Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Why we love normal dogs

As an antidote to the grossness of the "lick you to death" pit bull video and bloody pit bulls, here's an amazing lab to give holiday cheer..

I choose to believe that this incredible dog eventually won over the aloof toddler.




Commenter Sputnik notes:
(This video) shows how utterly disgusting it is that the pit freaks, and they are truly freaks, try to tell all that the shit bull type dog is the standard dog template. The injustice this does, the undeserved insult, to normal real dogs is not only unbearable but also criminal.
Jean Donaldson needs to stop talking about 'predatory aggression' in the SCAVENGER domestic dog as a way of explaining why shit bulls suddenly kill other dogs and children. Don't matter that she has, oh so reluctantly, admitted that MAYBE some breeds are just MAYBE inherently more dangerous than others. As long as she's still publishing books with a chapter showing how you can clicker-train the killing out of a shit bull, all she's doing is trying to WHORE to both sides. I'm not surprised that after some ten years she still hasn't got her PhD in evolutionary biology -- though in a way it surprises me that academic PhD committees wouldn't cooperate in saying evolution and selection apply to all in the biosphere EXCEPT SHIT BULLS (which is still what Donaldson claims to be so).
Ditto Miklosi, Dodson, Overall, Voith, Lockwood, and other pseudo-scientific academics who've understood zero about what the domestic dog really is. 


To read some of the hypocrisy mentioned in Sputnik's comment, go to the Experts post. Many of the same science whores who used to admit how dangerous pit bulls are have become pit bull promoting "experts" and state that pit bulls are just like any other dog or that pit bull aggression is normal dog behavior. Thank you Sputnik!

33 comments:

Rumpelstiltskin said...

Nice video for Christmas!

Thank you and Merry Christmas to everyone!

Dude, I BaggedYourPit said...

Love this! Merry Christmas!

scurrilous amateur blogger said...

oh my. even choked up a mean old hater like me. i've watched it 3 times. i took a screen shot of the moment she put her paw on his shoulder.

that lab embodies what it means to be a dog.
click on the youtube link and give it a thumbs up. i am sure the 97 people out 5000+ who voted it down either did so by mistake or were jealous pit nutters. i don't even think the dog haters would vote that down.

what a lovely dog. my next dog will be a lab.

thanks for balancing the blood and gore snack.

DubV said...

Thanks, Snack!

Merry Christmas everyone.

Dude, I BaggedYourPit said...

Same here, Dawn! This brought back memories of a lab I love and miss after all these years. She was as tough and inexhaustible in the field as any dog I’ve ever known, but as sweet, gentle and kind as the lab in this video. She never met a person or another dog she didn’t instantly like and she met hundreds, until she met one in particular. She certainly had never been in a fight, and never so much as showed her teeth until the day she was attacked by my neighbor’s pit bull. I have no idea how she recognized the incoming threat, but she was awesome. In the flurry of two spinning dogs, it appeared the pit bull had her by the throat. I lifted my lab into the back of my truck with the pit bull still attached, thinking the pit had her by the throat, but soon discovered my lab had a death grip on top of the pit bulls head. “Leave it,” I said, and she spit the pit bull out allowing my neighbor to drag the whipped pit away.

I inspected my dog, expecting to find open wounds or some tender areas at least, but there wasn’t a mark on her, and she was instantly calm again. My neighbor, however, reported back their pit had several punctures and gashes on top of its head.

“Boooo-yah!” I say to all the pit owning assholes! Not only could your piece of shit pits never compete in the field, nor be trusted or respected by society, but once in awhile they’ll go after a lab that just might kick the shit of them, and that’s a bloody fucking shame for an ugly dog that’s supposed to be king of dog fighting.

Water dog – retrieve – quarter and flush – can point – high ranking intelligence - guide dogs – dock launchers - #1 detection dog – legitimate service dog… There’s a reason they’re America’s most registered dog for consecutive decades – LABS RULE! :-)

Meals on Wheels said...

Heartwarming and beautiful.

Jake said...

Nice video - I invariably have affectionate feelings when I see a lab. Labs are what dogs should be like.

Alexandra said...

Thanks for this. It illustrates a couple of things. First and (in our context least important) what huge crap it is to talk about 'dominance' in dogs, how any active attempts by a dog to make contact would be 'dominant', gentle nibbling or licking, and so on.

Second, it shows how utterly disgusting it is that the pit freaks, and they are truly freaks, try to tell all that the shit bull type dog is the standard dog template. The injustice this does, the undeserved insult, to normal real dogs is not only unbearable but also criminal.

I hope these comments are Google-searchable, because I want to add the following and hope everyone who types in those names would bump into this:

Pit bull WHORE Ian Dunbar is both telling people dogs are about dominance and telling people that shit bull type dogs are -- other than normal dogs -- the great nanny dog. With that, his time of doing any good for dogs has ended. He's hooked up (in the getting into a dirty money-lined bed sense of the word) with Cesar Millan, sold his soul, sold normal dogs down the river.

Jean Donaldson needs to stop talking about 'predatory aggression' in the SCAVENGER domestic dog as a way of explaining why shit bulls suddenly kill other dogs and children. Don't matter that she has, oh so reluctantly, admitted that MAYBE some breeds are just MAYBE inherently more dangerous than others. As long as she's still publishing books with a chapter showing how you can clicker-train the killing out of a shit bull, all she's doing is trying to WHORE to both sides. I'm not surprised that after some ten years she still hasn't got her PhD in evolutionary biology -- though in a way it surprises me that academic PhD committees wouldn't cooperate in saying evolution and selection apply to all in the biosphere EXCEPT SHIT BULLS (which is still what Donaldson claims to be so).

Ditto Miklosi, Dodson, Overall, Voith, Lockwood, and other pseudo-scientific academics who've understood zero about what the domestic dog really is.

BTW, it ain't just Labs who can be like the dog in the vid. It's all kinds of normal dogs, if only we let them be.


scurrilous amateur blogger said...

the google search engine does pick up comments. :)

Miss Margo said...

Sputnik, wow, awesome comment!

Tangentially, I get annoyed when I hear people (usually pit nutters) blather on about how dogs are naturally predators. Like, there are threads on the nutter forums where nutters feed their dogs exclusively raw meat because "it's what wolves ate."

Everything I have read from what seems to be legit scientific sources suggests that domestic dogs are, as Sputnik mentioned, primarily scavengers who can--and enjoy--eating anything.

Am I wrong about this?

Great vid, by the way. Definitely a tear-jerker. Talk about a nanny dog!

Packhorse said...

45 Photos Of Golden Retrievers Comforting The Residents Of Newtown

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/photos-of-golden-retrievers-comforting-the-residen

Jake said...

@sputnik -agree 100% that dogs in general are wonderful. It's just that for me, labs are the epitome, the "poster child" if you will, of normal dogs.

I've also heard the comments from pit apologists trying to make sense of pit bull attacks, claiming the victim somehow reminded the pit bull of its "natural prey". Give me a break, it's "natural prey" is garbage, or table scraps!

Miss Margo said...

lol Jake "natural prey"--for whatever reason, this is making me think of groups of pit bulls chasing screaming, terrified prehistorical humans around the African serehnghetti(sp?)

............

ok, maybe not so funny....

A pack of pit bulls couldn't survive in nature anyway. They'd end up killing one another. Which kinda speaks for itself...

DubV said...

I'm similarly annoyed when people refer to dogs as wolves.

Domestic dogs surely still have some genetic material that leads to prey drive in some. But this doesn't mean they are predators, just because of a remnant. I'd say the most accurate thing, as far as my knowledge, is to call them former predators that have been transformed into mostly scavengers by selective breeding. Of course, nutters will pick whatever best helps their argument at that particular time.

DubV said...

Of course, I wrote solely about diet and behaviors related to it. The domestic dog, overall, is so modified by humans so as to fit the environment we provide that it is totally unhelpful to speak of their "natural" anything.


I'd like to give the nutters the benefit of the doubt here and think they were speaking of "natural prey" in the distant past, prior to domestication. But, nah, not gonna do it. Nutters probably think there is some island off the coast of Central America called Chihuahua and that is where the first chi specimens were netted and brought in for adoption at Petco.

Small Survivors said...

Thank you Sputnik, I will add your comment to the post itself so that it will be very searchable.

Looking at this video, it is obvious that this statement is no overstatement:
"it shows how utterly disgusting it is that the pit freaks, and they are truly freaks, try to tell all that the shit bull type dog is the standard dog template. The injustice this does, the undeserved insult, to normal real dogs is not only unbearable but also criminal. "

I know a lot of people here have already read it, but a great read is Alexandra Semyonova's book "The 100 Silliest Things People Say about Dogs." In that she describes how dogs evolved in tandem with humans and actually evolved to eat scraps from humans. The "natural habitat" of the dog is in proximity to humans, eating their food scraps. I think that it was Alexandra who said that what made dogs become dogs was turning from being a predator to being a scavenger.

If dogs were predators and wolves, strays and feral dogs would have populated our wild areas and competed with and maybe bred with coyotes and wolves a long time ago. And no one hears about coyote-doodles populating the state parks and forest preserves.

Rumpelstiltskin said...

Snack sized dog,

"And no one hears about coyote-doodles populating the state parks and forest preserves."

I think that is about the funniest thing I've heard all week!

I worry sometimes that pit nutters will get ideas regarding cross-breeding pit bulls with normal dogs. Lets admit it "lab-mix" is getting kinda old. "Lab-mix" has been used by pit nutters for decades. It's not uncommon, if you've met enough pit nutters, that they introduce their mauling machine as a lab-mix, especially if the dog is not present. When you see the dog, it's almost always 100% pit bull.

Pit nutters really do have a dilemma when they decide to mix their full blooded game-bred pit with another breed of dog. They would worry that the "gameness" and other attributes which make it a mauling machine are so watered down that the dog may never pose a threat or become the front page story in the news.

A wolf-pit hybrid. Now that's a scary combination.

Small Survivors said...

Oh I think our depraved little friends have already gone and mixed pits and wolves. Googling finds idiots who think they have a wolf/pit mix whether they do or not, idiots who want a pit/wolf mix, and idiots selling supposed pit/wolf mixes.

A child was recently reported mauled by the family wolf/pit mix, but then the owner claimed the dog was actually an american bulldog/husky mix...

http://bangordailynews.com/2012/12/17/news/lewiston-auburn/pit-bull-wolf-hybrid-attacks-infant-mother-in-livermore-falls/

scurrilous amateur blogger said...

the failed Velociraptor/Honey Badger Cross :-)

DubV said...

When coyotes aren't killing and eating dogs, they do occasionally shag them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canid_hybrid#Coyote.E2.80.93dog_hybrid

My guesses for why they aren't spotted much would be: 1. just rare, 2. secretive, and 3. over successive generations they are more likely to breed with coyotes than dogs and so they become indistinguishable from coyotes.

My uncle had some buy him a bunch of domestic rabbits (he didn't want) for his farm. Well, after a few years, they were laying all around the yard of his house and were pretty tame. Then, as they bred with wild rabbits more and more, they became more wary (and wild rabbit looking) and one year they just all left and he had no more rabbits.

DubV said...

Have I said yet today how much I love normal dogs and hate pit nutters?

Dogs (and a cat) protecting owners from pits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oif-N_lYIMQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-fF0G13k5g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kyBzVO3RwI

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=12996434

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfZddEiuv5U

Garnet said...

Ian Dunbar is particularly stupid since he actually parrots that ridiculous lie that pit bulls are particularly good with children.

What evidence is there of this? Well, pit bull fanatics like to parrot that "nanny dog" lie. Are there any primary sources from before the 1970s that back this up? Nope! None! There are, however, loads of primary sources from the 1800s onward that indicate pit bulls were used for the violent, pointless spectacles of bear and bull baiting and dog fighting.

Pit bulls also kill more children than any other breed. That has nothing to do with breed misidentification, I may add - usually when a pit bull kills someone, the dog that did the deed does actually look like a pit bull.

So, there's no historical evidence for the nanny dog myth, and pit bulls kill and maul more kids than any other breed. So, Ian Dunbar's claim that pit bulls are particularly good with children is a total fabrication. It's a fabrication that endangers children, which makes it particularly distasteful.

This is aside from the question as to why a "dog lover" would promote a breed that was selected to kill other dogs.

scurrilous amateur blogger said...

"Pit bulls also kill more children than any other breed."

pit bulls kill far more adults than any other breed.

scurrilous amateur blogger said...

dubv, thanks for posting these stories about normal dog heroes. pit nutters are always thumping their chests and are so proud of that their mutants are willing to die/kill for them. i fail to see why it so impressive that dogs bred for violence are so willing to engage in violence.

what is impressive is when a normal dog that is not bred for violence or a cat makes that sacrifice. now there's some bragging rights.

DubV said...

You're welcome.

It was tough to find dogs saving others from pit bulls because when you search for things like

dog saves owners from pit bull

it usually comes up as one of those stories that pit nutters spread everywhere (about a pit bull that died to kill a snake or something). Perhaps my google fu needs sharpening.

scurrilous amateur blogger said...

a reader sent me this hero dog video.

Small Survivors said...

Yes, Thanks DubV. This is real heroism - and these were not aggressive dogs. That is genuine heroism.

The one thing that makes me angry is all these vets that are willing to take donations or not give medical care, in the case of the first dog, but they don't say they are reducing or waiving fees and all the while saying pit bulls are like all other dogs. They know. Vets are on the frontline of seeing what pit bulls do, but they won't speak out.

Dawn, that video made me do the ugly cry. Again, what a hero.

DubV, I do realize that there are instances of coyotes and even wolves breeding with dogs at times. But it is rare because their behaviors are different. Abandoned dogs, even in rural areas, don't run to the wilds and sustain themselves by hunting and populate wild areas either with other dogs or coyotes because they generally will stay close to human populations and try to scavenge from garbage before they would try to hunt and find shelter in the woods to sustain themselves. If they were apt to do that, by now there would be widespread, self-sustaining semi-wild dogs populating almost every part of the country by now.

DubV said...

Snack, I agree that coyote-dog and wolf-dog hybrids are exceedingly rare, and with your reasoning.

Interesting to ponder the selection pressures involved in dog domestication and how it made them relatively bad at living on their own.

Branwyne Finch said...

I am very concerned that the younger generation is growing up with a warped idea of what a pet dog actually is. It's not a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode. It's hard for younger people to understand what it was like growing up surrounded by neighborhood dogs, unsupervised kids and dogs just roaming around and playing together, every day, for years, without incident.

I wanted to share with this group BadRap's list of instructions for bringing home a new pit bull...

http://www.badrap.org/sites/default/files/A_New_Dog.pdf

I would love for posters to weigh in....has anyone ever heard of keeping a new dog in a crate or on a "tie down" in the house for at LEAST a month? Not when you are out, but when you are home? And note there is no discussion of the normal concerns that people have with normal dogs...housebreaking,barking, etc.

The focus is on dealing with introducing a potentially dog aggressive pit bull to the resident dog, and being prepared for fights, and maintaing constant and complete control over the dog. Note the bizzare story about punishing a dog aggressive pit bull for being aggressive toward another dog by refusing to let her sleep on the bed that night; as if dog aggression can be "fixed" by taking away privileges!

Why would anyone want to adopt a pit bull after reading this? These are not the typical instructions for bringing home a "normal" friendly dog.

DubV said...

Thanks for the heads up, I'll read it Branwyne.

The instruction most people have for bringing a dog-aggressive dog into a home with another dog is.....don't ever do it.

Garnet said...

The advice of not letting the dog on the bed after a fight doesn't make sense. There's no way a dog is going to connect those two events.

I own (and have owned) a big variety of dogs, including toy breeds, mystery mutts, and greyhounds, and I've never had to keep a dog crated and tied up for the first month. It's actually never occurred to me to make a dog work for any little bit of freedom. I like having pets, not prisoners.

Of course, I'd never bring a fighting-breed dog into my house. That would be horribly unfair to my two existing dogs. It's quite nasty to expect a normal dog to live with a fighting dog. The people who adopt dog-aggressive pit bulls despite already having a dog should have to live in a lion cage at a zoo - to simulate how the normal dog must feel having to live with a dog that may kill it at any second.

Branwyne Finch said...

Thanks, Garnet. Remember, these are the pit bull EXPERTS at BadRap giving out this advice. I thought the same thing ...a dog could not possibly connect the fact that it did what came naturally..showed aggression to another dog; and it's being kept off the bed. The instructions are for bringing a potentially dangerous animal into the house, not a "normal", friendly pet dog.

Note that the instructions say that it may take MONTHS until a new dog can be allowed "freedom" in the house. Imagine bringing home a new dog and keeping it in a crate, night and day, for MONTHS...only letting it out for exersize, food, and training drills. If a dog is that destructive, dominant, and unpredictable, why would you want it in the first place?

Jim said...

Gee.... think it was a shitbull?
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=424881264250213&set=a.125705020834507.23490.113052328766443&type=1&theater