Patton's Willie

General Patton bought the first of many white bull terriers just after World War I for his daughters, Beatrice and Ruth Ellen.

Patton's first bull terrier was named "Tank" and turned out to be stone deaf. Patton's daughters called him by thumping on the floor.

The most famous bull terrier owned by General Patton was named Willie -- short for "William the Conqueror."

Willie was purchased in 1944 and followed Patton everywhere, with little bells on his collar to let people know he was coming and where he was. Willie also had regular GI "dog tags" issued to him.

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Hilter's Stolen Jack Russell

Hitler is under the "X". The Jack Russell was his. >> For another picture

This is a reposting from Dec. 2004

In World War I, it was common to find terriers in the trenches where they served three purposes: messengers (this was before radios, walkie-talkies and telephones), mortar detectors (a dog can hear an incoming shell long before a human can), and gas detectors (a dog can smell a drifting cloud of mustard or chlorine gas long before a human can).

The picture above shows one of the most famous and infamous veterans of World War I -- Adolph Hitler who was gassed despite the Jack Russell dog to the far right. Young Adolph is the fellow at the far left with the ridiculous mustache under the "X". In a later picture, Hitler insisted the dog be photographed sitting at his side.

Hitler's terrier apparently had been the mascot of English soldiers and ventured out into "No Man's Land" sometime in late January or early February of 1915 while chasing a rat. The dog jumped into a German trench where Adolf (himself a messenger) caught the Jack Russell terrier and decided to keep it. Hitler named the dog "Fuchsl" or Little Fox.

Adolph fed and taught Fuchsl tricks, and the Jack Russell terrier never left Adolf's side until August of 1917 when the dog was stolen at a train station, apparently by a railroad official who earlier that day had offered Hitler 200 Marks for the terrier. Hitler said he would not take 200,000 Marks for the dog. "I can look at him like I look at a human being," Adolph had written about the dog. "I am crazy about him."

In 1918, in an incident that might have been avoided had his terrier remained with him, Hitler was temporarily blinded by a British gas attack in Flanders.

Though Hitler's maniacal hatred, paranoia and obsession were already becoming self-evident during WWI, the loss of his dog and subsequent gassing may have contributed to his desire to scapegoat others for his -- and his country's -- failures and defeats.

The Death of the Fox Inn

The Death of Fox Inn is now a private residence.

In 1768, Washington was appointed as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and managed to fill his need for fox hunting at the Gloucester Hunting Club across the River from Philadelphia in New Jersey near present-day Haddonfield. It was largely because of the social and political connections made while fox hunting that Washington's social prominence rose, and in 1775 Washington was Congress's unanimous choice as commander of the new Continental Army that was to lead the American forces in their fight against the British.

In 1774, one year before Washington was tapped to lead the fledgling Continental Army, William Eldridge began a tavern at 217 Kings Highway (aka County Road 551), in Mount Royal, New Jersey. The tavern was known as Eldridge's Tavern or "The Death of the Fox Inn".

The name is derived from the fact that the hunters of the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club (1766 to 1818) often gathered at the inn after the chase.

Fox hunting shaped several key components of the Revolutionary War. A fox terrier owned by British General Howe was found during the middle of a battle, and was later returned to him by General Washington. Some historians believe this later led Howe to resign when told he must show the American forces no mercy.

After the revolution, it was the members of the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club, meeting at "The Death of the Fox Inn" that engineered Washington's selection as the first President of the United States.

Great nations from tiny fox hunting clubs are borne.

Giant Rat Mine Detectors

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , GONDOLA, MOZAMBIQUE, Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Rats Take Over From Man's Best Friend

Just about every method of detecting land mines has a drawback. Metal detectors cannot tell a mine from a tenpenny nail. Armored bulldozers work well only on level ground. Mine-sniffing dogs get bored, and if they make mistakes, they get blown up.

The Gambian giant pouched rat has a drawback, too: It has trouble getting down to work on Monday mornings. Other than that, it may be as good a mine detector as man or nature has yet devised.

Just after sunup on one dewy morning, on a football-field-sized patch of earth in the Mozambican countryside, Frank Weetjens and his squad of 16 giant pouched rats are proving it. Outfitted in tiny harnesses and hitched to 10m-long clotheslines, their long tails whipping to and fro, the rats lope up and down the lines, whiskers twitching, noses tasting the air.

Wanjiro, a sleek two-year-old female in a bright red harness, pauses halfway down the line, sniffs, turns back, then sniffs again. She gives the red clay a decisive scratch with both forepaws. Her trainer, Kassim Mgaza, snaps a metal clicker twice, and Wanjiro waddles to him for her reward -- a mouthful of banana and an affectionate pet.

A Gambian giant pouched rat searches for a landmine in a field where several defused landmines are buried at the Apopo training project in Gandola, Mozambique. The rat may be as good a mine detector as man or nature has yet devised.

"What Pavlov did with his dogs is exactly what we're doing here -- very basic conditioning," said Weetjens, a lanky, 42-year-old Belgian who works for an Antwerp demining group named Apopo. "TNT means food. TNT means clicking sound, means food. That's how we communicate with them."

Wanjiro has been rewarded for sniffing out a TNT-filled land mine, one of scores buried a centimeters below ground in the training field where she works out five days a week. Like all the training mines, this one was defused. But if the Mozambican authorities approve, she and her companions will move at year's end from dummies to live minefields -- the world's first certified, professional mine-detecting rats.

Indeed, in a test last November along a southern Mozambique railway that was heavily mined during this country's 17-year civil war, teams of three giant pouched rats found every one of 20 live mines in a previously unsurveyed 1,310m2 swatch of land.

"Animal detection, with dogs in particular, has increased very much in the last three or four years," Havard Bach, the top expert on demining methods for the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining, said in a telephone interview. But in many cases, he said, "it would probably be better to use rats than dogs."

Rats are abundant, cheap and easily transported. At 1.3kg, they are too light to detonate mines accidentally. They can sift the bouquet of land-mine aromas far better than any machine. Unlike even the best mine-detecting dog or human, they are relentlessly single-minded.

"Throw a stick for a dog to fetch, and after 10 times the dog will say, `Get it yourself, buddy,"' Weetjens said. "Rats will keep working as long as they want food."

Plenty of work awaits them. The International Campaign to Ban Land Mines estimates that 100 million mines have been laid worldwide, from anti-personnel and anti-tank mines hidden underground to above-ground mines triggered by tripwires. Although Mozambique's civil war ended nearly 12 years ago, sappers here still discovered and destroyed more than 10,100 mines last year alone, and mine explosions killed or injured 14 people.

Experts say that the pace of land-mine detection has slowed globally in recent years, in part because the death of its celebrity spokeswoman, Princess Diana, has robbed the cause of publicity and support. But there is also a shortage of land-mine specialists, and a true dearth of sure-fire methods to find buried mines.

Human detection -- steel-nerved workers with metal detectors and probes -- remains the preferred technique. But metal detectors are hard put to distinguish mines from other metal objects and even from some nonmetals, like mixtures of dirt and charcoal. Moreover, in areas where exploded mines have scattered metal fragments, rooting out false readings can be daunting.

Dogs, with their strong noses and affinity for people, are increasingly popular; about 200 are working now in heavily mined Afghanistan. But they are hard to keep healthy, especially in tropical Africa. They tend to bond with trainers, making it hard to switch them from one handler to another.

And they so badly want to please that a simple misreading of their trainers' body language can lead them to indicate a mine's presence where none exists or, far worse, ignore a real one.

Then there are rats, which don't give a fig about people but will do anything for bananas and peanuts. "All a rat wants to do is find the target and get his reward," said Bach, of the Geneva demining center. "They're almost mechanical in the way they work."

Mine-sniffing rats are the sole focus of Apopo, a Flemish acronym for "product development geared toward the demining of anti-personnel mines." The group is the brainchild of Weetjens' brother Bart, a college friend, Christophe Cox, and a University of Antwerp professor, Mic Billet, now Apopo's chairman.

The three decided in the late 1990s that so-called biosensor animals with great noses were the future of land-mine detection, but that there must be creatures better suited for the task than dogs.

With a grant from the Belgian government, they began hunting for an animal with a dog's sense of smell, but none of its drawbacks. They approached Ron Verhagen, the head of the university's biology department, for help. "And that," Weetjens said, "is where rats came along."

More specifically, along came Cricetomys gambianus, also known as the Gambian and African giant pouched rat. Up to 76cm-long, it thrives in most of sub-Saharan Africa, lives up to eight years in captivity and is "savage" in the wild, Weetjens says, but so docile when bred that some people keep them as pets.

Most important, the pouched rat (so named because it stores food, hamster-style, in its cheeks) buries what it does not immediately eat and sports a nose honed to bloodhound status by aeons of searching for buried food stashes. Persuading the giant pouched rat to hunt for land mines, therefore, is as simple as convincing him that TNT is just another tasty treat waiting a few inches underground.

Each rat gets to sweep a 10m2 of land on which two defused mines or TNT scents have been hidden. Finding the mine or scent earns a click and a bite of banana or peanuts. Failure generally earns a second try. Some rats try to game the system, scratching the earth randomly in hopes of getting free treats. But the trainers feed them and sound a click to signal success only when they scratch the right spots.

Bananas and peanuts, after all, are what drives Gambian giant pouched rats to excel. Which is why they are often at their worst on Monday morning.

"During the week, they're on a diet. They have to work for their food," Weetjens said. "But on weekends, they get to eat as much as they want. On Mondays, they just aren't as hungry."
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Baden-Powell: Fox Hunting as Cavalry School

Robert Baden-Powell was the founder of the world-wide Boy Scout movement and, before that, was a cavalry man in South Africa and in the Crimean War.



Around the the turn of the Twentieth Century Baden-Powell noted that the sport of fox hunting was one reason Britain was able to do so well with mounted regiments -- many in the cavalry had gotten their best training running to hounds.

"Fox-hunting, when you come to think of it, is really a very wonderful institution. Although it has come to be quite an artificial sport in a wholly civilised country it still keeps going in every part of England in spite of the War, in spite of the decline in horse-breeding, and in spite of heavy taxes and heavier costs. It is one of the few old institutions left which still keeps us in touch to-day with the traditions and spirit of the former Old England.There is another point about it too. Having seen most of the cavalries of the world I have no doubt in my mind as to which is the most efficient for its work in war, and equally I have no doubt that fox-hunting is to a large extent responsible for that efficiency.



The nation really owes much to fox-hunting for what it has done to help our cavalry to compensate for its small quantity by its excellence in quality, and this without any extra call upon the taxpayer—for once!



The ex-Kaiser fully recognised this even before he had tasted its quality in the Great War, and he had established at Hanover a pack of hounds as part of the establishment of the Cavalry School there.



Of course, it was militarised, having a Captain as Master, a Sergeant-Major as huntsman, a Sargeant as first whip, and so on downwards.



Undoubtedly fox-hunting has proved a school for training men in riding fearlessly across country of all descriptions; it has taught them practical horsemastership, in economising the powers of the horse, and judging when to nurse him and when to let him go. It has also trained in them that invaluable attribute, 'an eye for country,' and not through dry lectures or boring field-days, but through a sport which appeals to their enthusiasm and gives them at once health and enjoyment."