From the New York Times, an amusing quasi-self parodistic article about people who have more parenting drive than actual children to expend it upon.
You’ll Go Far, My Pet
Dog Feats Reach New Heights
By DAVID HOCHMAN APRIL 11, 2014
Not to brag, but we may have a little genius on our hands. Our 6-month-old is up before dawn playing brain games. She knows her way around an iPad and practically devours puzzles, and I’m teaching her to read. Just recently, she mastered an advanced chess toy.
I am talking, of course, about our dog.
Let me rewind a moment. The last time I had a puppy, I was 9 years old. This might as well have been in the Mesozoic era, since life with a dog was so primitive then. If Buck was good, he got Gaines-Burgers and maybe a Milk-Bone. Bad, we’d deliver stern admonitions over the half-eaten sneaker. But within hours of adopting our fuzzy, adorable Pi, I sensed that being a pet parent today — nobody uses the word “owner” anymore, apparently — means cultivating intelligence, manners and communication skills the way the parent of, say, a small human might.
Kant argued for treating other persons as ends and not merely as the means to our own selfish ends. It's fascinating how so many people have internalized that when it comes to their pets.
Our canine compadres no longer eat from mere bowls. Now there are interactive feeding products like Dog Twister (imported from Sweden, no less, for around $50), with rotating hidden compartments that make dogs reason their way to kibble. Another, called Slo-Bowl, pays homage to the artisanal food movement, with “nature-inspired” rubber curves and ridges that keep dogs “foraging for every bite,” the company’s website says ($20). A doggy tick-tack-toe puzzle from Petco encourages “problem solving” and increases “eye-paw-mouth coordination,” for $17. Smartphone apps like App for Dog, iSqueek and Answers: YesNo let puppies doodle, nuzzle virtual chewies and even recognize a few simple words. Others help them take selfies. Then there is the spreading quantified dog movement: A San Francisco company called Whistle Labs makes a wearable activity monitor — a Fido Fitbit, basically, for $129 — that tracks a dog’s every sit, stay and roll over.
Needless to say, I bought it all. My wife and I were already micromanaging our son’s schoolwork, food intake, extracurricular activities and playdates; why not helicopter Pi to the far limits of her breed? Which, come to think of it, meant figuring out what breed she was in the first place: Mutt doesn’t quite cut it these days. For $70, the scientists behind Wisdom Panel 2.0 will “uncover DNA-based insights that may help you understand your dog’s unique appearance, behaviors and wellness needs,” according to the package. Two awkward cheek swabs later (“I’ll hold her head, you twirl the Q-tip thingee,” my wife said), we were a lab test away from knowing Pi’s pedigree down to eight great-grandparents.
I'm struck by how there is absolutely no mention in this article about the possibility of using all this data now available to improve dog breeds. It just doesn't come up. After all, that's part of "the pseudoscience of eugenics," so scientific breeding is, by definition, unscientific. So, nobody at the NYT level of society thinks about breeding dogs for better functionality. How about an Apartment Dog with a big bladder who only needs to be walked once a day?
A lot of 95 IQ people today think hard about breeding dogs to make them conform even more to the American Kennel Club standards, but at the better educated levels, an interest in animal breeding today is just an idiosyncrasy. (It's tolerated in high-functioning autistic professorTemple Grandin because she's an oddity.) It's not like the days of Darwin and Galton when breeding was a central obsession of the best minds of the age.
A new dog is nothing if not a mystery shrouded in fur. What exactly was lurking behind Pi’s smoky eyes? Would she be a charmer, a rocket scientist or a bumbling, tail-chasing dolt? For answers, I turned to Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist who studies behavior at the Canine Cognition Center at Duke. Last year, he started Dognition, a web-based testing service that charges $29 and up for a series of rigorous at-home video experiments to evaluate your dog’s cognitive skills. The results are fed into a database with tens of thousands of dogs to determine one of nine personality types: “socialite,” “maverick,” “renaissance dog” and so on. ...
We spent weeks looking for such evidence in Pi. Night after night, my 10-year-old son, Sebastian, and I turned our living room into a makeshift doggy science lab as we took Pi through dozens of assessment drills on Dognition’s website that measured empathy, communication, cunning, memory and reason. I would cue up the video instructions as Sebastian readied the treats. The yawn game gauged whether a human yawn elicits one from the dog, a sign of interspecies empathy only certain canines are known to display. Pi wasn’t among them. She just tried to eat the sticky note that was her placekeeper. She fared better at the memory game that asked her to find a treat hidden under a cup after a minute looking away. But then she wouldn’t stop gnawing on the cup. Her Mensa move came in a physical reasoning game in which she inferred time and again that a piece of paper on an angle meant a treat was hidden behind it. Pi grabbed the square of organic white Cheddar and left the paper.
... Mr. Pilley told me, “The big lesson is to recognize that dogs are smarter than we think, and given time, patience and enough enjoyable reinforcement, we can teach them just about anything.”
It’s true that dogs everywhere are doing things that would have been unimaginable in the Alpo era. Last year, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Working Dog Center trained a team of shepherds and retrievers to sniff out lab samples containing ovarian cancer. Scent hounds are also being used to forecast epileptic seizures and potentially life-threatening infections. A black Labrador from the St. Sugar Cancer-Sniffing Dog Training Center in Chiba, Japan, was accurate 98 percent of the time in picking up early-stage signs of colon cancer. As Mr. Hare, from Duke, said, “I will take a dog smelling my breath over a colonoscopy any day of the week, even if it’s just an experiment.”
This is the umpty-umpth article I've read about purported cancer-sniffing dogs. Is this for real? Would it be useful in poor countries that can't afford expensive mass cancer screening programs like a colonoscopy every decade? I don't know the answers to those questions, but what I'm struck by is how none of the articles I've read about cancer-sniffing dogs have ever mentioned the idea of breeding the best ones together to develop a new breed specializing in that seemingly valuable task.
Can you imagine if Francis Galton had accumulated a folder of clippings about cancer-sniffing dogs?
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44 comments:
"nobody uses the word “owner” anymore, apparently" - Animal slaves.
My last four Komments all got Kontrolled.
I was 0-fer the weekend.
0-fer-four.
Like getting swept in the World series.
Sigh.
You have a corrupt society. Corrupted at your founding. Now corrupted by modern shibboleths and multiculti trinkets. Tawdry to an outsider.
So, nobody at the NYT level of society thinks about breeding dogs for better functionality. How about an Apartment Dog with a big bladder who only needs to be walked once a day?
Or what about a really robust dog that could go for long periods without food or water and that you could ride? It would be like a camel but smaller than a pony. You'd think the NYT would think about this given their interest in "green" transportation and the like.
“The big lesson is to recognize that dogs are smarter than we think, and given time, patience and enough enjoyable reinforcement, we can teach them just about anything.”
So, what is the achievement gap between African Americans and dogs?
Yes there seems to be lots of low-hanging fruit here.
Roissy and Vox Day say the uptick in dog-ownership is acting as a child substitute, e.g. http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2014/04/society-goes-to-dogs.html
"A lot of 95 IQ people today think hard about breeding dogs to make them conform even more to the American Kennel Club standards"
As a child in the 80s, American Kennel Club dog breeders impressed me as upper-middle class and/or wealthy. Almost Old Money like.
Perhaps it depends on the breed; or was I just being a hopelessly clueless child?
The dogs are taking action on their own:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dogs-best-friend/201404/washington-wolf-spayed-cavorting-dog-
No sooner had I posted my most recent blog entry on continued crossbreeding between wolves and livestock guarding dogs in the Georgian Caucasus than a geneticist friend sent me notice from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife that a young female wolf had been captured and spayed after being seen cavorting with a local livestock guard dog. The surgery revealed that she was pregnant, presumably with puppies the dog had sired.
Why do that, I wondered, in the face of mounting evidence that wolves and dogs had been interbreeding since their first incomplete separation more than 15,000 years ago? As recently as two years ago, researchers examining the genetics of village dogs, found that the livestock guard dog in a Lebanese village was in fact 100 percent wolf.
That is a simple question with a complicated answer that says more about our attitudes toward nature and its citizens than it does about the animals involved. They, after all, wolf and dog, are merely living according to their natures.
I asked Donny Martorello, head of large carnivore conservation—cougars, grizzlies, and wolves—for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, why wildlife biologists had not simply let nature take its course with the hybrids. If conventional wisdom is right most of the pups would die soon after birth, if not before. Over time the descendants of those who survived and reproduced might contribute something to the wolf gene pool, but there were a lot of ifs and maybes and mights in that scenario.
Martorello explained that his agency desired as a matter of policy to have “the most pure wolfstock possible for repopulating the state.” It is an article of faith among wildlife managers that hybrids between wild and domestic animals are wrong and must not be permitted. This attitude has deep roots in the modern environmental movement, which adopted the wolf as the symbol of wilderness, a species essential to the health of an ecosystem.
The change reflected the thinking and influence of Aldo Leopold, among others. He came to see the wolf as the embodiment of wilderness—a dramatic shift from his initial embrace of the Anglo-American attitude, dating to the 16th century when the English killed all of their wolves to protect their sheep but more importantly the king’s stag herd. Wolves were still killers—but in their world, wilderness, their killing had a place.
...So profound was the transformation that the wolf became one of the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. It would not do for this noble creature to carry dog blood; the mere suggestion of it caused an entire lineage, save for one animal, of endangered Mexican wolves to be killed, though they were later shown to be pure.
But if Washington’s wolves had to be pure, what about its guard dogs? I asked Donny Martorello why, since they had the wolf collared already, they did not capture the pups and raise them to be livestock protection dogs to see how they would perform? Martorello skirted the question. “We reached out to the people at Wolf Haven International in Washington and other groups,” he said, “but none had the resources to care for them.” In any event that avenue is no longer open.
It's ironic that the same people that will espouse the multitude of differences between different breeds of dog are probably the same people who will go to great lengths to deny the existence of any differences between different breeds of people.
Breeding cancer-sniffing dogs?
Well Steve you've found your calling. Just Do It (TM).
And if not Steve there must be some HBD, sorry DBD people out there.
You have to remember that breeding is not only frowned upon because it is part of the "pseudoscience of eugenics" but also breeding is contrary to principles of Feminism. Female dogs should get to choose with whom they mate. The whole notion of breeding is just "rapey". Additionally, animal rights are better served by us rescuing mutts from dog pounds(the only cool way to do it, even though you are not so secretly hoping he has some exotic pedigree that you track down), scooping up their crap and forgiving them when they bark at you and chew up your furniture. With so many crimethoughts vaguely nearby, the whole subject is doublebad and best to be avoided by righthinking minds.
This might as well have been in the Mesozoic era, since life with a dog was so primitive then.
So pathetic that I ought to show it to my students. People like this have their heads up their ass so bad that they historicize literally anything-even trivial shit like this- as an example of how enlightened they are. This is the intellectual depth of an annoying nine year old showoff. This is Pajamaboy culture.
That iSqueek app is great!
There's a marked difference.
It's a SMALL DOG.
Small dogs are cute, approachable and portable.
Small dog = Fashion Accessory = Child Substitute
Big dog = Security/Protection = More serious role
99% of the time, childless liberal women prefer small dogs. That's because big dogs are used by the police, or in more criminal zones.
On the other hand, small dogs pose no danger and no utility. Think Paris Hilton and her Chihuahua. Chihuahuas are small dogs which just decorate the place.
"The dogs are taking action on their own:
I asked Donny Martorello, [...] why wildlife biologists had not simply let nature take its course with the hybrids. [...] It is an article of faith among wildlife managers that hybrids between wild and domestic animals are wrong and must not be permitted."
Ok, take wolves off the endangered species list (they are inter-fertile with dogs, so they arent really a different species). Let ranchers kill wolves. Dump animal shelter dogs in the wild to replace them. Packs of beagles and poodles will roam, taking down moose and deer and fufilling their role in the ecosystem.
No need to read the NYT to find this stuff any more - just watch HGTV. So-called grown-ups actually have no shame in telling real estate agents (and the world) that they are choosing their new house mainly on the basis of what would be best for their dogs.
How much of this aversion to child-rearing comes from anxiety about how well potential human offspring will measure up? Dogs are easy. As long as they don't go around biting people, you're a success as a dog-parent. What if your human child isn't reading at a fifth-grade level when he enters grade 1? Think of the scandal! In my experience, the better educated a person is, the more irrational their expectations are for their offspring. And in an age where educated couples might have two children at most, they only get a couple shots to prove to all their friends and family that they're amazing parents. My great-grandfather was a doctor. He had sixteen children. With that many, at least one was going to be a success of one kind or another.
"people who have more parenting drive than actual children to expend it upon. "
One motivation for universal pre k is giving wealthy white girls a fulfilling life minus the pregnancies. They are getting paid to indulge their hobbies.
Such cancer. Many chemo. Wow.
Talking dogs should be top priority.
Yuki The Shiba Says Hello
It would help them do their other jobs better.
Rooo rav rulon ransuuuur.
In any event that avenue is no longer open.
They Roe-v-Wade'd the little mulatto dog-wolf puppies?!?
Dilation-n-Curettage'ed 'em?
Oh the humanity.
Er, caninity.
How about a dog breed that picks lettuce?
I sensed that being a pet parent today — nobody uses the word “owner” anymore, apparently — means cultivating intelligence, manners and communication skills the way the parent of, say, a small human might.
"pet parent," "A small human,"
We. Are. Doomed.
On the radio in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, I hear a lot of ads for fertility clinics. I've also started to see SUVs sporting bumper stickers that read "I love my granddogs."
Anonydroid at 10:26 PM said: Packs of beagles and poodles will roam, taking down moose and deer and fufilling their role in the ecosystem.
Hunsdon said: Two quick points. First, the poodle breed was developed as a retriever. Second, in the wild, dogs will breed back to a distinct type: not quite a wolf, but wolf like. Medium bodied, brownish, hale hearty and healthy.
You probably knew that.
"... Mr. Pilley told me, “The big lesson is to recognize that dogs are smarter than we think, and given time, patience and enough enjoyable reinforcement, we can teach them just about anything.”"
Anything? Organic chemistry? Portugese?
One has to admit that dogs disappoint far less than children do. True, your little pooch will never grow up to graduate summa-cum laude from Harvard. Neither will your dog get tattooed, or end up on a stripper-pole or a sherriff's work-detail.
A lot of dog-people clearly don't believe in genetics, as evidenced by the fact that they all seem to be so crazy about spaying and neeutering. I can understand the desire to have other people's dogs spayed or neutered. But if you like your dogs, and you want the world to have more like them, you should want them to breed.
I can confirm I took pets over kids LITERALLY and explicitly in a deal with the wife. Sue me! Life is easier and I hate kids.
These people seem more willing to educate their dogs than they are to educate African Americans.
This just perpetuates the structural racism in the system.
Martorello explained that his agency desired as a matter of policy to have “the most pure wolfstock possible for repopulating the state.” It is an article of faith among wildlife managers that hybrids between wild and domestic animals are wrong and must not be permitted. This attitude has deep roots in the modern environmental movement, which adopted the wolf as the symbol of wilderness, a species essential to the health of an ecosystem.
Lefty minds must work like prisons where everyone's kept in solitary confinement 24/7; no letting the ideas interact:
"Species must be preserved in their pure form, hybridization is wrong."
"Europeans must not be preserved in their pure form, hybridization is mandatory."
"There is no bright line between humans and animals. We are all animals, and non-human species have the same rights as humans."
You'd think this kind of thing would be pathological. Oh, right, it is.
This attitude has deep roots in the modern environmental movement, which adopted the wolf as the symbol of wilderness, a species essential to the health of an ecosystem.
Change two words and you've got a pretty robust form of racial nationalism.
It was about ten years ago that I read about how there are twice as many dogs and cats in America now as children. I have grown to be disgusted at the mere sight of people with pets and without children. They are... fundamentally unserious people.
I have a hunch also that having pets around reduces a woman's fertility. I know a woman who was trying to get pregnant, and there was a big black labrador (spelling?) in the house... a sinister creature.
Out of reach costs of family formation are behind this. You can keep a dog in a crate in a 1 bedroom trendy condo, you don't have to worry about "good schools"
Dog rescuing is quite the rage among NY hipster women, old and young. But they like to rescue pit bulls and other noxious beasts.
I don't see a lot of tiny dog love going around with SWPL women. Tends to be more medium and up dogs. Chinese seem to like teeny dogs. Has anyone ever known an Indian with a dog?
But the "dog lady" is definitely replacing the "cat lady" as the object of future game-blog scorn.
"reasoning game in which she inferred time and again that a piece of paper on an angle meant a treat was hidden behind it"
Reasoning? You don't suppose the dog could SMELL the treat behind the angled piece of paper? The dog may or may not have reasoning abilities but she's not stupid enough to bother with thinking when she can just use her superior sense of smell.
>One motivation for universal pre k is giving wealthy white girls a fulfilling life minus the pregnancies<
Not just white girls. I've known Chinese and hispanic girls professionally grokking pre-k and special ed. (One Chinese girl, a Masters of Ed-r, professed puzzlement over how unresponsive her largely black charges were. She retired at 40 to concentate on her 5-year-old.) There are paid-up "nice white ladies" who aren't white; the personality seems to have become a type to which women from all over aspire. This role model is certainly benign compared to Militant Lesbian.
But, yeah, the Ed Leviathan ain't drying up anytime soon.
I can confirm I took pets over kids LITERALLY and explicitly in a deal with the wife. Sue me! Life is easier and I hate kids.
Maybe some stranger will bring a care dog to the nursing home one day.
"Has anyone ever known an Indian with a dog?"
By default Indians in silicon valley seem to be dog-adverse. To the point where they've gotten politically organized on occasion to try to keep dogs from playgrounds and the like. They truly don't seem to like to be around dogs. Some of the more open Indians who have been in the US a long time (and maybe have kids who know kids who have dogs...) have slowly come around to dogs and then realize that dogs are cool.
(Maybe back in India a lot of the dogs are effectively feral. Chinese seem similar but not quite to the same degree.)
Back in the day, they actually used to have Dog Houses. Outside. The Dog's lived.
Since an ungodly number of dog owners now sleep in the same bed as their dogs ... you gotta wonder exactly what is going on 3 standard deviations out. I don't really know, but I strongly believe in keeping within your species. I know that it is simply powerful humans enslaving animals, but wtf.
As far as dog breeding, I have seen devolved dogs in Asia and they seem to be superior in their own way. They aren't going to point at quail or heard sheep. They are generalist dogs.
They are definitely not high strung and can survive for quite a while on garbage.
If you gotta breed dogs, why not hipster dogs?
Steve, this reads like a satiric piece written by you! Are you ghost-writing for the NY Times?
" The Anti-Gnostic said...
I sensed that being a pet parent today — nobody uses the word “owner” anymore, apparently — means cultivating intelligence, manners and communication skills the way the parent of, say, a small human might.
"pet parent," "A small human,"
We. Are. Doomed.
4/14/14, 5:16 AM"
I hear you brother, I hear you.
I have an intense dislike for childless young people having pets.
***"“The big lesson is to recognize that dogs are smarter than we think, and given time, patience and enough enjoyable reinforcement, we can teach them just about anything.” "***
What is 10,000 hours of practice, in dog years?
Apparently, some people are unfamiliar with Clever Hans...
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