Posted in Absolute Piffle, wildlife, tagged lion meat on June 24, 2010| 12 Comments »
And I thought they ate strange things at West Virginia critter dinners.
I bet these burgers are mostly beef.
I guarantee you that lion meat on its own isn’t going to be all that palatable.
Posted in animal welfare, dog breeding, purebred dogs, wildlife, tagged elephant seal, Northern elephant seal, purebred dogs, Southern elephant seal on June 24, 2010| 9 Comments »
In both northern and southern elephant seals, only a few males produce offspring ever year. The bulls lay claim to a stretch of beach and then claim as many cows as possible.
And yes, it really must suck to be a cow elephant seal. During this time of her life, she continually being herded by males much larger than she is. And never mind the mechanics of their reproduction. She is a large seal, but she is significantly smaller than the male.
If you’re an elephant seal bull, you must be big and nasty if you are to reproduce. Only one in ten males manages to reproduce. That is an astoundingly low number:
These selective pressures on the elephant seal species have resulted in a favoring of bull seals that are the equivalent of the most-used sire effect in many breeds of purebred dog.
The northern elephant seal nearly went extinct. Its population may have dropped to only 100 individuals. Today, there are 100,000 northern elephant seals, and because of their particular breeding arrangement, very few males pass on their genes every generation.
It is very similar to what has happened in many purebred dogs, and I’m sure that some will suggest that if the northern elephant seals are able to have a healthy population, then it should be okay to breed dogs in this fashion.
The problem with that logic is that we actually don’t know the full consequences of the extreme genetic bottleneck on the northern elephant seal. Because they lack genetic variation, it is possible that an epidemic or even a slight environmental change could prove disastrous for the seals. In normal populations, genetic diversity means that some animals will have some resistance to potential changes in the environment or infectious disease. However, if all the seals are genetically quite similar, they may all be similarly susceptible to these problems, which means they could all die off.
Again, the fact that it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean that it can’t.
The other thing is elephant seals are under the pressures of natural selection. Dogs really aren’t. Really defective seals don’t live very long. They wind up in the bellies of orcas or great whites. Truly defective elephant seals don’t reproduce. With dogs, we can continue to select for defect, intentionally or unintentionally. We can select for a whole range of disorders and not even know it until a third the dogs in any given breed have them. (That is only slight hyperbole.)
One of the delusions we have is that we think we can just selectively breed out disease without actually realizing that we’re dealing with a dynamic genome. I’m not in favor of breeding dogs with disease. Don’t get me wrong.
But unless we look at the whole system that leads to an accumulation of these diseases, we are doomed to failure. It is quite literally little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to think we can just cull for this disease or that one and not realize that the problem is much more systemic than peculiar.
Nature has done what it can to save northern elephant seals. Considering how these animals breed, I would certainly have wanted to have started with a larger founding population than 100 to 1,000 individuals.
But we didn’t get that choice.
With dogs, we have that opportunity, but it remains denied to us, simply because we cannot change our thinking.
As I’ve said before, the human ego is probably the most destructive part of the relationship between man and dog.
We are the so-called rational species, and in this relationship, we’re supposed to be the responsible ones.
But for all of our intelligence, we have failed our dogs.
And it’s something we need to think about.
Posted in Absolute Piffle, trivia, wildlife, tagged lemming, lemming suicide myth on June 24, 2010| 4 Comments »
Yep. It’s just not true. It was staged for TV. Blame Walt Disney.
I guess we’re a bunch of lemmings for believing this hoax and then allowing it to enter our public discourse.
It is now an idiom– an idiom based upon a fallacy.
Posted in animal welfare, Politics, wildlife on June 23, 2010| 5 Comments »
The brown pelican in this clip is very hard to watch.
I grew up spending a week or two of the summer on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I used to spend a lot of time walking on the beach looking for things.
Brown pelicans are kind of like the flying galleons of the seabird world. They glide through the air with a kind of graceful majesty one would not expect from such strange looking birds.
But what brown pelicans are best known for is their unusual predatory behavior.
Unlike any other species of pelican, they dive.
I have no idea what the full effects of the BP oil well disaster are going to be.
All I know is that it won’t be good for just about every living thing that relies upon the Gulf’s waters for survival. In fact, it’s going to very bad for just about everything that relies upon the North Atlantic.
The birds are going to suffer, just as the shrimp, oysters, and fish are.
People’s livelihoods are simply gone.
I don’t know how much this disaster will affect the numbers of brown pelicans living along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, but my guess is that I will see fewer of these birds diving into the surf after fish when I see the Outer Banks again.
And I can’t help but feel a little remorse at the loss.
Why couldn’t we have a different energy policy?
Why couldn’t we be smart about something?
We can blame Obama, Bush and Cheney, BP, and everyone else.
But maybe we should look at ourselves for just a moment.
Why did we allow ourselves to become so dependent upon oil?
Oil feeds and sustains us.
But it also can kill us.
We have made a bargain with the devil, but just as Faust found out, those bargains never turn out as we expected.
Maybe we’ll grow up.
Maybe we’ll expect more.
If we feel sad or angry about this, we should let it inform our actions.
Things must be changed.
But they won’t change unless we do something.
Don’t look for leadership. Leadership can never solve this problem.
This change must come from us.
That’s what’s going to be so hard.
Posted in Absolute Piffle on June 23, 2010| 1 Comment »
This is pretty good.
Posted in wildlife, tagged skunk spray, striped skunk on June 23, 2010|
I was collateral damage in an skunk spraying once.
It was not a pleasant experience.
I had a dog that reveled in killing skunks, and one night she grabbed one just as I was passing by.
Some dogs just don’t care about the spraying. They’ll kill the skunk anyway.
These dogs are pretty rare.
Posted in wild dogs, tagged birds, New Zealand birds, Sir David Attenborough on June 23, 2010|
This is what happens when you evolve in the absence of mammalian predators. You aren’t scared of things that can easily kill you.
Posted in wildlife, tagged bobwhite, New world quail on June 23, 2010| 6 Comments »
This is a rooster:
The description to this video said the bobwhite actually came in the house.
That means that this was a captive-reared bird.
Bobwhites have been bred in captivity for so long that they’ve become tamer than any domestic fowl. They also come in several color and size varieties. Some of the larger sizes appear to be bred for table fare only. (The so-called “jumbo” varieties.)
I have never seen a wild one in West Virginia.
They once were common, but the land no longer can support what is essentially a species that is more at home in the farm fields than dense woodland.
Releasing tame bobwhites into the wild actually doesn’t help much.
All it does is ring the dinner bell for every predator within a ten mile radius.
If they don’t know how to hide from hawks, then all you’re going to have in the end are some rather well-fed raptors.
Bobwhites naturally pair off in the breeding season, but they also travel in groups called coveys. The coveys tend to use the same roosts every night.
Foxes and raccoons are not stupid animals. They catch onto this very quickly.
And it would be one thing if they roosted in trees, but they don’t.
They roost on the ground in a circle. Their tails all point to the center of the circle, and their heads point outward. If they are disturbed, the birds will scatter in all directions. That way, if a predator grabs one, the others will have gone in so many different directions that the predator won’t be able to track them down.
But all of this works nicely in agricultural land.
It doesn’t work in forests that are full of lower and mid-level predators.
When the habitat is gone, turning loose tame bobwhites is a futile exercise.
They simply won’t last.
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