PETA Taking Dogs from Shelters to Kill Them

I recently reported on PETA workers in Virginia picking up the dog warden's dog, taking its very expensive electronic tracking collar off of it, and trying to steal away with it down the road.

Now here's how that tale was maybe supposed to end ....

It seems that PETA workers in Virginia (where PETA is headquartered) have been routinely going down to North Carolina to pick up perfectly good dogs from the pound in order to kill them and dump their bodies in dumpsters.

Yeah, I know, I don't believe it either. So here's the link for you to read yourself. Knock yourself out.

Ahoskie police arrested the pair Wednesday night as they disposed of some bags into a dumpster. Police said the bags contained the bodies of 18 dogs; 13 other animals were found dead in a white panel van that’s registered to PETA.

Authorities said the animals were alive with the pair picked them up from animal shelters in Northampton and Bertie counties. The two were picking up animals to be brought back to PETA headquarters for euthanization, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk said Thursday.

Police have said that Cook and Hinkle said the dogs would be found good homes.

The arrests came after a month-long investigation where as many as 80 dead animals have been found in dumpsters on four consecutive Wednesday nights. Ahoskie Police Chief Troy Fitzhugh said, "It just gets to you after awhile."

A veterinarian told 13News that one of the animals he examined had been healthy and he couldn’t understand why it was killed.

And please hear this -- these are not some run-off lunatic kids doing stuff without supervision. This is PETA's core policy and plan -- to pick up dogs in shelters and kill them before they can be adopted.

"PETA has never made a secret of the fact that most of the animals picked up in North Carolina are euthanized," Newkirk said.

If there is a God, PETA workers will be going to very rough jails for very long stretches of time. Let's hope that Virginia and North Carolina judges are ready to send a message.

Whippet Good

Matt Mullenix and Rina the Whippet, with Rina's first brace of rabbits. The title to this post was stolen from an email from Matt -- a reference to an old Devo song.

One of the unplanned benefits of this blog is that I have met, online, some pretty cool people who, though they may hunt differently than I do, share the same three- and four-species trials, tribulations and thrills of making it all work in the field while hunting.

Along with the folks that hunt with ferrets are the long-doggers and, perhaps most interesting of all, the hawkers and falconers. This last group is, without a doubt, the most literate group of complex-primitive hunters.

The picture, above, is of Matthew Mullenix and his young whippet Rina. There was a hawk in this hunt, of course, but as Matt explains it (quoting Gregg Barrow, another online friend), "The first season belongs to the dog," and these rabbits are purely Rina's.

The first season, of course, refers to the dog's first season -- not the hawk's or the human's. Matt's well-written and insightful journal this season is more about Rina the whippet (at least so far) than his veteran hawk Smash.

It was on Matt's blog that I learned that his old bird, Charlie, is now in stud at the Coulson's down in Louisiana (Tom and Jennifer Coulson are Harris Hawk breeders, fliers and mentors par excellence) and that Charlie had sired the new Harris Hawk that digger and hawker Teddy Moritz is now flying in New Jersey. A small universe, eh? Teddy's new hawk nailed its first bunny back in mid-October -- a development I learned on Matt's blog.

Matt took a long hawking swing around America recently. To read a little about his visit at Steve Bodio's, see the Querencia blog where he and Reid Farmer also blog with Steve.

Steve Bodio and Reid Farmer are another pair of interesting writers I stumbled upon due to this blog -- the kind of people who write about Turkish pigeons (No Dear, not Turkish prisons, Turkish pigeons), and the commonalities found among petroglyphs across the world. Three voices and three interests make for a rich gumbo at Querencia -- with occassional dashes of good stuff from other bloggers, naturalists, hawkers and doggers to spice it all up.

OK, back to dogs -- specifically hawking dogs.

I observe that a very rich and diverse variety of canines are found in the hawking world, and that the choice of dog may have less to do with the hawk than with the countryside being hawked and the collateral game than can be had in non-hawking seasons.

Teddy Mortiz, for example, hawks under a small pack of long-coated miniature dachshunds -- dogs that are useful for busting rabbits out of the tight thick stands of multiflora rose that are found in the East, but which also do double dirt dog duty on groundhog, fox, raccoon and possum.

Steven Bodio, who lives on one of the high flat stretches of upland New Mexico, has a love affair with the type of Turkish long-dog know as a Tazi -- a function of the jack rabbits, coyotes, and vast open spaces he has in his neck of the woods.

Hawker Rebecca O'Connor recently acquired a nice red Brittany. Her first Brittany was so well acclimated it licked the Falcon on the face and the bird actually tolerated it. A small all-pupose bird dog, Brittany's do well in a wide variety of cover -- a good all-rounder for California.

In other parts of the country, Jack Russells and beagles are popular for busting bunnies out of brush, while down in Louisiana, Matt has a fondness for whippets which are good warm-weather dogs for swamp rabbits and cotton rats as well as for busting birds out of tall tropical grasses.

For more on the subject, see >> Rabbit Hawker's Dogs.




A young male Harris Hawk and a longhaired dachshund named Fitz (as in Fitz-in-dens) which has an 11 inch inch chest, both owned and hunted by Teddy Moritz. The young tiercel Harris has been doing the business on eastern cotton tails.

A Change of Season and Quarry

Chris peers into the hole.


On the drive out to the farms this morning, the truck thermometer said it was 33 degrees out, and the first frost of the season was evident on the grass. The temperature would climb at least 20 degrees today -- maybe 25 -- but the groundhog season was over, as groundhog hibernation is driven by light, not by temperature. This is true for bird migrations too -- an unseasonal period of warm weather in the Fall does not fool the birds.

Beginning with Thanksgiving and continuing to Christmas -- a period of about a month -- it's hit or miss with quarry, with a very high liklihood of getting hit by skunk, and a better than-average chance of finding possum and raccoon. After Christmas, the raccoon and skunk are generally hibernating (the male raccoon will begin moving around again in early February as they beging looking for mates), and groundhogs will very occassionally exit to defecate and then trundle back down to sleep for a few more weeks. Possum are active all year long, though they will lay up for long periods of really cold weather. After Christmas until the first of March it's fox season, with the peak in late January and running through February.

Chris and I met at the Flint Hill store. I had in mind pulling into a new parking spot close to a creek bed we could walk looking for game, but as I drove by I noticed two SUVs parked right where I wanted to pull in. Deer hunters. It turns out it's the first day of shotgun season. Oh goodie. How many first days of the season are there? First day of early black powder, first day of shot gun, first day of rifle, first day of bow, first day of regular black powder .... No worries -- off to another farm.

I turned around, and Chris followed me back up the road, and we pulled into a nice big place that has a nice creek and a small bog on it. It was going to be a nice clear day -- not too cold or windy -- and I had high hopes. Or should I say I had high hopes until I got out of the truck and walked 100 feet. The fields were soaked. Where did all this water come from? I did not remember too much rain from the week before, but it had clearly come down very hard here just 25 minutes up the road.

We hunted the dogs up the hedge, busting out a fair sized doe and a black-and-white feral cat which managed to get away with its life. We crossed above a boggy area and hunted down the top of a field where there were quite a few holes in a more-or-less dry hedge row. A large new push-pile has been bulldozed up, but nothing was home.

We crossed down the field to a creek bottom and began walking up the high side of the creek. Mountain gave voice for a second, and the dogs and I followed into the hedge, but nothing could be found, and Mountain trotted up from behind us as if she had bolted something into the field. Whatever it was, it was lost now.

We continued down the hedgerow on the high bank above the creek. In the distance I could hear guns blasting away. There was a large metal tree stand -- the type large enough to hold four hunters and a propane grill -- overlooking this field. No one was in it, but I still found myself routinely looking up the hill to make sure I was not being scoped in on.

At the end of the hedge, we crossed over the creek and begn walking up the hill to another long hedge about 100 yards above the water, but Mountain was nowhere to be found. We waited a bit, and I whistled, but after another minute it was pretty clear Mountain had found.

I crossed back over the creek and began boxing some likely settes, but she was not in them. Chris crossed over too and walked up the hill towards the big deer stand but did not find anything. He then crossed back over the creek and began walking down the high hedge where we had been headed, while I continued to call and box a few more possible settes. Chris whistled and said he had found her -- he was walking down the field and pointing to the same hedge I was in, but about halfway back down the course we had just come up. He could hear herfrom up on top, but the acoustics were such that even though I was closer, I could hear nothing.

I gathered up my tools, and Chris did the same, and we headed over to see what Mountain had in the ground. I doubted it was a groundhog -- it would have dug away by now. Probably a possum, maybe a coon. Or a cat. Too warm for fox yet.

Mountain was on the other side of the creek, and we waded over to find her in the middle of a very old and thick multiflora rose jumble. Time to break out the machetes.

This sette had about five eyes, and a quick boxing showed Mountain about three feet down in a mess of old roots and brambles. We hacked away at the vegetation, and then worked with machete and saw on the thick roots twising along the ground. After we had it cleared it out pretty well, I reboxed to locate the dog, found Mountain to be exactly where she had been before, and we began to dig.

This was not a particularly hard dig, but we did pull out some big rocks -- one the size of my upper torso, and the other the size of a small turkey. At one point Mountain came out -- she had been underground working this critter for about an hour, and whatever it was could not go anywhere or dig away.

With Mountain out, Pearl slid in and bayed it up nicely -- a nice deep voice. Mountain, hearing Pearl give voice, turned back around and pushed her way back in down another hole. She winkled past Pearl somehow, and Pearl came out. Pearl's a very young and inexperienced dog yet, but I am very pleased with how readily she is entering and working. This is only her third dig.

Pearl had riled up the critter in the hole, and Mountain was winding it up a little more, and by now, from the sound in the pipe, I was pretty sure we had a raccoon.

At about two and a half feet down we hit dry dirt, and I was pretty sure the dog was only ahout 6 inches deeper. Chris scraped the loose dirt out of the hole, and I carefuly barred and broke through into the den only 6 or 7 inches below. Excellent. Time for the posthole digger.

This last six inches was very dry and seemed to be made up of mostly degraded rock, but the posthole digger is a tough instrument, and it punched through in short order.

We pulled Mountain and tied up the dogs while we opened up the hole to see what we had. Chris dropped Moxie in hole, and she shot up the pipe and engaged -- there was small a roar in the hole and now I was sure it was either a coon or a very loud possum. Moxie has a habit of going for a head grab, but this time she was working in the dark, and I told Chris to let her work it a bit as I doubted she was going to be so brave and foolish wihtout light. After a while, we pulled Moxie, and she seemed to be no worse for the wear. A little dark tunnel work is all Moxie needs. She's a great little dog.

Chris went to tie Moxie up, and I looked in the hole to see the top of a raccoon head poking out. Hello!
The raccoon took one look at my ugly face, turned around, and pushed in as deep as it could. I postholed the pipe a bit to cut away the overhang, and I could see the raccoon's tail now. After a brief pause to see if she would relax, turn around, and bolt out on her own, we brought Mountain back over, and she turned the raccoon in short order.

With the coon turned around, we pulled Mountain and I got a snare over the coon and pulled it tight. We had decided to take picture and let this one go, but as the cable tightened up the coon pulled backwards very quickly and the cable came down on top of its head rather than over its neck. Not good. I tightened up the cable, but the raccoon squirmed free and then bolted. I told Chris to release Mountain, and he did. After a second or two of confusion (What do you mean it's not in the hole?) Mountain was off down the bank, through the water, and up the other creek bank. We let off the other dogs, and they too took to the water. A commotion with a lot of barking and snarling told me Mountain had caught the coon in a brushy jumble on the other side, and I leaped over to sort it you, which was done in short order. This was a female raccoon with an enormous posterior and she weighed 16 pounds.

We tied up the dogs, repaired the sette, and took a few pictures of the raccoon before heading back to work along the hedge. The dogs located nothing more on this farm, and we headed off to Nick's to see if we could find something there.

At Nicks the dogs had a nice run around before we headed over to a high bank above a creek. This is a fairly bad area, as a lot of rubbish has been tipped down this bank -- old pieces of plywood, bits of metal farm equipment, spoiled straw bales, spoiled soybeans, some old rugs, part of a small outbuilding -- but it is riddled with groundhog holes and is a likely spot for possums. We did not go fast through this section -- there were a lot of holes, and it would take the dogs a bit of time to find them.

Mountain was ahead of us down the creek, when Moxie showed interest in a hole. I downed tools and descended the embankment and pulled a few leaves out of the hole and encouraged Moxie to give it another sniff. In she went. Excellent. Chris came down the bank, and I tied up Pearl, and broke out the shovel. Chris was at the hole when he suddenly said, "Oh sh--; it's a skunk." We both began moving very quickly now. Chris began locating and it was not good news. Due to the steepness of the bank, the dog was about 6 feet down. The good news was that the ground was very soft -- wash down loam from the fields above. The diggin would not be hard, but it would not be quick either.

Chris started opening up the entrance hole and calling for Moxie, while I began to dig a hole from the top. I did not think she was as deep as the box said -- or at least I hoped she wasn't.

There was no sound coming from the hole. Minutes went by, and both Chris and I got a very bad feeling. Chris and I switched positions, with him digging on top and me clearing out dirt from the side hole. Suddenly I saw movement -- a white dog coming out. What the hell? It was Mountain. She must have gone to earth here without either of us seeing her. I could have sworn she was up the bank.

Mountain was out now, and she was reeking of skunk but seemed entirely fine from the experience. As I was tying her up, Chris called over -- "Here's Moxie". She had exited from another hole up on top -- a very small hole a few feet behind where Chris was digging. Lucky for us this sette had three or four eyes.

The dogs were fine -- Mountain got the heaviest part of the skunk blast, but Moxie was nailed as well. We gathered up the tools as the stench rolled out of the hole and down into the creek bed. It was pretty bad.

We crossed the creek on a plank bridge and headed up and over to the other side of the forested hill to hunt in the woods. We were not likely to find here, but that was OK -- the dogs needed a bit of time to let the stink drain off of them.

Chris busted a buck -- maybe four or six points -- and we bolted another three does while we were just on the other side of the steep hill that descended down to the Mononcacy River. There were several large brush piles here, but they were empty.

Later on, as we headed back to the cars, Mountain headed up into a field to check a large old sette. She went to ground and stayed, but she did not bay. I think she could smell the groundhog, but it was dug in for winter and it was not moving and there was no way to find it.

We headed back to the trucks where I had a brand-new bottle of Skunk Off (a seasonal precaution). I dosed Pearl first, even though she did not have much (if anything) on her, and then I washed Mountain with Herbal Essence shampoo to get off the dried black mud from the last hole of the day. Now that she was back to almost-white, I dosed her with Skunk Off and crated her.

Chris I worked over Moxie next, rubbing Skunk Off into her coat and paying as much attention as possible to her muzzle, front legs and chest where the spray was most likely to have been concentrated.

As we finished up with Moxie, a couple of deer hunters showed up for twilight shooting -- a father and son. The father looked stoned, and his shotgun had a scope which always looks like an odd fit to me, but is increasingly common. They asked about deer, and we told them that we had seen a few. As we pulled off the farm we stopped to talk to Nick, and Dave the farm manager who were repairing a bailer.

The dogs were a bit stinky, but otherwise this had been a fine day in the field with a bit more experience given to the two young dogs. All in all, not a bad day, but next time we may need to leave Mountain crated to give the young dogs a little more experience on their own.




Pearl climbs a tree to grab a very dead raccoon. She got to work this one a little, as did Moxie.

Giant Rabbit

The BBC reports:

Herman Could Be 'Biggest Bunny'

A man has been showing off his gigantic rabbit named Herman.

The mighty bunny weighs a massive 7.7kg, and his ears are a lengthy 21cm - almost as long as most pet rabbits are tall. And he is almost 1m tall.

The German Giant is even big for his breed, which usually tip the scales at around 6kg.

Herman lives in a specially built solid oak hutch and chomps his way through just over 2kg of food a day. His owner says his favourite snack is lettuce.

The giant bunny, who lives in Berlin with owner Hans Wagner, also takes a vitamin supplement to keep him healthy, and munches through a bale of hay a week.

Bred big

Herman could be the world's biggest rabbit, but Guinness World Records have stopped accepting entries because of fears people were over-feeding their pets.

German Giants do not exist in the wild, and have been developed by breeders.

They can live for as long as 12 years.

Handsome Is as Handsome Does

In his books Modern Dogs, published in 1894 and written over the previous four year period, Rawdon Lee, Kennel Editor of "The Field" magazine for many years, writes of the absence of Devon terriers on the show ring bench:

"There appears a semblance of strangeness that the wire-haired terriers from Devonshire have not been more used for show bench purposes, and by all accounts some of them were as good in looks as they had on many occassions proved in deeds. Those owned by the Rev. John Russell acquired a world-wide reputation, yet we look in vain for many remnants of the strain in the Stud Books, and the county of broad acres [the north] has once again distanced the southern one in the race for money. But, although the generous clerical sportsman occassionally consented to judge terriers at some of the local shows in the West, he was not much of a believer in such exhibitions. So far as dogs, and horses too, were concerned, with him it was "handsome is that handsome does," and so long as it did its work properly, one short leg and three long ones was no eye-sore in any terrier by hte late Rev. John Russell."

Trolls, Whores and Gresham's Law on the Internet

Internet email lists and bulletin boards are not very good mediums for serious communication. Lists quickly get too large and result in a lot of in-box clogging chatter.

Bulletin Boards are, in theory, set pieces and you can skip over sections, authors and topics, but in reality they tend to become dominated by Internet Trolls and Internet Whores, creating a kind of "Gresham's Law" of the Internet in which the bad players tend to drive out the good.

What is an Internet Troll?

An Internet Troll, according to Wikipedia, is someone "who enters an established community such as an online discussion forum and intentionally tries to cause disruption." As a general rule these folks have small pointless lives and are hungry for attention -- any kind of attention. In some cases, they are even plants by opposition groups seeking to disrupt online communities.

Along with internet trolls, you also have Internet Whores who think they have to "click and treat" every comment, picture, joke, or inquiry made by anyone else on the internet. As Wikipedia notes,

"Some forums feature a points system that allows members to add to the points of another member by propping that member. (Alternatively, members can also detract points from another member by negative propping, or (more simply) negging, that member.) Some view the practice as a booster of member contributions, while others view it as unnecessary and a frequent cause of dispute. In any case, on some forums a culture of 'prop-hoing' has developed as some members become increasingly desperate for props."

How can you tell if someone is either an Interet Troll or an Internet Whore? One good indication is by how many posts they have contributed to a forum. If someone is logging thousands of comments on a forum, they are most likely doing little more than hurling insults, posting stupid questions (a common tactic of Internet Trolls), or clapping their hands at every comment, picture and thought (a common tactic of Internet Whores).

I recently ran an experiment on a likely Internet Whore by simply knocking a few points off their "karma rating" to see what would happen. The response was predictable: they signed on to the board as another person and then scurried over to add more "props" next to their name in order to boost their "karma" rating.

Much amused, I knocked a few more points off to see how far this "prop-hoing" would go. The other side scuried to rebuild the lost props -- a bit like a panicked ant protecting its nest after a boot kick had scuffled it flat. In the end, I think this person created at least three or four "sock puppet" registrations on this board solely to boost their own "karma" rating -- the very kind of thing you would expect an Internet Whore to do.

Whores do indeed work hard for the money. Prostitution is a sad thing, however. Imagine having to engage in an elaborate subterfuge in order to create and protect "karma points" on an anonymous bulletin board. Has a human life actually been reduced to this? Apparently. Time to leave the poor creature alone I decided; there is no reason to torture the ants beyond all reason -- that' the work of a Troll.

The Internet Troll is the opposite side of the same coin as the Internet Whore -- someone who hurls invective and raises up division in order to cause as much disruption as possible. Internet trolls count their success in negative karma points -- their goal is to generate as much attention as possible for themselves by creating as much negative energy as possible.

There is often a kind of odd symbiotic relationship between an Internet Troll and an internet forum creator. While the Troll creates disruption and harms community, the people that run internet bulletin boards often count success by the number of "hits" their board tallies up in a day, a week, or a month. The more that personal invective is thrown about and the more that inflamatory topics are broached, the more traffic will come to the board (at least for a time) since some people like to watch fights, while others will be intent on defending their honor, and still others will try (against all odds) to engage in rational discourse.

Board creators often fan the flames of dysfunction by allowing people to sign on to boards anonymously or with fake names and temporary email accounts.

Over time, the dysfunction on poorly moderated internet forums tends to grow and Gresham's Law come into play in full force as fewer and fewer knowledgable and experienced folks continue to post. As you approach a tipping point, Internet Trolls will begin to answer their own abusive missives, while Internet Whores will begin posting puppy pictures and gratuitously congratulating every winner of every show in a 15-state area hoping someone will come back to play the game.

There is probably no salvation for internet bulletin boards as they are currently structured. The reason for this is pretty simple: controversy and fence-fighting are promoted to the top of board discussion where they are given both status and immediacy, while rational discourse and useful tips and advice are quickly buried under the weight of invective, disagreement and mindless chatter.

If you create a system that rewards noise rather than content, you get more noise and less content. Which pretty much describes most internet bulletin boards.

Bellman & Flint's New Web Site: Well Worth a Visit

I am a tough sell. I get a lot of links forwarded to me from folks that want to cross link in order to help sell some piece of dog paraphenalia or another, and I generally ignore them.

Consequently, if I give something a thumbs up, it tends to mean something. With that caveat, take a look at Bellman & Flint's new web site. It's not perfect yet, but it's the right stuff and the price seems fair for what appears to be very high quality goods.

This is the right direction for a small business to take -- specialized quality goods sold around the world to those of us who care and look for such things.

In the terrier world, most folks over here in the U.S. have heard of Bellman & Flint because they were the first folks, other than Deben, to make a terrier-dedicated locator collar.

I have used the Bellman and Flint kit, and while it is extremely well made (no complaints there!), I found the locator collar too big for the earths we have here in the Eastern U.S.

That said, not every place on earth has such tight pipes, and in the U.K. where old badger settes, deep rock fissures and 9 inch drains are more common, the Bellman & Flint kit has its enthusiastic champions. There is no reason in the world that everyone has to embrace the same technology. Different horses for different courses.

Now what else is Bellman and Flint selling on their new web site? For one thing, a wide variety of well-made terrier and hound couples. These appear to be made of top-quality leather and can be custom-assembled in any number of sizes, leather types and bits of gleaming hardware for terrier, beagle, lurcher, and hound alike. Beautiful stuff.

Along with very nice terrier, hound and lurcher couples and leads, there is also a nice collection of digging tools along with some very nice knives that, from their labeling, appear to be made in America. I am a bit of an old stick with my cheap Opinal knife, but I have to say these pretty wooden-handled locking blades are a very tempting acquisition ....

Christmas is just a month away, so for those of you looking to bring a smile on the face of a digger's heart, visit the Bellman and Flint site.

And while you are ordering things, don't forget to give a gift of American Working Terriers to someone you love!