a heroic pit bull

I know I'm not amongst the first to hear about Sergeant Stubby, the pit bull hero of World War I, but I can't resist posting a link to a site where he is celebrated as the Badass of the Week. It's so amazing that at first I wondered how much of it was true. (Lots of swearing in the report, but what a humdinger of a story!)

I came across the reference to Stubby on The Pet Museum, where there's also another link, to an analysis of his story, on McSweeney. This second article seems more measured, as it explains some of the seemingly unbelievable exploits of Stubby in terms of known dog behaviours. For instance, the capture of a German spy near the American trenches may have occurred because Stubby, in making his rounds to look for wounded allied soldiers, smelled the fear on a disguised German soldier, and thus attacked him and held him for capture.

He saved many lives, it seems, through his superior canine senses. He could warn soldiers of incoming shells, by racing back to the trenches when he detected the high-pitched whine. He also warned of gas attacks before the humans could smell the mustard gas.

The McSweeney article has lots of other fascinating information about the role of dogs in war.

the evolution of dog's dogs' diets

I've seen mention on Slavenka's blog about a recent study looking at the genetics of dogs and grey wolves.

Basically, what I gather from the reports, especially one in The Los Angeles Times, is that there are certain genes in dogs that enable them to digest starch. This would suggest that, like humans, they changed in their eating habits when agriculture developed. Here's a short quote from the article:

Taken together, the data fit with the fact that dogs eat more starch than wolves, Axelsson said. He added that this adaptation would have allowed the first dogs to get more goodness out of the waste food they were drawn to at early farming settlements."It makes perfect sense that the most efficient scavengers were the wolves that could cope with this starch-rich diet," he said.
Still, dog domestication may have happened long before humans adopted an agrarian life about 10,000 years ago, said Robert Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA who wasn't involved in the Nature study.
Perhaps dogs evolved through hanging around hunter-gatherers so they could feed on leftover carcasses of the mammoths and mastodons our ancestors killed, Wayne said. In that scenario, the starch-tolerant changes would have cropped up only after dogs were domesticated, just as genetic changes that help break down starch evolved in human beings after we adopted a farming life.

And here's a little of what Patricia McConnell on The Other End of the Leash (one of the most informative and useful blogs on the internet, in my opinion) has to say about it:

 This is obviously of great interest to geneticists and evolutionary biologists, but also to those of us who are feeding domestic dogs on a daily basis. As you all are well aware, some argue that wolves primarily eat meat, raw meat at that, and we should use the diet of wild wolves to direct the menus of our companion dogs. At the risk of stirring the pot (so to speak!), about ideal diets for dogs, we would be wise to use the study above to remind ourselves that dogs evolved as omnivores who ate a little bit of just about everything 10 to 12,000 years ago. That does NOT mean that individual dogs do not do better on a particular diet. There is no question that some dogs do better eating “A,” and other dogs can’t handle “A” and do better eating “B.” I’d say the take away messages are to 1) know your dog and 2) don’t be seduced into claims that a new dog food is best for your dog because “it replicates the diet of a wolf.”

The research casts a new light on the daily question we face, as to what is best to feed our dogs. I'll look forward to seeing how the mega-corporations try to jump on the bandwagon on this one! They'll all be saying we should feed their products.

I'm still of the opinion that a raw diet is the best for Penny, together with some commercial foods to make sure we give her the needed  supplements, and then also a dash of home cooking  - and even more home cooking.

a welcome visitor

There's been strange activity in our backyyard the last few nights, and Penny has been in and out to see what's going on; but we couldn't figure it out.

Now we're wondering if it might be because we have an interesting visitor to our garden. It's a tawny frogmouth.

The other day we found a dead rat on the path, but Penny showed no interest in it. (Perhaps she only likes live ones, so she can hunt them).  It had a chewed tail, but showed no sign of what had killed it. We don't know enough about tawny frogmouths to guess whether one could kill a biggish rat, but I'm going to ask around and try to find out. And if it did, why didn't it eat the rat? All very mysterious.

Oh, wait a minute... Here's  an article in The Daily Mail about these gorgeous birds - they eat 

cockroaches, spiders, beetles, mice, lizards, centipedes, scorpions, snails and slugs. 

Okay, that's also going to be helpful in our garden. But I doubt the bird killed the rat.

When we spotted this welcome visitor in our agonis flexuosa tree, we all hurried out, cameras in hand, to photograph it, but Penny wasn't interested, and the bird was unfazed by all the activity a couple of metres below its perch.

Maybe it will do a better job at scaring off nighttime fruit thieves than our plastic owls did. The night diners have scoffed nearly all our apples and most of our apricots, and now they've started on our nectarines.

By the way, I've just visited the Australian Museum site  and read that these birds are not actually owls. They are more like nightjars. 

I"d better go now. I want to pop outside and see if the tawny frogmouth is still there!

socialising a puppy

When Penny first came to live with us, we were fortunate that we were told to introduce her to as many new experiences as we could, before she moved out of the critical age where she would be receptive to new experiences and learn not to fear them.

We travelled on the local trains, looked at ducks in the park, trained next to fast-moving cyclists, walked through our busy local shopping centre - amongst many other experiences. We always included lots of fun training and play in our schedule.

It was an age when everything was exciting and interesting:
a milk carton...

a doggy mat...

even a box of tissues.

I was browsing the Net today and came across an article suggesting that one of the differences between modern wolves and dogs may relate to that earliest period of socialisation. An evolutionary biologist at the University of Masscahusetts, Kathryn Lord, conducted a study that seems to show that wolf pups begin to explore their environment while they are still deaf and blind, whilst dog pups stay inactive until they have developed sight and hearing.

When a wolf pup explores at first, it may be frightened of a sound, but becomes accustomed to it. Later, when it begins to see, it may be frightened all over again by the sight of something. So, as each new sense comes into play, the wolf pup has to learn to cope with new experiences.

Dog pups, on the other hand, go through this period of accustoming themselves to things - like humans, horses, even cats, for instance - all in the one period.

I guess this has interesting implications for taming wolves.

I wonder if it would apply to dingoes also?

did humans suckle wolf cubs

Curator on The Pet Museum blog  has posted a report from some centuries ago that women in Naples were employed as wet nurses for rich ladies' lapdogs. I got to wondering if that was likely to be true, and looked around the Net.

I came across this interesting argument about whether early humans routinely nursed wolf cubs at the  breast as part of a domestication process.

I've blogged previously about one theory of where dogs originated but I didn't read anything about breast feeding at that time.

dogs having fun during a soccer game

Slavenka has posted a link to this funny clip of two dogs romping around during a soccer match (football match).






I love the joyful dogs and I love the way they are treated by the players. I wonder what happened afterwards? I presume the voice speaking is Turkish.

red tennis balls grow on trees

The red tennis balls (aka plums) are ripening on the tree.   Penny has collected one to keep.

Fortunately, she doesn't eat the plums. She just likes to have them around, perhaps regarding them as toys.