Posted in sharks, tagged beach sharks, Sandbar sharks, sharks on June 26, 2009|
I’ve been spending a few days at my relatives’ beach house in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina– a place I call “West Virginia’s coast,” simply because so many people from West Virginia come here on holidays.
Now, I am far from the typical beachgoer.
I don’t like spending hours sitting in the sun. I’m very fair-skinned, and I have to put on very high-powered sunscreen. And I actually don’t like swimming in salt water.
But I am a nature nut.
And I love to go on long nature walks.
Here, I have to walk three or four miles before I get beyond all the resorts and into the open beach, where I can see all sorts of little shore birds. I have yet to see any dolphins or porpoises here, but I know that if I’m going to see any of those, it will be away from the crowded beaches. That’s why I’m willing to take such long journeys away from the beach house.
I did, however, see something quite amazing this week.
On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I have seen many dolphins and porpoises, and from the shore, I’ve seen a few blacktip sharks and bonnetheads. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see those animals. The female sharks whelp just off the coast where I used visit in North Carolonia, and in June, the fishermen would catch scores of young blacktips and bonnetheads from the shore.
But I’ve never seen anything like that here.
But as I was walking along, I noticed a brown triangle poking above the foamy wayes. As I walked closer, a distinctive shark tail appeared behind the triangle. I knew instantly what I was observing. It was a sandbar shark. it was only about 3 or 4 feet long, and it was probably chasing small bait fish that it had chased into the surf.
What amazed me was the shark was only about ten feet from the beach in about 18 inches of frothing water.
Now, I’ve always been fascinated by sharks. My grandparents took me to the beach when I was about two, and according to my grandpa, he took me on a beach combing expedition, when we came across a ghastly sight. A large hammerhead, which could have been a bonnethead, had been caught by a fisherman. It had been fileted, and the rest of its body was left to lie there on the beach. According to him, I was so fascinated by the creature that he knew that the next thing to do was to take me to the local aquarium. And so fascinated was I by all the fish at the aquarium that he had to take me three times a day on that particular vacation.
To see that sandbar shark rise from the surf took me back to that time. I long for that childlike sense of wonder, back when I was a fully subjective human being without all of this rationality to cloud my thinking.
I saw the sandbar shark for only a few brief seconds. Then the waves crashed down upon it, and it swam back into the depths. But for a brief moment, I was a child again.
A crocodile has been spotted in a pond near the village of Xertigny in the Vosges region of France. Now, a crocodile has no place in the Vosges region, so it is either an escaped pet or zoo animal. Or an common animal that has been misidentified.
In true crocodile hunter style, the local authorities have placed a chicken near the pond to see entice the saurian from its depths.
Lacking any other option, some in the village want the pond drained, which, of course, is the nuclear option.
My guess is that someone has come across a large carp or pike. That’s also what the local anglers are saying.
I have seen very large carp in ponds, and they do look a bit like alligators.
Now, I’ve never been in an area where one could see both pike or alligators, but I cand see where someone could mistake a pike for a crocodilian.
It could be a pet caiman that has been released. Heck, we have a population of spectacled caimans in Florida that was founded by escaped pets.
This story does have my curiosity piqued, so stay tuned.
I have some experience here, for I grew up in “Rabbit biggle” country.
Bassets are almost never chosen to be working rabbit hounds. According to my grandfather, bassets were used occasionally. These dogs weren’t beagles, so the average rabbit hunter didn’t know how to react the working basset’s somewhat different from behavior.
Because hunters often didn’t register their dogs, cross-breeding was common. A lot of beagles in West Viurginia have a touch of foxhound or bluetick coonhound in their ancestry. And then there are the bench-legged beagles. A bench-legged beagle is a beagle and basset cross, usually 3/4 beagle and 1/4 basset. Sometimes, dachshunds are crossed in, rather than the basset.
Bassets were not thought of as working hounds in many parts of North America and Europe, and as a result, the only standard of quality for so many strains of basset was the show ring.
And it wasn’t very long before the fancy itself began producing larger dogs with far shorter legs than would ever be useful in a long ranging basset.
Case in point: the French have maintained several different breeds of working basset. They are all primarily working hunting dogs, and not a single one is as exaggerated as the dog we call the basset hound.
Right now, we are living at a time in which so many working breeds are losing their status. The only way to judge their quality isn’t to work them but to show them. And once the dogs get far removed from being selected for working behavior, it isn’t long before the dogs exist as nothing more than bench stock.
And then you can see why backwoods people keep only unregistered beagles and beagle crosses to work the cottontails. And no one I know is seriously considering a basset for the task.
The truth is I’m really bad at making predictions, but I think I’ll try my hand at prognostication. I think I might know what the next fad dog will be, and this time, it might not be as bad as the previous dog fads.
In the past few years, we have seen the rise of mass-produced tea-cup poodles, yorkies, Chihuhuas, and diminutive hybrids like the malti-poo. We have also seen the bulldog’s popularity increase, despite all of its various health problems.
What do all of these dogs have in common?
They are all good urban dogs. None of these breeds have very strong predatory behaviors, even though one can find individual dogs that exhibit some strong predatory behavior.
Border collies might be super easy to train, as are working strain golden retrievers, but they are also dogs with particular predatory motor patterns that they exhibit almost to the point of obsession.
My guess is the future of dogs will be heavily marked with popularity in more easily urbanized dogs. I mean people do prefer golden retrievers that don’t have their predatory motor patterns. I find them very different from the ones actually bred for those motor patterns.
So the breeds people will be keeping won’t be retrievers, collies, and shepherds. Those are so twentieth century.
After all, in the nineteenth century, the most common large breed was a dog called a “Newfoundland,” which could mean the big prototype to the Newfoundland we have today or the ancestral retriever. By the First World War, their popularity had waned, and the collie and German shepherd had come to the fore. By the 1960’s, these dogs began to loose ground to American cockers, who then lost ground to the golden and Labrador retrievers.
Now retrievers. standard poodles, and German shepherds remain popular, but they are the only larger breeds that consistently remain in the top ten of the AKC’ registrations. Smaller breeds continue to grow in popularity.
Some of this increase popularity comes from the rather obvious fact that they can be more easily milled than the larger breeds. They mature faster and start producing soon. ‘They can be stacked in tiny cages much more easily. And soft-headed celebrities buy them. Americans seem to do what soft-headed celebrities do, so they wind up buying even more mill fodder.
More people are buying dogs as child substitutes, and little dogs look like babies their entire lives. I highly suspect this transferance of parental behavior onto our population of diminutive canines is the main force that created the current epidemic of little dogs with behavior problems. Not only are many of these dogs born in terrible places, but they then are treated inappropriately their entire lives.
Mass production has exacerbated genetic problems in these little dogs. And if they are developing a reputation as poorly behaved dogs with lots of health problems, their fad status is probably tenuous.
What do I think the next fad dog will be?
Well, I try to be optimistic.
And I think we’re at a tipping point with purbred dogs. The public writ large is very aware of health problems in purebred dogs .
That’s why people are drawn to designer dogs.
But even the designer dogs aren’t always as carefully selected for health and temperament as people hope them to be.
So I see the future of the dog going something like this.
I think that in 25 years, the North American dog fancy will de decentralized. The closed registry system will not exist as it currently does, and dogs will be documented in registries that are purpose-based. Dog shows will probalby become little more than curiosities, where a few strains are still handled in the shows. But the big shows will have disappeared.
For pets, the public will look for dogs that are healthy and well socialized. Those performance based registries will probably steer pet owners away from their dogs.
That means that the “lowly mongrel” will once again become the pet of choice for the average family. The demand for these dogs has grown in recent years, even during the recession. As more and more of the public questions the legitimacy of the fancy as it currently exists, more of the public will be taking in randomly bred dogs.
I think society is finally becoming informed about what dogs are, and people want dogs to be much closer to the core considerations for the family. That means people will be looking for more healthy dogs, and they will be trepidatious of buying a dog from a breeder.
So as the eternal optimist, I think the next fad dog will be a “Canardly”– as in “I canardly tell what kind of dog he is!” (Yes, bad Kent Hovind joke.)
What follows are some generalizations based upon my experiences. Because you have different experiences than I do, you may have different opinions. I respect them. Please respect mine.
1. Labs do have a lot of energy. The American trial Labrador is usually a very hot-blooded animal with lots of spirit and more than a little stubbornness. Some can be scatty, and others are furry lunkers that can’t be controlled without judicious application of the e-collar. A lot of these Labs also lack retrieving instinct and must be force-fetched. (The average working gundog should never need to go through it. It should be a natural retriever.) It’s still possible to find good lines of working Labrador that aren’t too extreme in this regard. However, the chances of getting one of these wild ones is too high these days. With goldens, high energy is something to still be breeding for. In fact, pet goldens are being bred that lack drive and instinct. If you get a golden, chances are it won’t be one of these wild dogs. (I really don’t like a very calm golden retriever, but I think if you had one that was as up as some of these Labs are, you would have problems very quickly).
2. Labs are not as easy to train for normal purposes as a golden. Now, for waterfowl and retriever trials, they are far better. But goldens are far easier to precision train for dog sports. As house dogs, I find them easier to housebreak and easier to teach simple obedience commands.
3. Labs are more neotenous than goldens are. This means that they don’t develop as many wolf-like behaviors as goldens develop.
4. Goldens have a better nose than Labradors. Goldens are also natural air scenters and quaterers, which is bad for a trial dog but very useful in a flushing retriever in heavy cover.
5. Goldens mature later than Labs. This is supposed to be a negative if you’re a trialer. I happen to like a dog that as a bit longer childhood, because then you have more time to put in foundations in your training and socialization.
6. My goldens have lived longer than the working Labs I’ve known. Now, this may no longer be the case, but when the Labs died at 10 or 11, my goldens still made it 13 and 14.
7. If there is a border collie of the gun dogs, the golden is it. Before BC’s became AKC dogs, goldens simply took over the obedience trial. If you wanted to do competitive obedience, you got a golden to start out. Then you figured out to do it with something harder– like a basenji.
8. I prefer setter and spaniel behavior in a hunting dog but with much more control. The golden has a lot of setter and spaniel quartering behavior. They aren’t great at speed as flushing dogs, but because they are so easy to train, it is easier to teach them how to quarter closer. Labs don’t have the golden’s nose, and I find their quartering behavior to be very different. They are either methodical like black Clumbers or they run around like black springers.
9. I have had three super smart golden retrievers, which have all been very easy to train. They also have been superb at problem solving. All three have figured out how to open doors on their own. One taught the other how to open the door. The current dog figured it out when she was about 5 months old.
10. “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it?”
Labs are popular, and many are good working gundogs. If you want a trial dog, there are many more lines of working Lab than golden. If you want a dog that works in the old-fashioned way, that is very easy to train as a pet but takes longer to train as a retriever, I’d say go for a golden.
I’m biased toward goldens. I don’t deny this.
There are good Labs are there. There are many of them.
You do have to hunt to find a good golden. Good Labs are far more common.
It’s just the Labrador isn’t for me.
I’ve never actually written why I prefer goldens to Labs before. It may be that I just met the right goldens early on, and first impressions have a very strong impact upon perception.
I respect Labrador people for making their decisions. I’m sure their dogs are good.
It’s just that I like the old-fashioned retrievers. I like dogs that look like they belong in Edwardian shoots in the last halcyon days of the Empire. Call me romantic or a touch nostalgic, but the golden is the only common retriever that still has that mystique.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Chesapeake bay retriever, Chessie, Working retriever on June 20, 2009|
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The United States has only one native retriever– unless you also count the Boykin spaniel and American water spaniels as retrievers. We, however, have only a single breed derived from the St. John’s water dog. Of course, here, I’m talking of what was once called the “Chesapeake ducking dog.” We know it officially as the Chesapeake Bay retriever.
The breed is anomaly among retrievers. Not only are its origins in the United States, but it also very different from the other retrievers. Now, I’ve been told that curly-coat is like a Chessie, but I’ve also been told that Chesapeakes are an outlier among retrievers.
You see, most other retrievers were bred by aristocrats. The curly and Murray River curly had some blue collar roots. The curly was used by poachers on the great estates of the early nineteenth century, and the Murray River curly was used as a meat dog along the marshes of its native river. The Chesapeake, though, was the market hunters’ dog.
And that required a different temperament.
Chesapeake Bay isn’t the Grand Banks, but it is cold and stormy ocean at certain times of the year. To have a dog that could fetch shot birds efficiently from the sea in all sorts of weather, the hunters bred a tougher, more drivey retriever that would brave the water with little hesitation. They also needed a dog that would guard the boats and their owners’ daily harvest, so the Chesapeake was bred to much more protective than the others.
Some of old-line Chessie were extremely “rugged.” These dogs were really tough customers. They were often criticized for having hard mouths and surly dispositions. Some of this criticism may have been warranted, but I think some of the comparisons were unfair. After all, Chesapeakes are more protective than Labradors, but Labradors are known for being rather terrible guards anyway. How much of this reputation comes from being compared to genteel British dogs and how much of it comes from a fair assessment of the breed’s temperament is still up to conjecture.
Now, let me set a few things straight about this breed. I often read that this breed is descended from the Newfoundland, and of course, this gets people thinking of the dog we call a Newfoundland today. Actually, just like all the other retrievers, the Chesapeake is descended from the St. John’s water dog.
In fact, the Chesapeake descends from two of these dogs that survived a shipwreck in Chesapeake Bay 1807. There were two of them– a dog and a bitch. The bitch was the more typical black coloration and was given the name “Canton” (after the ship). The dog, however, was a reddish liver. He was named “Sailor.”
The two dogs most likely were not bred together. Perhaps they were littermates or close relatives.
“Sailor” was described as such:
[H]e was of fine size and figure-lofty in his carriage, and built for strength and activity; remarkably muscular and broad across the hips and breast; head large, but not out of proportion; muzzle rather longer than is common with that race of dogs; his colour a dingy red, with some white on the face and breast; his coat short and smooth, but uncommonly thick, and more like a coarse fur than hair; tail full, with long hair, and always carried very high. His eyes were very peculiar: they were so light as to have almost an unnatural appearance, something resembling what is termed a wail eye, in a horse; and it is remarkable, that in a visit which I made to the Eastern Shore, nearly twenty years after he was sent there, in a sloop which had been sent expressly for him, to West River, by Governor Lloyd, I saw many of his descendants who were marked with this peculiarity.
Now, this is where the story gets interesting. Governor Lloyd was a planter and sporting gentlemen. He wound up purchasing “Sailor” in exchange for a Merino ram. (This was when everyone wanted to have Merino sheep to improve wool stock. He was Frederick Douglass’s original owner.)
It is generally believed that Sailor’s line begat the Eastern shore strain, while Canton founded the Western shore line. These two lines were not kept exclusively by sporting gentlemen.
One reason is that Chesapeake Bay had a thriving market hunter industry. Shooting as many birds as possible for the fine dining tables in Eastern cities required a dog that could retrieve rapidly and with very little direction.
The breed became popular among people who liked to shoot. General Custer had at least one Chesapeake, and it thought “Sailor Boy” was descended from Custer’s retriever or retrievers. Sailor Boy was, of course, Teddy Roosevelt’s beloved retriever.
Much the most individual of the dogs and the one with the strongest character was Sailor Boy, a Chesapeake Bay dog. He had a masterful temperament and a strong sense of both dignity and duty. He would never let the other dogs fight, and he himself never fought unless circumstances imperatively demanded it.
Teddy Roosevelt
To me, this suggests that the Chesapeake was a protective breed, but nowhere near the maneater that so many old retriever books claim that it was.
Today, the breed is far less common than goldens and Labradors. However, as a breed, it is usually easier to find a dog that is a natural retriever. After all, goldens and Labs have been bred as pets for many, many generations. Chesapeakes are still more commonly bred for work. Their breeders have sought to keep their breed a working dog, and that may be why the breed isn’t that popular. And popularity can be a curse– just look at the average golden retriever!
I’ll be honest that I’m not a Chesapeake person.
I’m much more accustomed to Labs, goldens, and flat-coats. And if you expect a Chessie to be like one of those, you’ll be sorely mistaken.
Those years developing on the Chesapeake Bay as a guardian, meat dog, and assistant to the market hunters shaped a different dog than those softer British retrievers.
Over the years, some lines have developed are more like Labradors than others. I don’t know whether that is a good thing for the breed or not. The Labrador started out as a British estate retriever that later evolved into a field trial specialist. (Contrary to popular belief, Labradors are from Britain, but they are derived from the very similar St. John’s water dog, a Newfoundland breed.)
I don’t think the true Chessie purist would like to see his or her breed turn into a Labrador. I certainly wouldn’t like it if goldens became like English show Labradors. This breed has a certain essence that its most devoted fans can appreciate. If they wanted a Labrador, they would’ve bought one.
I do hold out some hope for the Chesapeake, simply because the fad breeders and the pet market haven’t really worked on this breed. It’s still pretty much as it was.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bench-legged feist, feist, Jack Russell, Jack Russell terrier, mountain feist, rat terrier, treeing feist on June 18, 2009|
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For those of you who have seen me use the word “feist,” I mean a landrace terrier-type evolved on American frontier. Its ancestry is cosmopolitan. Small British terriers, whippets, Italian greyhounds, beagles, Native American dogs (like the “canoe dogs”), and probably some rustic German pinschers (which looked a lot like the Austrian pinscher) are in the background of these dogs. I have known people to cross in really game chihuahuas with their feists, and I’ve also know them to add cur-types and Norwegian elkhounds to their strains.
To the layperson, a feist looks a lot like a Jack Russell. That’s because the ancestral fox terrier is an important ancestor of the feist, and a Jack Russell is very similar to the ancestral fox terrier.
However, there are some differences. Feists typically do not have their tails docked. Jack Russells almost always do. Feists often have prick ears, but in Jack Russells, this is faulty.
Jack Russells are earth dogs, and they are often so game that they will go to ground after prey. Feists usually aren’t that game and are usually too large follow the prey down the burrow anyway. Some of the bigger feists approach 40 pounds in weight. Feists are usually used to tree game, usually squirrels, and bark like crazy when they have the animal in a tree. They can also be used as a flushing breed for grouse. However, grouse will not fly away from a very small feist. Typically, the feist will send the grouse into the trees, where it is unsportsmanlike to shoot them.
Feists are the terrier-type of the American frontier. They have an illustrious history, which you can read about here.
I have always been into feists, because I had a bench-legged feist for a few months. This dog had been found by relatives in Eastern North Carolina, and we mistook her for a large dachshund. It was only recently that I realized what she was. She had dewclaws on her hindlegs, a tawny coat with a white spot on the chest, and black mask.
She was quite dog aggressive when she first arrived. She hated my golden retriever, but my golden retriever had a way with other dogs. Within two weeks, she broke the feist of ever wanting to fight other dogs. Of course, the golden had nothing to fear from a 25 pound feist. She was more than twice the feist’s size, and she could run circles around her.
I have no idea how the golden retriever taught the feist how to get on with other dogs. I think her confident, gentle nature was infectious, and the feist just couldn’t resist it. She turned into a very playful dog.
However, we couldn’t keep her. She liked to chase cattle, and the neighbors had a small herd.
But she did find a good home where she was taken squirrel hunting every fall.
Now, we always thought she was a dachshund cross– maybe with basset.
However, I was perusing the various strains of feist and cur that can be found in the US. In parts of the coastal South, the feists are bench-legged, that is with short, crooked legs like you used to see in dachshunds. They also have more than a slight trace of hound in them, which gives them a dachshund-like appearance.
The feist landrace where I live are usually called treeing feists, mountain feists, and rat terriers. While the rat terrier is a standardized breed and has been for over a hundred years, the other two have only recently been separated. In fact, a lot of feist breeders mix and match strains, and recently, they’ve added Jack Russell to their dogs. The distinctions between the feist and rat terrier strains where I live are quite nebulous, and I’ve more than once called a dog a rat terrier, when its owners call it a feist, and vice versa.
In fact, the arrival of the Jack Russell to this part of the world has been rather momentous for the feist. It is something akin to the arrival of the golden retriever to the Upper Midwest, where the American water spaniel had long been the preferred retrieving breed. Lots of former feist owners have taken up Jack Russells. The Jack Russell can learn to tree squirrels in the same fashion. However, they are not natural trailers like some strains of feist are.
And they are a bit more dog aggressive. One would have hard time using Jack Russells in packs, but feists are used in packs regularly. Feists are traditionally occasionally used as bear dogs. They are very good at swarming the bear and making it run. And while I do know of a pack of Jack Russell bear dogs that also are used to catch pigs, most people who keep Jack Russells find them hard to keep in packs.
The Jack Russell, though, can double as an earth dog. And it’s just as good at ratting. They are also more uniform in appearance and temperament, and you know basically what you’re going to get in a litter. Further, JRT’s are popular dogs these days, as is keeping horses for pleasure. For some reason, people who keep horses also keep Jack Russells. This tradition may have come from British-style fox hunting, but I think it is more likely that the grain used to feed the horses always attracted rats. And a terrier is good thing to have when rats are around.
Jack Russells are game. In fact, the gamest dog I ever knew was my grandpa’s farm terrier, “Cabbage.” She was exiled to his house after proving to be a miserable suburban pet. She liked to kill things, and one day, she killed the neighbor’s cat. She was an excellent groundhog dog, squirrel dog, and “anything else” dog. He ran the Jack Russell with his beagle cross, and the two of them were a hunting duo whose exploits became legendary.
Once they got after a ground hog on the neighbor’s property, not far from his pasture where he kept cattle. He heard dogs barking, and thinking they were chasing his cows, he ran out to see what was going on. He discovered the beagle baying at the side of his barn near a pile of rocks. Cabbage was standing on top of the rock pile, yippiung with all her might.
When cleared the rock pile to see what they were barking at, he discovered a large groundhog. No soon had the animal in the rock pile been exposed, Cabbage leaped upon it. She grabbed the ten pound animal by the throat and within two minutes, the groundhog was dead. Now, that doesn’t seem too strange until you realize cabbage weighed only about 12 pounds.
Rat terriers and feists of that size might tree a groundhog or bay it up in the rock pile, but very few would launch such a daring attack and actually kill the animal. Even that old 30 pound beagle wasn’t brave enough for such a move.
These stories began to circulate, and it wasn’t long before, I noticed fewer and fewer feists at farm houses. And I noticed more and more Jack Russells. Further, feist/JRT crosses were becoming common as squirrel dogs.
So right now, I’m actually watching a breed or type replacement in my area. I hope the feists can withstand the pressure that the little earth dogs are putting on them. A feist is not a Jack Russell, and some people surely prefer the level of gameness in the feist to that of the Jack Russell. Further, the feist is more multipurpose, and it is easier to run as a trail dog. But Jack Russells have everyone beguiled these days. I hope that they don’t wind up replacing the feists.
Farley Mowat is one of the best nature writers I’ve ever read.
He is always the iconoclast, and I happen to have a soft spot for people who try to look at things from very different perspectives than those currently accepted as orthodoxy.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged small-eared dog, small-eared zorro, South American wild dogs on June 17, 2009|
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The answer to yesterday’s “Name the Species” is the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis). As far as I know, it is the only naturally occurring species of water dog. These animals have very webbed feet, which much more webbed than any domestic breed used in the water. One way to think of this animal is as a cross between an otter and a dog. It spends a lot of time in and near the water, and its diet includes lots of fish, frogs, and crabs.
Now it looks like a leggier version of the South American bush dog. However, its closest relative is the crab-eating fox(Cerdocyon thous). If the small-eared dog is the otter-dog, then the crab-eating fox is the mink-dog. It eats animals that appear along the banks of the rivers. In Venezuela, it is a creature of the Llanos, where it can be seen catching crabs in the floodplains.
Now the crab-eating fox is quite common. Native peoples know this animal well, and many have domesticated them and kept them as pets. South American wild dogs are closely related to the genus Canis and its allies, and the crab-eating fox is rumored to have crossed with a domestic dog. That’s far more likely than the a domestic dog crossing with a vulpine fox.
The short-eared dog, by contrast, is not well-known even by native peoples. It is not widely hunted, nor is it widely described in native folklore. Where it does exist, it exists at very low densities. As a result, we know very little about them.
The dogs give off a musky odor and can raise their hackles. The bitches are 1/3 larger than the dogs and do not have hackles or the musky odor. In all other dog species in existence, the bitches and vixens are smaller than the dogs.
What I find more interesting is that the short-eared dog can be rather short-haired. When nature creates a creature that can live in or near the water, evolution created a short-haired animal. This photo really shows the texture of the short-eared dog’s coat. Shorter hair is more practical in the water, for it doesn’t get bogged down, allowing the animal to swim more efficiently.
So the short-eared dog was the identity of the last “What is the species?” post.
And it didn’t hurt that wordpress automatically generated a link to an earlier post of mine that features a rare video of the short-eared dog.
South America has the greatest diversity of wild dogs species in the world, and it is really amazing how many unusual dogs can be found there. The short-eared dog is certainly one of them.
