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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: June 2006
B O O K S
A Shepherd’s Watch:
Through the Seasons with
One Man and His Dogs
by David Kennard
St. Martin’s Press (175 5th Ave.,
NY 10010), 2005.
184 pages, hardcover. $30.00.
On turning the first pages of A Shepherd’s Watch and looking at the pictures of the faces of five happy sheep dogs, we knew intuitively that we would enjoy this book. As animal rights activists, we were pleasantly surprised to read how author David Kennard admired for her beauty and cunning a fox he saw trying to hunt a lamb, instead of shooting her on sight. Here in South Africa, such an attack would most likely have resulted in the fox being shot, under an official declaration that foxes are a problem species, to be exterminated or risk prosecution.
With humour and rare authenticity, Kennard relates one year in the life of a North Devon sheep farmer. He takes us through the cycle of the seasons, each with its own unique charm, natural beauty and hardships. Toiling through lambing, weaning, tupping, and all the other seasonal chores, Kennard reveals how dependent the British sheep farmer is upon his faithful and hard-working sheep dogs. The industry would collapse without the dogs, and Kennard’s book is as much about his dogs as about himself. His five dogs , each with an individual personality, bring expertise to work each and every day.
Representing England in international sheep dog trials, Kennard describes a difficult exercise where, “Greg [one of his dogs] was obviously aware that this was a brace run, and on arriving at the sheep, had lain down and waited for a minute or so for his partner to arrive without a command from me. When Swift appeared, he simply got to his feet and moved across to his side of the sheep. I don’t know how many people noticed his reaction, but it was something that I’ll never forget.”
The two dogs had to move together and Greg knew instinctively that he had to wait for his partner to get into position before he could begin his own run.
Also of interest to us was the progress of a young and inexperienced dog named Ernie.
Terms of trade have moved against the traditional sheep farmer, whose flocks roam the fields and enjoy a relatively happy life eating natural food in natural surroundings. Factory farmed imports drive down the price of lamb to the immediate detriment of the livestock farmer, and to the ultimate detriment of the health of the consumer. Wafer-thin profit margins prohibit paying attractive wages, driving away farm laborers, making the farmer reliant upon his own family, on seasonal veterinary volunteers, and upon his dogs.
Having farmed sheep ourselves, we know only too well how much hard work is involved. At least the sheep enjoy some quality of life before their shortened lives come to an abrupt end, in contrast to the pitiless cruelty of factory farming. Yet some of the methods employed by traditional livestock farmers are also to our minds questionable. When there is a conflict between the welfare of the animal and the financial constraints of the farmer, the animal loses every time.
For instance Kennard castrates his lambs by the common method of placing a tight rubber ring over the scrotum. This cuts off the blood supply to the testes, causing them to shrivel over a period of weeks and eventually, to drop off. This method is popular because it is quick, cheap, and effective. But we have seen how much discomfort the ring causes to ram lambs. Vasectomy under local anaesthetic would be better for the rams––but far too ecostly and slow for farming.
Kennard is well aware of the decline of the sheep industry in recent decades, and the reasons for it. Indeed, his book could be the swan-song of a way of life which is no longer feasible in an overpopulated world.
––Chris Mercer & Beverley Pervan
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
One Day With
A Goat Herd
by C.J. Stevens
John Wade, Publisher (P.O. Box 303, Phillips, ME 04966), 2005.
100 pages, hard cover. $15.00.
This concise little book offers an hour-by-hour description of a day in the life of a herd of domestic milk goats in California. It will encourage people, especially children, to look at goats in a different light.
Of most interest to me is the history included about how goats became domesticated and began to interact with humans.
I would prefer to have become better acquainted with the goats as individual personalities. ––Bev Pervan
Animal Passions & Beastly Virtues:
Reflections in Redecorating Nature
by Marc Bekoff
Temple University Press (1601 North Broad Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19122), 2005. 290 pages, paperback. $26.95.
Marc Bekoff, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, is among the best known scientists and scholars in animal welfare.
Animal Passions & Beastly Virtues, his latest of many books, covers topics ranging from the behavioral ecology of carnivores to the moral issues surrounding the use of animals in science.
We especially enjoyed Bekoff’s essays on coyotes, since our own wildlife rehabilitation work during the years we ran the Kalahari Raptor Centre involved black-backed jackals, the comparably persecuted African and Asian coyote counterpart.
We found everything Bekoff observed in coyote behaviour to be relevant to our own jackals. Like Bekoff, whose pioneering field studies helped to turn American attitudes toward coyotes from fear and hatred to appreciation, we found jackals to be among the most lovable of wildlife species, remarkable for their intelligence, affectionate nature, and propensity for having fun.
As for “problem animal control,” a euphemism for inflicting ghastly cruelty on animals to protect bad livestock farmers from paying for their own ignorance and callousness, Bekoff is in our view quite wrong to state on page 95 that “Failure of predation control is due to a lack of basic knowledge about predatory species, a problem that can be remedied by further studies...”
In our own experience, as livestock farmers and wildlife rehabbers, predators are simply a test of management skills. We solved our predation problems not with traps, guns and poisons, like other farmers, but by changing the breed of our flock toward indi-genous, agile animals, corralling the flock every night, and keeping lambs in safe camps until old enough to survive out in the veld.
In our view there is really no such thing as a problem animal, only problem farmers. The remedy for that is to uplift the ethical and intellectual capacity of farmers. In short, change the farmer, not the wildlife.
Other Bekoff essays deal with ethology, animal emotions, social play and communication, and human-animal interactions, particularly the adverse impact of human study upon animal subjects.
If we have a criticism, it is that the author tends to repeat himself. Certain themes, such as the need to wage peace with nature, can legitimately be stressed, but excessive repetition leads to tedium.
––Chris Mercer & Bev Pervan
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
South Africa
Cairo Cats: Egypt’s Enduring Legacy
Photos by Lorraine Chittock
Camel Caravan Press 1999, reissued 2001, 2006.
Order c/o <www.CairoCats.com>. 96 pages, paperback. $18.95.
Itinerant photographer and animal welfare volunteer Lorraine Chittock has sold out two editions of Cairo Cats during the past seven years, donating part of each press run and some of the proceeds as well to the Egyptian Society of Animal Friends.
This is the third edition.
The content consists chiefly of photos of Cairo street cats, captioned with appropriate quotes from Islamic literature. The photos illustrate that while Cairo street cats often lead hard lives and die young, they are at home in their native habitat, with little evident sense that they are “suffering” by mostly living outdoors on birds and mice. Many seem to see themselves as the rulers of their domain.
While Cairo Cats enjoys enduring popularity, Chittock has journeyed on to volunteer stints with the Best Friends Animal Society and Kenya SPCA, and has helped ANIMAL PEOPLE to cover the post-Hurricane Katrina rescue effort in New Orleans. At last word she was investigating animal welfare in Belize and Costa Rica. ––Merritt Clifton
Hurt Go Happy by Ginny Rorby
Tom Doherty Associates (175 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010), 2006. 267 pages, hardcover. $17.95
"I called all over trying to find a place, but there are hundreds of chimps in need of a place to go, and they were especially uninterested in a chimp who can’t be housed with other chimps.”
This is the age-old problem of keeping baby “wild” animals as pets: what to do when they grow older and stronger, and can no longer live with humans in their homes.
Hurt Go Happy is the story of such a chimp. Although fiction, the novel is based on the true story of an ill-fated chimp named Lucy, who was raised as a human child in Oklahoma, as part of a language experiment. Rehabilitated and returned to the wild in 1977, as one of Gambia-based sanctuarian Janis Carter’s early projects, Lucy was killed by poachers in 1987.
Hurt Go Happy begins with the tragic childhood of a young girl named Joey. Beaten by her father, she suffers a loss of hearing. Instead of helping her to overcome her disability, her mother, wishing her to seem normal, refuses to allow her to learn sign language. Living a marginalized life, Joey finds salvation in a chance meeting with an elderly doctor, Charles Mansell, who is caring for a baby chimpanzee, whom he rescued from the bushmeat trade in Africa.
Joey falls in love with the baby chimp, who is lonely like her. Mansell encourages Joey to use sign language to communicate with the chimp. This brings conflict between Joey and her mother.
Joey’s love for the little chimp will eventually take her on a journey which is both sad and uplifting, with many lessons for younger readers about what really happens to too many cute and cuddly baby animals who fall into human hands, and the importance of personally acting to alleviate the suffering of animals. ––Beverley Pervan
The Price of a Pedigree:
Dog Breed Standards & Breed-Related Illnesses
Advocates for Animals (10 Queensferry Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4PG,
Scotland, U.K.), 2006. 25 pages, paperback, no price listed.
Members of the dog and cat fancies, as breeders and exhibitors of purebreds style themselves, like to pretend that there was a time when the humane community endorsed their obsession with “improving” dogs by selective inbreeding. Yet there has always been tension between those who recognize a moral obligation toward all animals and those who would distinguish between upper and lower classes, based on pedigree.
From the beginning of humane involvement in animal control, some fanciers have adopted prime specimens of their favorite breeds from death row in shelters, while humane workers have struggled with conflicting emotions––grateful that some animals are saved, but frustrated that even a biting purebred will almost always have a better chance of rescue, as a presumed “better” animal, than the nicest large mongrel or domestic shorthair.
Increasingly since dog and cat sterilization became widely available, humane workers have come to resent breeding of any kind. Purebred dogs conspicuously make up 25% to 33% of shelter admissions. This is well under half the percentage of purebreds in the general pet population, indicating that purebreds have a better-the-average chance of staying in homes, but shelter workers almost universally believe that all dogs could have homes if only breeding could be stopped.
Once generally true, this long since became demonstrably false. Twenty-odd years ago, when most dogs arriving at shelters were cast-off litters, “pet overpopulation” was an accurate term, as most shelter dogs were admitted as surplus. Today, in much of the U.S., most incoming dogs have flunked out of homes. They have become waste products, yet were not surplus when they were born and then deliberately bought by someone.
Stopping the supply-and-demand cycle that produces surplus dogs today requires intervention to keep dogs in homes.
One could accurately argue that breeding often amounts to practicing planned obsolescence. Producers of purebreds, especially puppy-millers who raise unsocialized pups by the hundreds or even thousands, often sell animals with inbred health and behavior problems, which may result in the dogs or cats being replaced long before living out their natural lifespan. But producing purebreds is such a competitive and fragmented field that this could scarcely be anyone’s deliberate plot.
What is really going on is that the concept of “perfecting” dogs through selective breeding is inherently self-contradictory. Breeders purport to seek stable temperament. Yet they also seek repetitively predictable conformation among dogs who often are at extreme ends of variability within the species.
In general, the farther the breed standard is from the generic norms for all dogs, the greater the incidence of genetic defects and behavioral abnormality.
The humane community has compiled and published lists of the excesses of fancy-breeding for at least 80 years.
Among the most succinct is the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights’ Guide to Congenital and Heritable Disorders in Dogs, by Jean Dodds, DVM, originally issued in 1994, updated and reissued earlier in 2006. It sells for just $1.00, from AVAR, P.O. Box 208, Davis, CA 95617; <www.AVAR.org>.
Also of note is a May 2006 report by the Companion Animal Welfare Council to British minister for environment, food, and rural affairs Ben Bradshaw. Co-authored by a committee headed by Universities Federation for Animal Welfare scientific director James Kirkwood, the CAWC report covers many species, not just dogs, and recommends banning intensive inbreeding, writes London Times environment editor Jonathan Leake.
The Price of a Pedigree: Dog Breed Standards & Breed-Related Illnesses, from Animal Advocates, is likewise oriented toward possible legislation, and stands out as the most thorough guide to genetic defects in purebred dogs that ANIMAL PEOPLE has seen (having not yet seen the CAWC report).
Yet The Price of a Pedigree––and the entire debate––may soon be outdated. Already a firm called Allerca Lifestyle Pets claims to have used genetic science to produce cats whose dander is free of human allergens, and to have sold several hundred of the cats to buyers in five nations. Similar approaches could rapidly transform dog breeding.
The second chapter of The Price of a Pedigree, entitled “Current and future breeding trends,” fails to anticipate that mapping the dog genome, achieved with a poodle in 2003 and a boxer in 2005, may at last enable fanciers to combine extremes of conformation with predictable temperament, while eliminating genetic defects.
This chapter also overlooks the recent emergence of breeders who are deliberately producing small mixed-breed dogs, to satisfy the growing numbers of people who believe that mongrels are healthier, but can no longer find small mongrels in shelters to adopt.
In effect, these breeders are back-breeding their lines, restoring lost diversity whether they intend to or not.
While dog breeding in the 19th and 20th centuries trended toward ever-increasing specialization and differentiation among dog lines, dog breeding in the 21st century might go in some directions that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. For example, genetic manipulation may give us dogs who easily learn to use litter boxes, are born sterile, and are resistant to most common in-bred physical defects. “Improving the breed” may pass from a pursuit of fanciers to a pursuit of science, backed by pet industry megabucks.
If genetically modified dogs become “improved” enough to seldom land in shelters, public attitudes toward dogs may shift to the detriment of shelter dogs and street dogs, who more than ever may be perceived as inferior.
That is likely to soon be a much bigger problem than the incidence of inbred physical problems so severe as to cause a dog premature death or disability. ––Merritt Clifton
Caribou Rising by Rick Bass
Sierra Club Books (85 Second Street, San , CA 944105), 2004.
164 pages, hard cover. $19.95.
Rick Bass is a hunter. He sees the natural world through the crosshairs, but considers himself an ethical hunter, as opposed to a slob hunter, because he measures the success of a hunt by his “quality of experience,” rather than by the volume of dead meat he recovers. He thereby considers himself a conservationist, though the relationship of hunting fraternity notions of fair chase to protecting biodiversity is at best indirect.
On a hunting trip to Alaska, Bass finds an indigenous native American community, the Gwich’in, living off a herd of caribou whose numbers have fallen from nearly 200,000 to about 129,000 in recent years.
Bass’s book about the Gwich’in and the caribou aims to raise awareness of the damage which might be done to the Artic National Wildlife Refuge by oil extraction as proposed by the George W. Bush administration. Bass argues that the impact of oil extraction in such a fragile wilderness would have a devastating effect upon caribou numbers, to the detriment of the culture and survival of the Gwich’in.
Few Animal People readers would argue against Bass’s plea to preserve the Arctic refuge, or against his argument that sensible measures to minimize oil consumption could save many times the existing oil reserves in Alaska, which in all would satisfy American consumption for no more than six months.
Yet, though Bass objects to ruthless exploiting the refuge’s mineral resources, he sees nothing wrong with ruthlessly exploiting the wildlife. His argument boils down to wanting to prevent the oil barons from brutally plundering the finite mineral resources so that he and the Gwich’in can continue to brutally plunder the declining caribou herds.
––Chris Mercer
Falcon by Helen MacDonald
Bee by Claire Preston
Parrot by Paul Carter
Reaktion Books Ltd. (33 Great Sutton St., London, EC1V 0DX), 2005. 208, 224, and 224 pages,
paperback. $19.95 each.
Reaktion Books’ new natural history book series explores not only the natural history of animals, but also their places in human history, culture, and current affairs. The authors discuss the differences between the real-life behavior of each animal and the behavior attributed to the animal as used in political, military, and commercial symbolism.
Helen MacDonald’s compelling book on Falcons, for example, explains falcon myths and legends, the sport of falconry, how the pesticide DDT nearly exterminated raptors through food chain buildup, how falcons and humans interact in cities, and how falcons have been used as mascots and weapons of war. Falconry is making a comeback, MacDonald says, arguing that this is partly because masculine qualities considered lost or marginalised in modern life are being projected onto falconry. Falconry, MacDonald believes, has become a romantic, anti-urban, anti-modern pursuit.
An alternate explanation would be that the explosive growth of interest in wildlife rehabilitation in recent decades has resulted in thousands of people trying to teach rescued young raptors how to fly and hunt. This requires learning the skills of falconry, and obtaining the same permits as falconers.
Claire Preston’s book Bee is a heavily intellectualised study of the complex role played by bees in the art, politics and social thought of human cultures. There are chapters on the biology of bees and beekeeping, but Preston goes much wider in her search for the less obvious influences of bees upon society, studying the aesthetic bee‚ the folkloric bee‚ the futile bee‚ and the retired bee‚ among others.
Paul Carter’s book Parrot is beautifully illustrated. Carter divides his work into three sections: Parrotics, Parroternalia, and Parrotology. Much of the treatment is abstruse, and difficult for the general reader.
––Chris Mercer & Bev Pervan
Wildlife Demography: Analysis of Sex, Age, & Count Data
by John R. Skalski , Kristen E. Ryding, & Joshua J. Millspaugh
Elsevier Academic Press (30 Corp. Dr., Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803), 2005. 656 pages, hardcover, $69.95.
As the ANIMAL PEOPLE statistician as well as the editor, I jumped at the chance to review Wildlife Demography: Analysis of Sex, Age, & Count Data, for two reasons.
First, at times I feel as if I spend half my life explaining to people in humane work and animal control the basics of animal population analysis. Humane workers and animal control officers have a constant need to estimate and compare populations of street dogs, pet dogs, feral cats, pet cats, raccoons, deer, nonmigratory vs. migratory Canada geese, et al.
Effective techniques of counting animals and estimating unseen numbers are not terribly complicated, and do not require knowledge of advanced math. They do require a clear understanding of how to judge whether a sample is representative, what conditions are conducive to population growth or reduction, how to project longevity, and how to account for mortality resulting from the various common causes.
I hoped that Wildlife Demo-graphy would be a comprehensive primer, to which I could refer callers.
I also hoped to learn something from it myself.
Unfortunately, Wildlife Demography is impenetrable geek-speak. What isn’t written in dense academic jargon is written in algebraic symbols. Even a would-be reader who routinely helps a teenager decipher algebra homework will find his/her head swimming.
Each process described in Wildlife Demography for getting from observation to outcome could have been explained as a step-by-step problem-solving walk-through. It could have been as easy to use as The National Animal Control Association Training Manual, or any of our own downloadable manuals on such topics as rabies control, keeping shelter cats healthy, fundraising, and accountability.
Maybe some day it will be translated into English. ––Merritt Clifton