur from that island where the basic dog was cleaved into two or, if you count the Chesapeake, three dogs—Labradors, Newfoundlands, and Chesapeakes.  That's my notion, but there are many people who would disagree.

Farley Mowat in Sea of Slaughter (1984) argues the the black St. Johns water dog was the dog of the Beothuk, the native people of Newfoundland, and that it was different from mainland dogs.    The Beothuk were killed off, but their black dog survived as the St. Johns water cur, which essentially was a mixed breed of the sort that came to exist in America where European dog with local dogs and apparently wolves.  Although it was a dog with input from many sources, it bred to a broad type.


So if we follow Farley Mowat, we would conclude that the Chesapeake is derived in part from Native American dogs.  But Mowat is a lone rider on this question, it appears, and, according to retrieverman even backtracked on it.  It important to remember that English and European settlers brought their own dogs and had little interest in Native American dogs, which they considered wolflike unrefined savages, like their human companions.  They killed both.  That is not to say that some mixing didn't occur; it is to say that the dominate lineages, even for Catahoulas, are European.

The official breed history says the Chesapeake is descended from two Newfoundland dogs bound for England in 1807. The Newfoundland was apparently the St. Johns water dog, said to be from England, crossed in the 17th century with one of the large mountain dogs, although I suspect it was initially just a large, slightly curly version of the St. Johns dog.   The claim of English decent was, I suspect, an attempt to claim that the Labrador and Newfoundland were at base good English dogs.

Landraces, or autochthonous breeds, aside—they are types of dogs that have formed in particular areas or regions, to which they are adapted--there are two primary ways to create a breed—consolidation of a particular type from a more variable landrace and crossbreeding of different dogs to create a composite then consolidated through inbreeding to fix the desired traits.  In both cases the gene pool is severely narrowed. Although admixture brings an initial burst of variability, it is quickly bred out once the desired form is achieved.  The Carolina dog is consolidated from a more general type.  As far as I know, no genetic evidence suggests that it or any of the other putative Native American dogs live up to expectations.  But the surveys are not complete, and that allows anyone to claim just about anything.  Suffice it to say, that the Chesapeake is a distinctive and distinctly American breed.  The St. Johns water dog, if it still exists, should be protected.

The dog is ancient.  The genetic sorting of breeds has shown that some of them have not mixed with other breeds for a long time, and for that reasons researchers have called them 'ancient breeds.'  It is, I think, an unfortunate choice of words. What that means in terms of behavior is a much discussed question with no easy answers, no matter what some experts suggest.  In any event, the Chesapeake is a mix of Chesapeake Bay water dogs, all probably of European descent.

Contacting Me

Several people have tried to contact me by leaving comments to posts on this blog in response to my essay in the October 29, 2011, Wall Street Journal, on the origins of the dog and an interview in Salon posted on October 28.  If you do contact me in that way and you would like me to respond, please incude your email address in your comment; otherwise, I have no way to reach you.  Blogger—Google, of course—sends comments to me from a 'no reply' box.  I then have the option of publishing them or not.  As a rule, I don't publish the personal messages, so your email address will not escape.  Were I to publish your comment, with your permission, I would strip off your email address.  I set this system up to keep me from being bombarded with messages from that group of on-line commentators whose idea of rational discourse consists of insulting in no particular order the writer's intelligence, education, motives, and parentage—and occasionally proclaiming that whatever disease or disability he or she might have is obviously well deserved.

So there it is.  If you would like me to respond personally, include an email or phone number.

Obama Care Is Bad for All of Us

“U.S. Health Insurance Cost Rises Sharpely, Study Finds”– that’s the headline for Reed Abelson’s story in today’s New York Times, and it it should surprise no one. I say should because the average rise of 9 percent in health insurance costs for American workers seems within the bounds of what the Obamans consider circumspect or restrained. If they really believe that they are truly incompetent and should be removed, or they are nothing more than tools of the insurance industry, which has used them to gain extraordinary profit. If they are simply lying in the hope that someone, anyone might believe that Obama’s healthcare reform benefits anyone but insurance companies, then they are more delusional than the Nixonites in their darkest hours. That anyone who voted for this misbegotten piece of legislaltion still feigns shock and surprise at what is happening is living, breathing, but about to expire politically proof of why the Tea Party continues to score well in the polls despite an antediluvian social polciy.

What i find saddest about this article is its portrayal of a president and administration with no learning curve–none. They are vain, ignorant, and incompetent, but unfortunately so are their chief allies and their enemies. Obama won election in part because people wanted healthcare reform. The Democrats were trounced in 2010 because no one wanted the healthcare bill they passed. In 2012, they will be trounced again because of healthcare–costs that suppress the depressed economy and a ‘reform’ act that makes everything worse. Losing twice on the same issue is proof of stupidity.

The Passing of the Kate

The Kate (10 March 1998  to 13 September 2011)

The intrepid kelpie Katie barked her last about noon o’clock on September 13, 2011, letting the vet who had kindly come to relieve her of her suffering know that she was The Kate, boss dog of all she surveyed, the one creature on earth solely responsible for the well being of two hapless bipeds and that in the name of all the gods and goddesses who had ever dared to lay claim to this lost planet, she was not about to go gentle into the great cosmic void, even though she had been telling those same two bipedal klutzes that her time had come, her spine was failing along its entire length and her pain was constant.  Her eyes had the unfocused distant stare of an animal waiting for death.  When she did move, which was seldom, she propelled herself as fast as she could in an inevitably doomed effort to keep ahead of her failing hind legs, and then sprawled on the floor, she would look shocked and betrayed.  After one particularly rapid propulsion across the room the night before her death, she stood by me and gave a plaintive whine/yelp, call it a ‘welp,’ indicating clearly that she wanted to go.  And so she went, her head in my lap, with Gina stroking and soothing her, and telling her as the anesthetic took hold that she could finally rest, that she would look after the old klutz.

I had told Gina the night before, after the Kate’s welp, that she would on principle not go gently.  That was not in the nature of a dog who had only two speeds--naught and ought, i called them, zed to flatout with nothing between--but was also capable of the most carefully calibrated maneuvers.  She routinely ‘matrixed’ walls for six or ten feet at a stretch and once performed  a three-foot vertical jump from a stand still to the top of the back of a sofa and then walked five-feet along it before sliding down next to me, couch bound with a fractured femur. For all her athleticism, or perhaps because of if, she needed to be engaged, primarily with people, other dogs being more hindrance than accomplice to her games. 

The initial object of her desire was a tennis ball, and within ten minutes at ten weeks of age, she learned that if she wanted to ball tossed for her, she had to bring it back to the thrower, who for the Kate was always precisely defined as the person she chose to throw her the ball.  She played frisbee for a while, but that was replaced by a tennis ball.  Traveling farther and faster, it nonetheless stayed in play longer--floating on the water, bouncing off the ground--thereby allowing her to deploy her full athletic repertoire and show off the mental acuity that earned her the moniker, ‘two brain.’  

Tennis ball for the Kate was an exercise of acrobatic precision.  She loved running under the long throw and catching it over the shoulder, then pausing so that her audience might appreciate her skill--and invariably there was an audience, including people who ordinarily wanted nothing to do with dogs in the park. She would enlist individuals in her game, dropping her ball at a person’s feet and backing up, eye on the ball, barking if they were too slow by her measure to understand that they were to throw the ball.  The Kate abandoned those who threw poorly while favoring those with canons for arms.  If she dropped a ball, she would race it back to the same thrower and demand that they repeat the throw until she got it right. When arms failed or the heat was too great for running, she would engage in short order drills, displaying reactions to make the best shortstop envious. 

At poolside, she would wait, poised until the ball was tossed gently in a high arc over the water and then leap for the catch, twisting, tucking, turning to grab it before she hit the water.  It will doubtless be said that such contortions stress the spine, contributing to problems of the sort that beset the Kate late in her lfe, but then she would have been denied an activity she loved that helped keep her in excellent physical condition.  

The Kate recognized no inside or outside if there was a ball to be had. We routinely warned visitors not to engage the Kate with a tennis ball unless they wanted her to plague them the whole time they were present--or until they begged for mercy.   We emphasized that when we said don’t touch the ball, we meant with any part of their anatomy.  The warning was expansive, because the first time we warned guests to avoid playing ball with Kate, no matter their instincts, she unveiled a new game, she brought the ball to the most dog phobic guest, the one who had ignored her most assiduously and carefully positioned it on her chair so that it touched her leg  while succumbing to the pull of gravity.  She waited for the ball to hit the ground before returning it to the same person and repeating the process until she relented and rolled the Kate the ball and then did it again and again with obvious pleasure. The game became a part of the Kate’s repertoire. She had a special appeal to the disaffected, a capacity for engaging them in order to please herself.

  

Then the Kate’s spine began to deteriorate and her lungs to fill with fluid.  Retired from ball playing, she would rest on the pool steps, her front feet planted on on level, her hindquarters floating above another, and bark.  We would joke that she was reciting all the sacred texts of the world, but we knew that it was the Kate’s proclamation that translates roughly: ‘I am here now, and I am Kate B. Kate, also known as the Kate, a creature unique in the world, and you can be the same.’

For thirteen-and-a-half years the Kate shared our lives. She arrived as a nine-week-old puppy, named Katie, a gift from a rancher friend in Texas who thought she was a little short in the wheel base to handle the 1,000 pound steers he ran on his ranch.  She entertained, amused, sometimes aggravated but always engaged and amazed us.  The diminutive faded from her name.

Did she love us unconditionally as some writers on dogs proclaim?  Did we love her? I have pondered that question for a long time, and I think it fair to say that at its best what lies between humans and dogs is something like love that is much more paradoxical and elusive.  At their best humans and dogs form am empathic union that is essentially nonverbal and  nonmaterial while being intensely physical and communicative.  It is a relationship grounded in an unquestioning loyalty that neither side demands--or let us say that those who demand loyalty invariably fail to receive it--but that both sides expect.  Like true love itself this empathic union is often approximated, rarely achieved.  Even within the same household, individuals will have different relationships with the dog or dogs.  Yet when it forms and is nurtured, that empathic union can become transcendent, 

Kate was the last one standing of the six dogs we have had in 30 years together--and the eleven I have had in my sixty plus years.   Each of them was unique, including the one who was neurologically miswired to the point of self-destruction.  I would be hard pressed to say that Kate was the best of them, although she was the most brilliant and the best athlete, but my relationship--I dare say, our relationship--with her was subtly different for a host of reasons that boil down to one.  

She was The Kate.   She is emblematic of them all.

A Reminder

Occasionally people come to this blog hoping to find a way to contact me directly by way of making a comment.  Indeed, that works—all comments come to me for deciding whether to print them—most I do, although as a rule I don't allow anonymous comments.  There are easy to conceive circumstances that would force a person to cloak his or her identity, but in this country, Anonymous too often is a cover for incivility or worse.  I support anyone's right to say anything he or she wants as long as they attach to their comments an identifiable nom de plume or nom de guerre.

That said, if you are trying to contact me, do so through a comment, noting whether you want it posted, and including in the body of the message your email address—Blogger does not include your return email address in the comment it forwards to me.  It strips them off.