Is the End of the Ban at Hand?

In American Working Terriers I detail how the rise of the Enclosure Movement of 18th and 19th Century Britain led to the rise of a wool-based sheep economy, which in turn led to the rise of mounted fox packs in the U.K., and the forcing of the rural poor off of the land and into the kind of squalor made famous in Dickens novels.

Class divisions exacerbated by the Enclosure Movement continue to boil just beneath the skin in Britain, fueling such diverse activities as pedigree dog shows and the RSPCA.

If one is looking for evidence of the pentimento of the Enclosure Movement, however, one could hardly do better than study the current platforms of the Labour and Conservative parties where, perversely, fox-hunting is a front-and-center debate.

As The Farmers Guardian notes:

A CONSERVATIVE Government would introduce a comprehensive package of measures to tackle TB in cattle and badgers and give MPs a free vote to repeal the fox hunting ban, it has been confirmed.

The Tory election manifesto, launched by David Cameron this morning (Tuesday, April 13), said bovine TB had led to the slaughter of over 250,000 cattle since 1997.

In what is seen as a key point of difference with the Labour Party it pledged to tackle the disease which it described as ‘the most pressing animal health problem in the UK’ through ‘a carefully-managed and science-led policy of badger control’.

“While vaccination is an important part of the long-term solution we cannot afford to wait until 2014 when this may be available.

“A carefully managed and science-led policy of badger control in areas of high and persistent levels of TB in cattle is necessary to eradicate this disease,” Jim Paice, Shadow Farm Minister told Farmers Guardian.

In another controversial move, the Conservative manifesto also promised to give Parliament the opportunity to repeal the Hunting Act on a free vote.

“The Hunting Act has proved unworkable,” it says.

The Conservative’s overall manifesto message to farmers and voters was to promote ‘a sustainable and productive’ agriculture.

Right.

Here is a perfect case of both sides starting with their conclusions and carefully crafting their rationales around them.

One side acts as if the badger is an endangered animal rather than a creature more common than the fox in the British countryside.

The other side acts as if badgers are a major threat to farm economies, and never mind if they have been present in the U.K. longer than either man or cow!

But set aside badgers . . . What about fox hunting?

The one uncontested truth here is that "the Ban" on fox hunting is universally seen as having been a complete and total flop.

Not only did it NOT slow down the mounted hunts in the slightest (they are more popular than ever), but it did not save a single fox life, as vehicle impact, snares, disease, and guns have served as alternative methods off trimming off Mother Nature's excess.

What the Ban did do, however, was undermine the rule of law.

Not only was the Ban widely flouted, but the police could not be bothered to enforce it, as the law was so poorly crafted that getting a conviction was nearly impossible, and even when achieved, was never popular.

The good news for common sense and the rule of law is that the Ban on fox hunting with dogs may not survive the Spring. As The Independent notes:

The Conservative lead over Labour widened yet further in the week that the date of the general election was finally announced. As a result, the party now appears tantalisingly close to an overall majority, but is still somewhat short of what it needs to be confident of outright victory on 6 May.

Our latest poll of polls, based on no less than 13 national polls conducted during the course of last week, now puts the Conservatives on 39 per cent, up one point on the previous week. That means David Cameron's party is now nine points ahead of Labour, whose average vote, at 30 percent, is unchanged.

Of course even a Conservative win will not end the debate, if for no other reason than the debate about fox hunting has never been about fox!

The issues here are deeper than that.

These are ancient land and class grievances passed down from one generation to another, for 200 years. Only the naive would imagine they will not be fanned, fed and nurtured into the future.
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Badger Digging, 1917

This is how it used to be done -- a whole tribe of men to dig, and far more dogs in the field than make sense. Were any of the dogs pictured of any actual use?
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Badger Baiting Is Not Badger Hunting

Back in March of this year, I wrote a piece on this blog entitled Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas in which I bemoaned the inevitable ruin that comes when the world of working terriers is invaded by wannabe dog fighters and and badger baiters.

That post noted that some 17 months earlier I had written a piece entitled Honey Pots and Trolls in the Land of Eire in which I had noted that someone in Ireland had gotten on the boards to bash a piece I had written two years earlier (now more than four years ago) about the old Irish "strong dog" tests and the potted histories that you commonly find for all Kennel Club dogs, including the Glen of Imaal terrier.

I warned what I suspected: a "honey pot" operation was in operation, and it was designed to harm the legitimate world of the working terrier by trying to associate it with dog fighting and badger baiting.

Sadly, I was right, and the result has not only been busts in Ireland, but also bad press on the international front as well.

Perhaps now is a good time to review my original March 2005 post, in which I quite succinctly noted that Baiting Dogs Are Not Hunting Dogs.

It seems this is a point that still needs to be stressed and underlined.

The confusion in some minds stems from the fact that shortly after the turn of the 20th Century, some show-ring pretenders in Ireland tried to suggest that Ireland's overlarge turnspit, fighting, and cart-guarding dogs were once used for genuine field work.

That's not quite true, is it?

Those Irish Kennel Club dogs were always far too large to actually go to ground, and so "artificial" work had to be cocked up for them.

And the work, to put a point on it, was a joke.

But don't take my word for it: You can see for yourself by watching this 1923 video clip. Here is the famous (or infamous) Teastas Beg and Teastas Mor in action!

At the "minor trial," we see a couple of rabbits released, and a bunch of confused dogs sniffing around on the ground. Some terrier trial!

At the "major trial," we see the true "work" of these over-large Irish dogs: Badger baiting with a live badger in a smooth wooden den liner or barrel.

This is pretty far from genuine terrier work, isn't it?

And what does genuine terrier work of that era look like?

The good news here is that we do not have to guess, as here too we have a film clip, also from 1923, this time of properly-sized working terriers going to ground.

The dogs go in, the badger is dug to, and in the end it is bagged to be moved to a new location where it can do no harm.

Are the dogs wrecked? No.

Is the badger maimed? No.

Is their confusion and chaos at the dig? No.

This is real terrier work, and you will notice there is no "strong dog," "pull dog" or "hard dog" nonsense in evidence.

These men are not show-ring pretenders, get-rich-quick dog dealers, or wanna be tough guys displaced from the world of fighting dogs. These are real terriermen, and this is what real terrier work looked like in 1923 -- and what it still looks like today, albeit with a much smaller entourage and clothes that are not quite so fancy.

• Related Posts
  ** The Sad Rise of Hard Dogs
  ** Strong Dog Trials: Where Fancy Leads to Fantasy
  ** The Nonsense of Pull Dogs
  ** The Value of Discretion
  ** Pride and Prejudice
  ** Balancing Points
  ** A Scar is Not a Badge of Success
  ** Red Badge of Courage?
  ** Hunting Ethics and Terriers
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Danish Earthdog Setup

The above picture is of a Danish den dog trial set up. Similar setups are done in Ukraine, Sweden, Germany, Finland, and several other countries, but with somewhat different designs from location to location.

In this design, there is an incline in one section in the middle and a spot where the dog is in a pit below the quarry. To get to the quarry at that location, the dog has to leap up 60 cm on to the ledge next to the drum or "kessel" (pot). This section can be closed off for a simple trial.

The drum on the far right is rotated so that the "quarry" (a live fox or badger) can escape out a side door and run from down the tunnel to another drum (not shown) which is then rotated half way to put bars between the dog and the game.

The fox and badger are very relaxed about the whole thing (they've been doing it their whole lives and are lept as pets) and the dogs get to run around a bit and see if they have voice and whether they will stick to the job even in in non-contact situation. There is no digging and no actual contact between the dog and the fox or badger.

The den pipes are generally too big with these things to suit my taste (9" by 9" is common) and so bigger dogs are able to act as if they have the stuff even when some of them could not get down a real pipe.

That said, this is fun sport for folks without the desire or without the physical ability to take their dogs into the field to do real hunting.
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Honey Badger

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Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas

Some 17 months ago, I wrote a piece entitled Honey Pots and Trolls in the Land of Eire in which I noted that some gas bag in Ireland had gotten on the boards to bash a piece I had written two years earlier about the old Irish "strong dog" tests and the potted histories that you commonly find for all Kennel Club dogs, including the Glen of Imaal terrier.

This guy wanted to talk about badgers, and badger-bating trials, and what great badger dogs they had in Ireland.

Eh? I was a bit confused, as this fellow seemed detached from any logical mooring.

He had, of course, not so much as dropped me a line.

I suspected he did not want to provide a real name and a real email address.

As I wrote at the time:

A two-year old post? Did someone just get their first dog, or did they just get their first computer?

No mind.

Now here's the funny thing about this kerfuffle -- the "strong dog" tests once given by the Irish Kennel Club have not been done since 1968!

And when they were given, they weren't much of a test of a working dog were they? The Teastas Mor lasted for all of 5-minutes.

Five minutes? Five minutes.

In this Kennel Club test the dog was not required to find the quarry at all, and if the terrier bayed it was summarily disqualified.

Since the Kennel Club rules for this "test" were knitted up prior to the invention of locator collars, one has to wonder how the dog was supposed to be found underground. Telepathy? Dowsing rod?

But of course the dog did not need to be located, did it? The Teastas Mor was nothing more than a timed badger-baiting trial in a short artificial earth made to look "natural."

So what was this poster on about, I wondered?

I had an idea.

Well, it could be a simple matter of another Internet Troll on the boards. Such people are common enough, and I have written about them before.

But perhaps in this case it is something else. Think about it -- a person with an anonymous name shows up less than a year ago on a working terrier board, and now he wants to talk about badger baiting in a country where that practice is quite illegal?

Hmmmm. Sounds like a honey pot operation to me.

What's a honey pot? A honey pot is an old trick. You put down bait (preferably under cover of dark) and then stand back and shoot anything that comes in to feed on it.

I have written before about how these Internet bulletin boards might be a problem in this regard, and more people should probably be aware of how these honey pot schemes work if they want to stand clear of real trouble themselves, especially in the U.K.

In the old days, law enforcement "honey pots" were store-front fencing operations manned by the police, or a buy-and-bust drug corners where undercover cops replaced the local dealers which had been rounded up a half hour before.

Nowdays, thanks to the Internet, cops never have to leave their chair to make a bust -- they just go online to find the folks they want to arrest. Whether they are looking for wildlife poachers or illegal aliens, terrorists or pedophiles, neo-Nazis or stolen property, the Internet is the new hunting ground for law enforcement.

Are wildlife officials and animal rights lunatics using the Internet this way?

Believe it. It has been tried on me (though I do nothing illegal with my dogs), and it has been tried on others.

Right now the Roller Pigeon community is in a bit of a pinch and a bulletin board had to be closed down for a week so that it could be scrubbed of all mention of hawk and falcon killing. Falconers have similarly been nailed for illegal bird sales overseas.

Heads up and fair warning. Those in the U.K. who ignore this caution can go to page 30 of the June issue of Earth Dog-Running Dog magazine to find the telephone number of the Hunting Lawyer they may soon need. Those who want to see what the working terriers of Ireland actually look like, however, can go to page 29 of that same magazine. A little irony there, eh?

Well, of course, it turned out I was as right as rain.

Just six weeks later, a major bust went down in Ireland -- a fact I noted in a post entitled As Predicted: Fools Get Stung at Irish Honey Pot. And behind this bust was some bald-headed poseur showing up at the dog shows, and even trading dogs.

Of course, anyone with a brain and a sense of smell could have sensed this was coming.

You did not need to be a dyed-in-the-wool backwoodsman to see the sign. As I wrote:

The spoor was obvious to me, and so too was the scent. When you see such things, just sit down and keep quiet -- the game will reveal itself in time.

The funny thing is that genuine digging folks know the score, and have nothing to fear. We aren't going out to bait animals, we are going out to hunt.

And we sure as hell aren't using turnspit dogs or fighting dogs to get the job done, are we?

We are using terriers, yes, but the terriers used in Ireland to hunt are the same as those used all over -- Jack Russells, Patterdales, Fells and (perhaps) a few Borders. There is no shame or artifice in the world of true working terriers who are being worked by folks who actually know what they are doing.

And the job being done is not complex, is it? It's to locate and terminate the quarry, as quickly and painlessly as possible, and to shepherd the safety of the terrier so it can be used again next week.

So what's the latest news?

Well, it comes to me via way of an email which directed me back to the same before-mentioned bulletin-board where the folks there are all atwitter again because there have been more raids in Ireland. More are supposedly in the works for "known blood sports enthusiasts in Ireland, and as far afield as France and the USA."

Eh? Come again?

I am no expert on French law, but I am quit certain that hunting badger is legal in France, and I know for a fact that it is legal in most of the U.S.A. where badger are actually found.

So there will no arrests, as no laws have been broken -- that is just fanciful bunk cocked up by an ignorant press corps trying to sensationalize things as much as possible.

As for "baiting," I know no one who does that. Not a one.

But then, I do not claim to know everyone lurking on the margins of the world of working terriers, even in this country.

I have noted in the past that there are a few wanna-be pit-dog fighters about, but I will have nothing to do with them, and neither will anyone else with an ounce of brain or a real interest in working terriers.

These knuckle-draggers are to true working terriers what jack-lighting deer poachers are to real hunters -- an outrage and an embarrassment.

That said, I have always suspected that most of these loud mouths are nothing more than wannabe tough-guys who do not hunt very much, and who simply talk big to get attention.

I have written about these fools and fantasy diggers before, and I have noted that their rich fantasy life is every bit as detrimental to real terrier work as the nonsense spouted by Kennel Club matrons.

Does fantasy do any real harm?

Generally, no, but at times yes.

The fantasy digger who thinks a go-to-ground tunnel is the size of a real den pipe is spreading a lie forged in ignorance that allows the "big wink" of over-large dogs to continue unabated.

The preening pretender who prattles on about the glories of brain-dead "hard dogs" in order to compensate for his own male shortcomings glorifies a canine characteristic which, in excess, is too often a serious liability in the field.

The show ring breeder whose fantasy fox is as large as a coyote is what led to the Kennel Club fox terrier -- a dog whose chest is as deep as the keel of a war ship.

The young enthusiast who thinks a mute dog is a fine thing glorifies a serious nuisance and a potentially fatal liability in a working dog, while the "blue-blazer rosette chaser" who cares more about the color of a dog's nose than it's ability to scent does no better.

When push comes to shove, the thing that has killed working terriers over the course of the last 50 years is the creep of fantasy, and the slow but steady erosion of real diggers in the hedgerow.

The simple truth is that you cannot protect working dogs without working them.

And working a dog is not easy -- it is suspiciously like work for the human as well as the dog. There is equipment to be gotten -- spades, bars, posthole diggers, tie-outs, locator collars, machete, yo-ho, veterinary first aid equipment, and a decent pack in which to carry it all.

There are farm permissions to get, and there are the dogs which have to be raised up and given the experience -- experience which can only be gotten by driving out to the country and walking hedgerows and fields for many, many weekends.

This is to say nothing of the reality of digging in freezing cold, howling winds, sucking mud, pounding sun, and swarming bugs.

And so, I was not too surprised when I turned on the computer this morning to find someone had sent me another news article from The Sunday Times of London about the badger-baiting arrests in Ireland. Only in this article, two Americans were named -- the owner of Deadgame Kennels in West Virginia, and the owner of Barnburner Patterdales in Iowa. It seems these two gentlemen had imported dogs from Robert Booth, formerly of Ireland and now living in France.

Booth is a dog-dealer, and part of his business plan has been selling dogs to wanna-be tough guys in America who then go on Internet Bulletin Boards, list-servs, and web sites like "Bay Dogs Online" to claim that their dogs are descended from "Booth's So-and-So" and will "hunt anything."

Right. Hunted nothing is more likely.

As for badger baiting by either of the two named Americans, I seriously doubt it.

You see, neither of these gentlemen live in an area known for badger, and in fact it seems one of them even has to go out of state to hunt groundhog!

The other fellow seems to "hunt" only a few times a year, and this is generally done by shooting large numbers of raccoon that flee the treeless fields of Iowa in winter only to jungle up in barns and silos where their feces damage vast loads of hay and feed.

I do not consider this hunting; it is extermination.

And, let the record show, it is perfectly legal, even if it is not genuine terrier work in my book.

The United States, thank God, is not the U.K.

Not only are guns legal here, but so too are steep-jawed traps. In fact, there are more than 100,000 active trappers in the U.S., and these trappers are trapping (and mostly exporting) over 2,500,000 raccoons a year, along with many hundreds of thousands of wild fox and coyote pelts.

This trapping does no harm to wildlife numbers; raccoon, red fox, groundhog, and coyote numbers are at historical records.

As for North American badgers, which are not related to their European counter-parts in any way, they are not protected in most of the states where they occur in any appreciable number.

If you want to hunt badger in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, or North Dakota, for example, go right ahead; it is an unprotected nongame species. The states of Nebraska, Wyoming and Missouri, very helpfully suggests using #3 traps. Kansas has a season that stretches from Nov. 12th to Feb. 15th, while Iowa's stretches from Nov. 3rd to Jan. 31st.

And so it goes. . . . .

Which is not to say that there is any excuse for stupidity or brutality.

The oldest adage in the world is both true and poignant: "Lie down with dogs, and get up with fleas."

If you rub up against dog dealers, dog-fighters, badger-baiters, and wanna-be-tough guys, do not be surprised if their mud ends up being splattered on you, whether it is deserved or nor.

And if, by chance, you are the kind of person who does not respect both the wildlife and the dogs, please get the hell out of terrier work all together.

Terrier work does not need thugs and numbskulls.

And, if you want my opinion, it does not need any of these Internet bulletin boards at all. As I wrote on this blog back in 2005:

When was the last time you read something useful or interesting or new about fox, raccoon, weasel, groundhog, badger or even ducks on one of these boards? When was the last time you got a bit of practical advice about shifting rocks, closing a wound, or finding permission? When was the last time someone even wrote a well-written story about their day in the field with the dogs?

Instead, what you find on the Boards are a great number of very young or immature people who seem to get most of their attention in this world by being combative, or otherwise wanting to work out their manhood issues (and yes there are some women doing that too!).

Most of these people seem to know very little about wildlife and not too much about dogs, either.

It is ironic, but true, that in the dog world the most common animal is the parrot -- people quick to repeat what others have said or scratched out. The parrot offers no new information or expanded point of view. They have little experience of their own. Think for themselves? Go their own way? Dig their own dog?

Parrots don't do that -- they are bird-brained and can only mimic. They do not own a library card and cannot hold a shovel.

Starting a bulletin board is certainly easy nowdays, isn't it? These things are now offered up as free services, the code is easy and can be set up in an hour or two, and the only trick is to get people to keep coming back.

No committment or investment is needed. Just erect an electronic wall and let the graffitti spraying begin.

And graffitti spraying is exactly what you get about 95 percent of the time. In fact, this is the chief product of the bulletin boards -- not information but fighting, not shared experience, but name-calling.

It is like a Drunken Night at O'Malleys, except that the drunks are a thousand miles apart and hiding behind fake names.

The folks that run bulletin boards are big on "free speech," but it is pure posture to hide true poverty. The sad truth is that if civility were maintained on these bulletin boards, the real truth would come out pretty quickly -- no one has very much to say.

In the end, bulletin boards have not created a working terrier community so much as destroyed it. The pictures on "anti" web sites are all culled from bulletin boards. Educated people who might educate, motivate and represent the best of working terriers soon turn away from these boards, leaving the loud, stupid, very young, and unemployed to dominate the boards and represent us all.

It is reverse Darwinism -- a devolution to the unfit and the unsound.

I think history has shown that nothing has harmed the world of working terriers more than weakly moderated bulletin boards. Mud and slander has been slung on established breeders, 30-year diggers, working judges, and respected authors.

At times I have wondered if these things were Animal Rights honey pots -- bait stations set out to poison the working dog community. Whether intended or not, that is what most of them have become.

What a sad thing the internet has done to working terriers!

Was I right? I think time has proven it so!
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Whither All Those Trapped Raccoons?

Raccoon harvests have gone up and down with the price of pelts, fads (for coats and hats) and population densities. The peak raccoon harvest was about 5.2 million pelts a year for the years 1980-83, but pelt prices have plumeted since then, and during the first half of the 1990s, only 1 to 2 million raccoon were trapped a year.

Unlike fox and mink, raccoons are never farm raised, as it's simply not economical. Only about 200,000 raccoons a year are harvested in Canada, reflecting their much smaller populations (most are taken in Ontario).

The majority of raccoon pelts are exported to Europe, especially West Germany, where they are sheared and dyed and sold as imitation otter, mink or seal.

The colloquial name for the raccoon in Mexico is the "tejon solitaria" which means solitary badger. Columbus called them the "perro tejon" or badger-like dog.
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The Architecture of Burrows

A reprint from this blog of April 22, 2005.

The list of animals that hibernate in underground burrows, live in burrows or nest in burrows is astounding: fox, badger, turtles, some owls and parrots, ground squirrels and marmots, some penguins and puffins, European rabbits, bears, wolves and dogs, otter, some wild pigs, some wild cats, many snakes and lizards, possums, wombats, frogs and toads, moles, mice and rats, nutria, crayfish, armadillos, skunks, muskrats, meerkats, some large spiders, and several types of bees.

Many of these animals spend a fair amount of time constructing, maintaining, and modifying their den systems which, in turn, are structured in response to changing external circumstances and changing internal needs.

Anatomy, behavior, and distribution of wild animals are all greatly affected by the burrow environment, with temperature, humidity, oxygen, living space, availability of food, and protection from flooding and predation all being influenced by burrow architecture.

Despite this, the burrow structure of almost all subterranean mammals is barely known, and data and descriptions of den structures as they relate to soil composition, drainage, external defenses (rock, wire fences, farm buildings), proximity to food and water sources, is almost entirely non-existent.

All of this make understanding burrow architecture as an adaptive tool a difficult task, but it nonetheless clear, among humans digging to their terriers, that burrows are designed with a reason and that certain "tricks" keep popping up. A few I have noticed in the construction of groundhog and fox dens:

• Water and the phreatic zone: Dens of fox and groundhogs are designed to keep the animals dry, yet fox in particular like to locate their dens very near water. Shallow dens are sometimes found carved into the sides of small humps or rises in marshy areas, but these are rarely natal dens. The deeper natal dens of fox are generally found on the rises above the flood plains -- on well-drained hillsides near a creek or pond or water-filled ditch. The ideal spot for a pipe is deep enough to be dry from surface water, but not so deep as to be encountering the water table -- the so-called "phreatic zone".
  
  
• The "plumbers pipe" opening: In these settes the pipes run down for two or three feet before rising again and then dropping again. This creates an earthen "water stop" not so very different from the plumbers p-pipe you will find under your kitchen sink. This is a common feature in many animal burrows, from rat to fox.
  
  
• Depth is determined by soil: This is near-truth. The softer the earth and the easier it drains, the deeper the den is likely to be. One of the chief functions of a den is to keep the animal dry, and in soils that are very light, dryness tends to be achieved with some depth. You may cut through very soft stuff for three or four feet, but below that will be the harder stuff -- a layer of hard sand below the soft, or a layer of hard dry clay below much softer friable soil. The pipe is likely to be in softer soil that lies below the vein of hard stuff. The hard vein works to structurally support the pipe and to keep out the last bits of water. The one exception that I would note is where a ridge is made almost entirely of small cherts, flints or flaked slate. Here digging by a fox or groundhog is so hard, and the drainage of water is so rapid, that the den pipe may be very shallow since water runs through the den as fast as it falls. These shallow and breezy loose-rock dens will not be used in winter, but are likely spots in summer.
  
  
• Rocks, roots and barbed wire at the entrance: This is so common that it is clearly a planned design feature. It is not uncommon to find dens exiting inside a stump or hollow tree, or to have a strand or two of barbed wire running along the lip. Groundhog dens frequently start on one side of a barbed wire fence and exit out another. If there is an abandoned vehicle on the edge of a farm, a groundhog will invariably makes its home under the chassis -- a nice shelter from the rain, but also from predators who will have to slow down to a crawl to avoid beaning themselves on the I-beam and suspension. Hard structures not only make digging out more difficult, it makes a mad dash at the den hole a dangerous and maladaptive strategy for large predators. In addition to hard structures at den entrances and exits, you will frequently find "soft structures" such as thickets of multi-flora rose, bramble, poison ivy, and thick wild grape vines serving the same function.
  
  
• The hard turn after the den entrance: This is a frequent feature of groundhog den entrances and serves two purposes: 1) it makes it difficult for predators to enter, and; 2) water entering the entrance will tend to follow the straight line of gravity and soak into the ground at the end of the pipe rather than run sideways with the turn of the pipe. I have encountered some rather incredible animals that took this "hard turn at the entrance" technique to absurd levels as they never stopped turning -- they corkscrewed their dens in full circles all the way down in a spiral that went four or five feet deep.
  
  
• The pocket room close to the entrance: This is a common feature of groundhog dens, and I believe these serve as "loafing parlors" where the animal can tuck in out of danger between feeding forays. If you are quiet, and the dog is too, you can often bottle a groundhog in one of these little rooms before it goes deeper into the sette.
  
  
• Right angle turns inside the den pipe: These are very frequent features of groundhog and fox dens and seem to serve two purposes. The first purpose is that they help keep the den dry, as water running down a pipe will tend to follow gravity rather than take a sudden turn to the left or right. The second purpose is clearly defensive; a groundhog or fox can take a stand at a corner and slash out at anything coming down the pipe, inflicting considerable damage if the corner is tight, as it invariably is. Often a sette will have several right-angle turns, each providing additional elements of security, like doors on a hallway. A human digging on a dog will often break into a pipe where the dog and quarry are at a standoff at one of these turns, at which point all hell will break loose as the animals grab each other, or else the fox or groundhog will manage to retreat to the next hard corner in the pipe system -- a kind of running battle that can be very frustrating to the digger!
  
  
• Side pipes and stop-end branches: These are common feature of both groundhog pipes and fox dens. Some of these represent unfinished den digging, but for a fox they also provide a place into which one animal can scoot in order to let another pass by, where one animal can lay up without getting overheated from the warmth of its mate and where it can get a better supply of air. Earth dens are all about keeping dry, maintaining the right temperature, keeping the air flowing, and staying secure. Side passages increase the options on all counts.
  
  
• Field settes are generally deeper and larger than hedgerow settes, and often harder for the human to dig up as a consequence: I believe this is due to a conflux of opportunity and necessity. The opportunity for larger and deeper settes is due to the lack of obstructions like roots and rocks. The necessity is that plowed fields with friable soils require deeper dens to remain dry, while larger more complex settes are an element of security, allowing a groundhog or fox to escape danger in one part of the sette by going to another -- or even bolting out of one entrance into another nearby sette.
  
  
• Large "race track" settes are fairly common in fields. These large settes circle back on themselves several times and may have several layers of pipe. More commonly are simple four-, five-, or six-eyed settes with connecting pipes. A groundhog can run around in these large settes, shoveling dirt behind it to block the dog, and effectively preventing the dog from bottling it in a stop end. The solution I employ is to earth stop the den at two or three spots (generally at exits where the pipe goes left and right). If needed I will also allow two experienced dogs that know each other well to enter opposite sides of the settes and work the animal to the middle. This generally prevents the groundhog from digging in and gets the animal pinned against one of the newly-minted stop-ends in short order. Putting two dogs to ground should be left to people who know their dogs well and who are experienced diggers. It is better to lose quarry than a dog. Two very hard dogs to ground, or two dogs in a den occupied by a skunk, could be a disaster! Never enter two dogs on a fox -- it is simply not necessary, as the fox cannot dig away.
  
  
• Winter "fox porches": A fox will often dig out the first three or four feet of a groundhog den and create a kind of "loafing porch" where it can tuck in out of the wind but still not be fully underground. Fox can easily overheat inside the earth, and this "porch" area allows for easy temperature regulation -- go a little deeper if it is very cold, stay right at the entrance if it is warm. The breezeway allows the fox two excellent avenues of escape if danger approaches -- into the nearby woods or thicket, or deeper underground.
  
  
• An observation on what does not dig: Raccoons and possums do not dig earth dens -- they occupy holes made by other animals or find hollow trees, brush piles, rock crevices, hay bales, barns or crawlspaces. Neither animal is equipped to move dirt beyond a little scratching for worms and beetle grubs. Neither animal will modify a den in a significant way (though both will pull plastic bags and other debris into a den in order to improve insulation and provide bedding).
  

The Secret Life of Badgers

The BBC put a camera down a Devon badger sette for two years to photograph the activities of a family of badgers. One of the most interesting bits is the reported badger population in the UK: 300,000. That means there are now more badger in the UK than red fox. Click here to see video of badgers grooming, fighting, rolling bedding, and with young. A shout out to Walter H. for sending me the link!

Note that the European badger is not closely related to the American badger which lives a different (largely solitary) life, and eats different foods (i.e. rats, mice and ground squirrels rather than worms, beetles, and bulbs).

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The Spread of Tanukis (Raccoon Dogs)

The Tanuki or Raccoon Dog is an interesting animal that is hunted with terriers in Finland and, increasingly, in other European countries as well.

Originally from Japan and China, this 13-22-pound animal has migrated through Russia and into Finland (where it was imported for fur and sport), and is now found as far west as France. While some sources claim this animal was once hunted to near extinction in Japan, numbers there seem to have rebounded with a vengeance (if in fact they were ever low), as road impacts now are estimated to be in the range of 110,000 - 370,000 a year.

The secret to the Tanuki's success seems to be that it occupies an ecological niche that was heretofore unoccupied in Europe. The red fox specializes on small mammals (mice and voles), the raccoon dog on plant material (berries and seeds) and the badger on invertebrates (worms, snails and beetle grubs).

Though primarily a plant eater, the Tanuki is an opportunistic omnivore that will eat just about anything if given a chance, and is willing to live in a wide variety of homes, including old fox, badger and rabbit dens -- as well as under sheds, and in locations very near human residences.

Unlike the Raccoon, the Tanuki is a true canid ( Canus Nyctereutes procyonoides). The "procyonoides" species name is a tip of the hat to the genus name of the North American Raccoon, Procyon.

Where the Tanuki differs from other canids. is that it is fairly slow, and has a jaw structure that is too weak to take down larger prey. Like the raccoon, Tanuki will scavenge baby birds from nests and might catch an occasional mouse, but their weak carnassials and well developed molars mean they have a diet heavy in plant matter supplanted by eggs, lizards, roadkill, frogs, mice, insects and human refuse.

Like Fox, Raccoon, Possum, and Groundhog, the average Tanuki has a short life span, rarely living past three years in the wild.

Of course, as with any successful species with a short life span, reproduction rates are high. The average Tanuki litter is 5 to 9 pups born in a ground burrow after a gestation period of about 60 days.

The raccoon dog carries the highest average litter weight of any canid, with the mean weight of a litter being 24% of the weight of the female. Males stick around and help raise the young -- a good thing since the female Tanuki is no doubt exhausted from carrying her load!

Home ranges for a Tanuki are quite large (10-20 sq kilometres) and overlap, reflecting the seasonal nature of food sources. As food in one area declines, the Tanuki waddles off to another area where the berries, insects or seeds are in greater supply.
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Coffee and Provocation

Going to Hell in a Handbasket:
The United Nations has put out another report saying the world's environment is going to hell in a handbasket due to rapid and sustained human population growth. That's exactly what I have been saying for 27 years. There's just one little problem with this story board as a policy-making tool: the folks that vote and read United Nations reports are humans, and for the human race (taken as a whole) things are actually better now than they were 20, 50, 100, or 150 years ago based on almost any metric you would like to choose (longevity, neonatal mortality, income, access to clean water, food intake, sanitation, women's rights, etc.). Yes, things are often worse for wildlife (though not always), but wildlife and wild places don't get a vote in this human-dominated world of ours. To bad, we may think, but that's the sum total of the world's environmental problems in a nutshell.

Time to Cull the Badgers:
The British Government's chief scientific advisor, Sir David King, has said culling badgers is the "best option available at the moment to reduce the reservoir of tuberculosis infection in wildlife," and that a cull will start in a few months. I am not sure how this is news: DEFRA, the Department of Environmental and Rural Affairs in the U.K., has been gassing scores of thousands of badgers in TB-plagued areas of the U.K. for years. Nonetheless, the badger population in the U.K. is at historical records, and in fact there are now reported to be more badgers in the U.K. than fox!

Protecting Virginia Wilderness:
The Virginia Ridge and Valley Act, which will permanently protect as wilderness almost 55,000 acres in Virginia's Jefferson National Forest, has passed the House of Representatives. Let us hope the Senate is next. To read more about the region.

National Geographic in Praise of Hunters:
The National Geographic has come out with a piece in praise of hunters! About time they recognized the conservation history here. The article, entitled Hunters: For the Love of the Land, gets it just about right.

HSUS Says It's the Ignorant Public's Fault
Read this piece from the folks at the National Animal Interest Alliance about the Humane Society of the U.S. is concerned. Patti Strand of the National Animal Interest Alliance notes that, "HSUS calls itself a mainstream advocacy group, hiding or downplaying the fact that it ... is all about promoting vegan diets - no meat, no dairy - and ending traditional human-animal relationships across the board, from agriculture to biomedical research. . . . Mr. Pacelle [of the HSUS] seems baffled that anyone would go after HSUS for not having shelters because as he stated, 'We never said we run - local animal shelters.' This is vintage HSUS. They call themselves a humane society and then blame the public for being confused. By calling itself the Humane Society of the United States, HSUS rides into every situation on a 'case of mistaken identity' - an identity that, oops, just happens to raise millions of dollars: the mistaken impression for many Americans being that it is a humane society rather than a giant propaganda, lobbying and fundraising machine." Of course, what Strand does not mention is that her organization is a professional apologist for the puppy mill industry and factory farming, while she herself is on the board of the AKC where she works to make sure the Dalmatian registry is kept firmly closed so that the deep (and painful) health problems of that breed are not rectified through outcrossing. Nice! Talk about calling the kettle black!

Drunk and Disorderly in India:
In India, a herd of about 40 wild Asian elephants in Chandan Nukat, in northeast India, got drunk on beer kept outside in casks by local villagers, and then proceeded to run through a nearby paddy field where one of them struck an electrical pole and came in contact with a very powerful electrical wire. Writhing in pain while being juiced by electricity, other elephants tried to come to its aid, and a total of 6 elephants ended up being electrocuted. The report is that there would have been even more elephant deaths had not villagers, awakened by the cries of the animals, not chased them away to protect them. For the record, this was not the first time drunken elephants have rioted in Chandan Nukat -- it happened three years ago. Perhaps now is a good time to suggest leaving the beer kegs inside?

Electrocuting Elephants With Thomas Alva Edison:
In turn out that drunken elephants in India story (see above) is not the first time an elephant has been electrocuted. Believe it or not, the first elephant electrocution was orchestrated as a stunt in 1903 by none other than Thomas Alva Edison who was looking for a shocking (pun intended) publicity ploy to show that the alternating current (AC) system being proposed by George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla was dangerous and could kill people, while his direct current (DC) system could not. The gruesome elephant-killing publicity stunt was even filmed, but guess what? It didn't work! We have AC in our houses today, and DC is what runs all those little battery-operated thinga-ma-jigs we get at Best Buy.

Thank You Blowhards!
A special shout-out to the folks at 2Blowhards who gave us a very nice atta-boy for a couple of posts on this blog. Considering the rather stellar and far-reaching content of their blog, I am pleased as punch by their compliments.

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The Nonsense of Pull Dogs

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This is a repost from this blog, circa Feb 2005:


In "The Working Jack Russell Terrier," Eddie Chapman writes:

"Something that makes my blood boil is when I hear terrier men talk about dogs they call Caesar dogs. They will show you a Russell type that has been bred too big and say, 'I use him as a Caesar dog'. If I ask what a Caesar dog is, they say it is a dog which will hold the badger, he won't let go,' they say. I have never heard such rubbish in my life. Besides being unnecessary, it is invariably cruel to the dog and more often than not he will be badly bitten for his pains. Besides that, it is unnecessarily cruel to the badger and the sort of behavior that got badger digging banned. I have tried to explain how to remove badgers from a sett without injury to dog or badger. There is nothing clever about getting a hard dog smashed up by a badger. On the contrary, it shows ignorance and a lack of responsibility and feeling. Bravery in a terrier should never be exploited."

I found it quite refreshing to read this passage, as I have often noted that there is is little reason to own a "pull dog" if you actually know how to handle things at the end of a dig. The use of "pull dogs" damages dogs and quarry alike and is wasteful as it often necessitates time out of the field and expensive veterinary work.

In the U.S., the use of pull dogs (what Chapman and some others call "Caesar" dogs) is to due to the prevalence of too many over-large terriers that cannot go to ground in a real earth. To say you have a "good pull dog," is to say you do not have a dog capable of actually going to ground.

If you have followed the Kennel Club dictates, and embraced a 14 inch tall dog with a 17" or 18" chest (or larger!), you are forced to rationalize a job for it. No matter that it is a stupid job forged in pain. Most people would rather see their dog injured than swallow their pride and admit they have drunk the Koolaid offered up by the Kennel Club know-nothings who think a fox den is as big around as a go-to-ground tunnel.

Another factor is that many people simply have no idea of how to handle quarry and so use the dog to to do the job. Having gotten to the end of a dig, they do not know how to get the animal out of the pipe, nor do they know how to dispatch it. In such a situation, the use of a "pull dog" is ignorance in motion.

The simplest way for a novice to handle quarry is with a snare. You can make your own for about $5, or else buy a pig snare from a feedstore. An alternative is a "coon tong" available from Bill Boatman's raccoon hunting supply catalogue.

Groundhogs can also be tailed out alive -- it is not hard if the groundhog's tail is presented, as it so often is. If very much of the pipe is remaining, however, you may find yourself in a tug-of-war with the groundhog who can jamb up inside a pipe so tightly that even a large man can have difficulty pulling one free.

Always use a snare for raccoons -- they can twist all the way around on their short fat bodies. They can grab you with their hands and have crushing bites. Rabies is not uncommon in raccoons, especially on the East Coast.

If you have entangled a fox in a net, be carefully when extricating the fox. The best advice is to pin the animal to the ground under your boot while removing the net. Work the net off the fox in sections, and then release it to hunt another day.

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Honey Pots and Trolls in the Land of Eire

With four web sites, three dogs, and two semi-adult kids getting out of school to fly off to the ends of the earth, my life has been more than a little busy.

Add into the mix a real job (and a wife who has a job too), and close to zero at-home computer function for the last 10 days due to a crashing Internet connection, and I hope I am excused for not checking the anonymous postings on Internet bulletin boards across the pond.

If someone has a question or a suggestion, most people know how to get hold of me easy enough.

Which is what a friend did yesterday.

Where was I, he wanted to know? Apparently some anonymous Irish kid was raising a kerfuffle because I had said something bad about Irish dogs?

I did? Really? When was that?

I looked through my old posts, and apparently, it's not this post, in which I defend Eire's honor, but this one, which is more than two years old and which speaks of the old Irish "strong dog" tests and the potted histories that you commonly find for all Kennel Club dogs, including the Glen of Imaal terrier.

A two year old post? Did someone just get their first dog, or did they just get their first computer?

No mind.

Now here's the funny thing about this kerfuffle -- the "strong dog" tests once given by the Irish Kennel Club have not been done since 1968!

And when they were given, they weren't much of a test of a working dog were they? The Teastas Mor lasted for all of 5-minutes.

Five minutes? Five minutes.

In this Kennel Club test the dog was not required to find the quarry at all, and if the terrier bayed it was summarily disqualified.

Since the Kennel Club rules for this "test" were knitted up prior to the invention of locator collars, one has to wonder how the dog was supposed to be found underground. Telepathy? Dowsing rod?

But of course the dog did not need to be located, did it? The Teastas Mor was nothing more than a timed badger-baiting trial in a short artificial earth made to look "natural."

In fact this 5-minute "trial" with its fancy name was nothing more than a bit of nonsense cocked up by the folks at the Irish Kennel Club who were looking for a historical rationale for their over-large terriers.

Truth be told, even in the 1920s, the native terriers of Ireland were not seen too often in the field. The Teastas trials were designed as a promotion tool for dogs which needed a rationale to exist. Think American Kennel Club Earthdog trials, and you have the right idea.

So that's the background.

The new development is that some fellow I have never heard of before now wants to create a Sturm und Drang about the prowess of Kennel Club dogs at Irish Kennel Club badger-baiting trials that were last held nearly 40 years ago.

He does? Well God bless him for being so helpful to the cause of field sports at this critical time in the political debate.

Badger baiting trials; now there's a thing to be proud of and drag into the current world as if it's a practice as current as this morning's milk!

Now, if some anonymous person in Ireland wants to claim his country has the best badger-baiting dogs in the world, whom am I to deny the claim? After all, I suppose somebody has to "elect to receive" in the javelin throw. Why not the Irish?

That said, I think it's an insult to Irish diggers to tar them with this artificial five-minute "test" cocked up more than 80 years ago by the Irish Kennel Club which banned it almost 40 years ago. It surely does the Irish no favors that this trial was a "test" designed not to emulate real hunting but badger-baiting. There are real diggers in Ireland today. Let us celebrate them, eh?

Now if some folks are too stupid to see that a celebration of the old Teastas tests is a very bad thing, then I will not point it out to them. I try to extend charity to the truely retarded, not abuse them for their lack of insight.

The funny thing about my post on the Irish "strong dog" tests is that the quotes I set into the piece were written by none other than Henry B. Fottrell, who actually supplied the badgers used for the first Teastas Mor trials.

Fottrell held office in the Irish Kennel Club from 1936 to 1978 -- the entire era of the Teastas Mor trials. The article from which I quoted in my original post first appeared in the December 1926 edition of Dogdom magazine. For the record, this is not secret knowledge, and the article I quoted from is not hard to find on the Internet.

As for the over-large native terriers of Ireland, I do not need to say one word about them, as the Irish diggers vote with their wallets on that one, don't they?

Look at the sort of dog that is standing behind most Irish diggers today, and it's the same sort of dog you find everywhere else in the world: Patterdales, Russells, Border Terriers, Fells, and some crosses of the aforementioned.

Take a looks here for example. What's that dog that Seamus Erwin is holding? It's a Patterdale you say? Named after a small village in County Cork is it? I had no idea. His first dog was descended from those used in the Lake District of Dundalk? I must visit that area. The Cheviot Hills are just outside of Dublin are they? That smooth coated white dog is a Glen of Imaal is it? Ah! Pour me a drink, and I will swear to it.

Pour me a second drink and I will raise a glass to Reverend John Russell who was vicar in Kilkenny. And while we're tossing back a pint, let's drink a round to Tommy Dobson who was a Leprechaun if there ever was one. And let's pour a shot for that great Irish poet Ossian. Ossian knew his dogs! If you want to know about Irish dogs, every true word on the subject was first penned by Ossian!

Now I am having a bit of fun, of course, but it's not like the original post was written to actually solicit genuine information was it? As for Kennel Club Glen's, they are about as common in the field today as Chihuahuas.

So what was the point of this fellow's post?

Well, it could be a simple matter of another Internet Troll on the boards. Such people are common enough, and I have written about them before.

But perhaps in this case it is something else. Think about it -- a person with an anonymous name shows up less than a year ago on a working terrier board, and now he wants to talk about badger baiting in a country where that practice is quite illegal?

Hmmmm. Sounds like a honey pot operation to me.

What's a honey pot? A honey pot is an old trick. You put down bait (preferably under cover of dark) and then stand back and shoot anything that comes in to feed on it.

I have written before about how these Internet bulletin boards might be a problem in this regard, and more people should probably be aware of how these honey pot schemes work if they want to stand clear of real trouble themselves, especially in the U.K.

In the old days, law enforcement "honey pots" were store-front fencing operations manned by the police, or a buy-and-bust drug corners where undercover cops replaced the local dealers which had been rounded up a half hour before.

Nowdays, thanks to the Internet, cops never have to leave their chair to make a bust -- they just go online to find the folks they want to arrest. Whether they are looking for wildlife poachers or illegal aliens, terrorists or pedophiles, neo-Nazis or stolen property, the Internet is the new hunting ground for law enforcement.

Are wildlife officials and animal rights lunatics using the Internet this way?

Believe it. It has been tried on me (though I do nothing illegal with my dogs), and it has been tried on others.

Right now the Roller Pigeon community is in a bit of a pinch and a bulletin board had to be closed down for a week so that it could be scrubbed of all mention of hawk and falcon killing. Falconers have similarly been nailed for illegal bird sales overseas.

Heads up and fair warning.

Those in the U.K. who ignore this caution can go to page 30 of the June issue of Earth Dog-Running Dog magazine to find the telephone number of the Hunting Lawyer they may soon need. Those who want to see what the working terriers of Ireland actually look like, however, can go to page 29 of that same magazine. A little irony there, eh?

The best advice, of course, is to do nothing illegal. That's what I do, but of course that's an easy course of action here in the U.S.A. which still remains the Land of the Free.

My genuine sympathies to the folks in the U.K. who are being persecuted by lunatics. All I can offer is immigration advice.

Terrier work is still legal over there, of course, and I suppose if you mind yourself you can stay clear of the law. For God's sake, however, stay away from young thugs that want to talk about badger-baiting anywhere.

Nowdays mere possession of a historical book about badger digging is enough to raise an indictment in the press. And you will note how freely this recent press account confuses hunting badgers with badger baiting and how much genuine fiction is slipped in as well.

This is the slippery slope I was warning about in my original post -- the same slippery slope that the animal rights lunatics in the U.K. would love for folks to slide down.

A word to the wise in this regard should be sufficient.

As for Honey Pot Poseurs and Internet Trolls, the best course of action is to ignore them and delete them.

A genuine digger has nothing to prove, and throws his or her dirt with a shovel and not a keyboard. He has a real name and a real address and does not play games with the law or foment negative discussion, especially in a public space like an online bulletin board.

Anyone who wants to drop me an email with a genuine question, a correction or to offer a different point of view, my internet connection is back up again, and my email address is in the top right margin, as always.
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Honest working dogs do not need a Kennel Club test to prove their worth;
they simply need an owner with a shovel who is willing to take them out and use it.

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The "Beast of Basra" Is Blamed on the British

From The Times of London:


British forces operating around the southern Iraqi city of Basra are being blamed for the arrival of a plague of vicious badgers that stalk the streets at night, attacking livestock and even humans.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was, according to the local rumour mill, released into the area by UK forces to spread panic.

Major David Gell, a British Army spokesman, said the animals were thought to be a kind of honey badger or ratel - melivora capensis - which can be fierce but are not usually dangerous to humans unless provoked.

The animals are indigenous to Africa and large parts of the Middle East and are about the same size as European badgers but much more aggressive, with long claws and strong jaws. They have been described in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most fearless animal.

“They are native to the region but rare in Iraq. They’re nocturnal carnivores with a fearsome reputation, but they don’t stalk humans and carry them back to their lair,” Major Gell said.

Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm the public but the story of the British badgers has spread like wildfire through Basra and the surrounding villages.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several dead badgers and sought to reassure his fellow citizens that they are not new to the region but had been seen well before Saddam's ouster in 2003.

“Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific," Mr Abdul-Mahdi told AFP.

But their numbers are increasing, possibly, scientists say, because Iraqi authorities are trying to reflood marshlands north of Basra that were drained under Saddam Hussein.

So far neither the scientists nor the soldiers have been able to calm the populace's fears.

“I was sleeping at night when this strange animal hit me on my head. I have not seen such an animal before. My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer,” said Suad Hassan, a 30-year-old housewife. “It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey. It runs so quickly."

Mobile phone video of the badgers circulating in Basra shows a stocky skunk-like animal with long front claws. The honey badger, or ratel, is known as a brave predator capable of killing a cobra. It weighs up to 14kg (30lb),

Sattar Jabbar, a 50-year-old farmer from Abu Sakhar north of Basra, believes the badger can tackle even large prey. “I saw it three days ago at night attacking animals. It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece. I tried to shoot it with my gun but it ran away into the orchards. I missed it,” he said.

“I believe this animal appeared following a raid to the region by the British forces,” said Ali Mohsen, a farmer in his 40s from Karmat Ali, near the air base used by the multinational force. “As we are close to the airport, they probably released this animal into the area.”

Amid such tales, there is little experts like Dr Ghazi Yaqub Azzam, deputy dean of the veterinary college, can do to reassure his neighbours. “Its nature is to eat small animals like hens and rats. It has powerful senses of hearing and smell. It gets aggressive if senses danger, but it doesn’t attack man unless threatened,” he said.

Major Gell said that Basrawis should have little to fear from the beast, although he warned them not to get too close, “If you cornered it and poked it with a stick, then the smart money would be on the badger,” he said.

But he added: “We have not released giant badgers in Basra, and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river."

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Working Terrier Year Book: A Box Full of Jewels

The compilation volume entitled The Working Terrier Year Book, 1987-1991 is a box of small jewels, and a good read for the dedicated working terrier enthusiast.

The book is eclectic and full of short pieces on a wide variety of themes related to working terriers, but if there is a central thread that holds these pearls together, it is that the sand is always slipping steadily through the glass. Some of what what has gone before will never come back, and some of what what exists now may soon be lost forever.

The passage of time is not entirely unexpected as a theme in a Year Book, least of all one on working terriers in the U.K.

It was during during this five-year period, after all, when the political pressures to ban fox hunting really began their ascendency, and when the last vestiges of legal badger work had only recently gone the way of the buggy whip.

At the same time, the push was on to pull the Jack Russell Terrier into the Kennel Club, while some of the legendary greats of the terrier world from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, were getting long in the tooth and passing on to the Great Hunting Ground in the sky.

Add to this mix one of the constant beats in the terrier world: the loss of great dogs before their time, coupled with the rise of young know-nothings and fools who continue to give the sport a bad name.

So is the book grim, then?

Suprisingly, not at all, for the central voice is that of the diggers that have endured and will always endure, not the least of whom is editor David Harcombe himself.

A short section bemoaning "Which way for the Jack Russell Terrier?" is also somewhat bemused that otherwise intelligent people are going down the road to Kennel Club oblivion thinking this old road must now lead to somewhere else.

A piece entitled "The Spirit is Willing," is a celebration of an old dog who nearly loses his life due to the mistake of his owner.

A piece entitled "Respect for the Quarry" reminds us all that we safeguard our own self-respect when we treat dogs and wildlife with some reverance.

Again and again in this book we get quick profiles of notable characters, famous names, and unique voices in the world of digging. We also get a regular peppering of concern and amazement about about how terrier work is presented in the press.

I have to say I do not wonder why terrier work is often misrepresented: the world seems to be full of young fools only too happy to do it all wrong and present the ugly side up. This last week, for example, I was rather alarmed to read one person on a semi-public forum who suggested that a ban on fighting dogs was a threat to terrier work (it is not, and to equate the two is pure nonsense and an insult), while on another semi-public board a young digger posted pictures of the ugliest kind of fox culling. Did we need to see that?

Of coure the young who have done very little have to show all they have ever done, no matter how pathetic. And if some people waited for knowledge before they spoke, we would still not know they existed.

As an antidote to the poseurs, this Working Terrier Year Book gives us the varied voices of experience -- of those who observe that a mute dog was never valued in the old days, and who note that a really hard dog cannot stick with it over the several hours (or more) that it may take to dig deep.

My favorite line, is stolen from Napoleon Bonaparte, and is used to describe why show rings are incapable of judging the invisible but not emphemeral, qualities of a true working terrier: "The spirit is to the material as three is to one." Excellent!

Some book reviews are also included: a very nice (and well deserved) review of David MacDonald's Running With the Foxes, and an excoriating (and equally well-deserved) review of the awful novel Trog by D. Brian Plummer.

And, of course, there are stories of digs and dogs and men. The murky pedigrees of some famous terriers are debated as if they are important, while a well-thought out piece on Jocelyn Lucas wonders whether his dogs were really any good and whether Lucas himself was more of a writer than a digger (good question, good question!) Short profiles are given of such "names" in the world of working terriers as Bert Gripton, Arthur Nixon, John Park, Ken Smith, and Ken Gould.

All in all, this book was an easy and quite enjoyable read, as it presents a varied set of topics in easy-to-digest bits and pieces that are perfect for consumption between coffee and work, dinner and bed. A very worthy addition to any working terrier book collection.


4Hard cover, 425 pages, edited (and often written) by David Harcombe

4Available from: Fieldfare, P.O. Box 2, Llandro SA19 6EW at cost of £25 pounds including postage and shipping within the U.K. and £27 pounds to Europe and Ireland, and £29 pounds to the U.S.A.

4To order via credit card (PayPal), >> CLICK HERE

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Record Numbers in the Hedge

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AMERICA IS BLESSED with many kinds of quarry that can be worked by terriers year round: groundhog, raccoon, red fox, possum, gray fox, and badger.

Most terrier quarry is at record levels of abundance, and most folks in the Eastern U.S. and Midwest live within a half hour of excellent hunting opportunities.

Groundhog populations, for example, are much higher now than they were in Colonial times when most of the Eastern U.S. and Midwest was forested. Red fox, of course, is an import, while raccoon populations today are 15 to 20 times larger than they were in the 1930s.

In the U.K. wildlife in the hedge is also doing remarkably well and is at record levels.

Red fox populations, for example, now appear to be at the limits of biological density, with the Mammal Society estimating the late-December fox population to be stable at about 250,000, with about 14% of this population in urban locations.

In the Spring, of course, the fox population of the U.K. soars, with the addition of about 425,000 fox kits, but large numbers of these cubs subsequently die from disease or starvation, while later in the year fox numbers are also thinned by vehicle impact (estimated at 100,000 a year), shooting (estimated at 80,000 a year) and hunting with dogs (estimated at about 20,000 a year in 2004 before the so-called "ban" went into effect). In his excellent book "Running with the Foxes," wildlife biologist David MacDonald has noted that "foxhunting is of minor significance to foxes in particular, or amongst wildlife issues generally."



Red fox population growth, U.K., 1961-2000



As for badger, the Mammal Society reports that there are now more badger in the U.K. than red fox -- an astounding thing considering that red fox are now so common as to be seen as a bit of an urban plague in the U.K.

British badger populations also appears to be at their biological limits, with little or no growth in numbers in recent years, and mortality accomplished chiefly by disease, starvation, vehicle impacts. In addition, DEFRA -- the Department of Environment, Farms and Rural Affairs -- routinely gasses thousands of badgers a year (and has been doing so for more than 30 years) in an effort to eradicate the animals from from areas where brucollosis (a kind of bovine tuberculosis) is a worry.

For more information, see:
>> Mammal Society release (2005)
>> Vet Wildlife Management (PDF)