Archive from September, 2017
Sep 20, 2017 - Animal Policy    No Comments

The California Legislature and Governor Brown need to read this…

The State veterinarian in Rhode Island knows what is going on and has the integrity to write about it publicly. We sure hope the state veterinarian in California will be as candid in informing governor Brown, before signing on to AB 485 – a bill that is bound to set animal welfare back 50 years in California.

People will go to extraordinary lengths to bring home a puppy, even exchanging cash on the side of the road in the middle of the night when legitimate or affordable options are not available. Shady dealers, often posing as legitimate rescues, are more than happy to fill that market, which leads to suffering dogs and dog owners.

Although many pet lovers believe the problems with puppy mills have been largely solved by closing the pet stores that sold puppies, in reality, the problem’s become worse, he said. At least the brick and mortar stores could be inspected and regulated. They had to be licensed. They had to keep medical records, and their transporters could be inspected. It was not a perfect system admittedly, he said. But now it’s all being done underground behind a virtual curtain

To quote the title of a talk in our upcoming conference: to be kind, you need to know what is true. Having a good heart and desire to reduce suffering is great… but to truly solve social problems, you need an understanding of people, markets, and consequences.

Sep 18, 2017 - Animal Science    No Comments

New Findings May Push Origin of Dog Breeding Back Thousands of Years

Ask the average Jane or Joe about dog breeding, and their most distant point of reference probably goes back 17 years to the mockumentary film Best in Show. If they have a friend or relative who breeds dogs, add another 20 years on to that total. And if they’re history buffs, they might be able to go back to the late Victorian era.

But people have been purposefully breeding dogs for a lot longer than that. Thousands of years, in fact — and new findings are pointing all the way back to the hunter-gatherers of Zhokhov Island 9,000 years ago

Now it appears these ancient Arctic dwellers did something even more remarkable: They may have been among the first humans to breed dogs for a particular purpose. An analysis of canine bones from Zhokhov suggests the dogs there were bred to pull sleds, making this the first evidence—by thousands of years—for dog breeding in the archaeological record.

As these findings indicate, the length and depth of the human-dog bond is truly astounding.