Paddy Burns at terrierman is at it again. He is commenting on things which he knows either very little about; or shoots off the hip without researching when he could have saved face instead.
This time it is about wolf domestication. I cannot help, but wonder if the recent trends inspired his lovely post. After all, Mark Derr is publishing “How The Dog Became The Dog” soon due for the end of October; and Stephen Bodio recently endorsed it. Given a recently released study from August, “A 33,000-Year-Old Incipient Dog from the Altai Mountains of Siberia: Evidence of the Earliest Domestication Disrupted by the Last Glacial Maximum”, supports some of the fore-coming ideas in Derr’s upcoming text, it is all too coincidental.
However I don’t particularly care for Mr. Burns’s dismissal of wolf domestication. After all, his ideas are rooted in Cesar Milan’s alpha pack theory which was debunked by wolf scientists in the last decade.[1] Good luck trying to convince someone whose ideas are based on dogma instead of scientific facts. Besides, the fact he owns terriers only further roots his position in alpha camp of dog-training; seeing how terriers are retarded socially and are well-known not the sharpest tool in the box. Any respectful owner of primitive or aboriginal dogs will tell you the alpha theory is a fast-track to ruining a good dog. If one wants to ruin their dogs, that’s fine, their fault.
However what is really irritating is this:
While the battleground is via the comment system on his own blog, I am cross-posting since much of the information imparted also pertains here.
Usually he censors his commentors. I don’t censor. After all, there are ways to deal with trolls; usually by ridiculing them. I responded in the lion’s den anyway. Oddly enough, He approved it. I was all raring to go to re-post the censorship on this blog instead. However I forgot to comment under Dave@PrickEared instead of an old Blogger account since a self-hosted OpenID server is not enabled on “Prick-Eared”. Regardless, here’s what I have to say:
And here is what Paddy Burns, or rather PBurns, has to say:
Here is my response to the above statement. I had to break it down into two since Blogger has a character limitation of 4,096. Let see if he will actually publish them. I doubt it. Here is the original excerpt with two noted corrections made after submitting:
I am not misinterpreting or misrepresenting it at all. You, on the other hand, intentionally left out the variables to why some hunting cultures are completely dog-centric and why others are not.
The San of South Africa recently discovered they could take more animals with dogs than they possibly could with traps and traditional hunting methods. The Bushmen of the Congos still use the Basenjis for the same reason. And if you haven’t discovered Carl Lumholtz, he discussed in great details about how the Australian Aborigines hunted with dingoes. In Thailand and Vietnam, they need terrier-like dogs to find bamboo rats, which fetch the people a quite a sum of money on the market. One cannot trap these rats as they are usually sold alive, and rodents are notorious escape artists. The only place I am aware of where hunting dogs don’t exist in non-Westernized societies is probably South America and parts of Africa; but not all. And in those cases, it’s because they don’t have access to dogs.
Regarding the Samis and Evenkis, you are being a self-styled expert here. Yes, you are correct, they do have a reindeer culture[;] but the pastoralist lifestyle is and was only a fraction of the population. Historically, the Sami were the only people qualified to hunt bears; similarly, the Matagi of Japan were also bear-hunters, with serows and boars on the side, and so were the people of Siberia. However, baying elks (moose) and bears were not always seasonally reliable in the Far East; and sometimes grouses hit a natural lows. During those lean periods, squirrels were and are taken. Furthermore, for many centuries, even in Northeastern Europe, squirrel pelts were a currency until the 19th or 20th century, and a made barking spitz is worth many times its weight in gold. Even after the value of pelts declined, they [the dogs] were still vital in the fur trade for discovering martens. A good dog will fetch a hunter larger profit than a trapper could. Also, I love how you glossed over the fact the Evenkis were commercial fur traders since the 16th century after the Tsarist opened up Siberia to Europeans. It was then the hunting laikas became highly specialized.
Regarding seal-hunting. It is a dying genre. Seal pelts don’t go for much on the markets these days. Diamond and gold mines basically replaced trapping as a viable industry, and supermarkets and McDonald’s drove down the price of food. The seal-hunts are merely only traditional these days and many are thinking of phasing it [out] completely since it is cost-prohibitive to conduct such a thing.
However, I do have relatives who lived up in Cambridge Bay during the ’80s [Correction: late '60s, early '70s] and actually have hunted with huskies; albeit not the Qimiq, but that is the breed usually associated with such method. While it is correct to say the dogs are mostly used for hauling and transportation, it is errenous to assume they don’t use them to hunt. Amongst the people, it is considered as foolish or insane to hunt for seals without a dog if one lacks modern technology. A breathing hole would ice over within an hour, and the holes themselves are near impossible to find. The good thing is that seals tend to surface every ten to thirty minutes, which allow these holes to be frequently scented. If a dog finds a hole, there is a good chance a seal used it five minutes or fifteen minutes prior. But of course people don’t do this anymore. The folks of Labrador now have fancy equipment for their annual hunts.
In addition, if one listens to the elders, the Inuits and Denes once used dogs to hunt caribous in packs in a similar fashion to how people in Virginia would hunt deer with hounds. However no one does this anymore because snowmobiles replaced the dogs. Nowadays, people runs down caribous until they tire with machines.
What you seem to be intentionally leaving out with the trapping method is: it’s not reliable, and it is usually based on a combination of luck and experience. A dog with good instinct, keen eyes and a good nose takes luck out of the equation. Even then, it’s usually laws which forbid hunting more so than the practical value. For example, in many part[s] of North America, one cannot takes a fur-bearing animal without a registered trapline; so of course someone in America would be naive. In many countries of the Middle East, the government banned hunting which stripped the dogs out of their jobs. Oops, there it is.
In hindsight, I am not sure why I haven’t commented on “high degree of command.” If one talks to anyone who hunts with Elkhounds or Laikas, these dogs are notorious for not listening. They don’t take commands very well. What people are looking for in these dogs is a particular sense of intelligence. So while a dog is not expected to listen, they are expected to catch on quickly after the first try. For example, if a dog barks, it might frightens the hazel-hen, so the dog learns to stay quiet; the owner is not expected to teach the dogs this; but the same dog will learn a capercailllie will not hold still without being barked at. Also the dog will learn if it doesn’t bark excessively at a moose or a bear, the hunter may not come to spare the dog of a certain end; on the flip side, a deer or reindeer startles easily, so they must stay silent while on track during a stalk. There are natural consequences for these things which only require little or no training. Many of these dogs don’t even know the command “sit”, at best “lie down”, yet they are still valued hunting dogs.
Seeing you are such an armchair expert, maybe it’s best to stick with what you know best: terriers; because terriers are not exactly known for contextual learning.
Seeing how Terrierman is not beyond removing an old post out of public shame, click here for a webpage screenshot, or access a Google cache copy here.
There is one thing I forgot to correct: there are hobbyists in North America who engage squirrels and grouses with primitive methods such as bows and arrows. It is why some species have evolved to roost near the trunk as eons of selection pressure by human predation pushed toward a preference for concealment from the arrows. Also, in some of the ethnic languages, squirrel is interchangeable with “protein” which highlights the significance of the critter within their diets. So all across the board, it is an epic fail.
So, kids, let this be a lesson: don’t say things which will provoke others to discredit; that is if you don’t want to be publicly shamed on another person’s blog.
Resources
L. David Mech. 1999. Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 77: 1196-1203
L. David Mech. 2000. Leadership in Wolf, Canis lupus, Pack. Canadian Field-Naturalist, 114(2): 259-263
Images
Information About Laikas – Squirrel Dog Central 2010. wsl4ever2 . http://www.sqdog.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=98479 (accessed July 13, 2011).
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