The problem with two-faced dogs is that shit coming out of their mouth doesn't help you distinguish which face they're talking with.

Patrick Burns is a two-faced dog who is trying very hard to publicly convince his readers that he lives close to his moral code, but in the honesty of private communication he reveals his true contempt for divergent viewpoints, open dialogue, women, alpha males, libertarians, breeders, pitt bulls, vegans, and others.

It’s time to vote this fool out of the sandbox, he does not play well with others and is intellectually dishonest.

Patrick “I call myself Terrierman” Burns is Tolerant and Circumspect:

“I believe in balance and can co-exist with divergent viewpoints so long as both sides are represented”

Patrick “Wrong century, wrong country” Burns Lives Close to His Moral Code:

I came of age after birth control but before AIDS, after marijuana but before crack. I regret nothing, but I will say that I did enough in the late 1970s, that I rediscovered the virtues of living close to my own moral code which (oddly enough) does not have much in common with the late 1970s.

Patrick “I actually have invented my own immoral code” Burns Loves Jesus:

That said, I believe in the essential message of the New Testament, which is Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. I have not invented my own moral code.

Patrick Burns Hates Women, Ron Paul, Me, and Probably You Too:

From: Patrick Burns <siriusdogma@gmail.com>
Sent: Fri, September 11, 2009 6:41:46 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: 10,000 Thank You’s for SB 250

I wrote a pretty tough piece to pry of three or four lunatics at about the place you are now.   See >>http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2009/01/zombies-time-wasters-and-anonymous.html

One was a fellow who plunked down a few hundreds dollars for AKC border collies, never saw a sheep in his life, and then proceeded to say what was wrong with Don McCaig.  Such people exist.

Then I had a guy who got his first gun 10 years ago and became a gun nut.  No dog, no hunting.  Just a man who needs a piece to know he’s a man, and he rode in on every turn he could to explain his Ron-Paul like theology and why everyone should go to the mall fully strapped..

Then there’s “Mrs X”, the libertarian puppy mill breeder from Michigan or Wisconsin I think.  She’s a Ron Paul loony dirt bag.

I had a crazy broad show up who is Pit Bull breed blind.  According to her, a Pit Bull never bil anyone ever.  Right.  If you gave this lady a break stick, she’d think it was a marital aid.

Then there’s the guy who is a wannabe Tarzan.  For him, dogs are part of his he-man loin cloth persona. Hes got lot of dogs, but he hasn’t actually discovered what any one dog or one breed can really do.  He’s like the guy who buys an orchestra full of instruments at a pawn shop, and after a while can play Three Blind Mice on most of them.  Figure he knows now!

Then I have had a couple of vegans, a few show ring people, etc.  Not many for all of that, and I do not edit comments very much.  The trick is to shit-can the sticky tapes who only want to argue all the time.  I do not educate one-on-one.  That’s what books and Google and experience in the field are for.

I wrote this >> http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2009/01/zombies-time-wasters-and-anonymous.html to shake loose the sticky tapes.  Pretty harsh, but it works.

So too does asking people to actually do real research work, LOL.  Still waiting for someone to got through those pit bulls mortality reports.  No takers, because the evidence is pretty solid that NO dog is likely to kill you, but Pits are disproportonately owned by dick heads and a lot are still bred by dick head fighters.

You want to write the post on me blog re: the three dogs I put up tonight?  The top two are first-generation Boxers, the bottom is a modern American pit bull from a numbskull kennel.  The point is that boxers and pits and all the rest are all one things, just as Jack Russell terriers are, Parson Russells, and Russell Terriers.

YES, over time, some temperament problems do get smoothed out (you get what you breed for, and what you breed for depends on the person who is the breeder).

Patrick

Apparently living close to one’s moral code means calling people who read and comment on your blog ‘lunatics, zombies, time-wasters, nuts, puppy-millers, dirt bags, crazy broads, loin cloth Tarzan wannabes, sticky tapes, dick heads, and numbskulls.’ It’s also really classy when he basically tells a woman to go %&$#?@! herself with a break stick.

Patrick must have missed the day of kindergarten when three year olds learned how to disagree without being disagreeable.  Jesus would not be proud.

If you need to invoke the "Dunning-Kruger effect" to win an argument, you're probably an idiot in denial.

Patrick Burns, the self-proclaimed “terrierman,” has a poor track record of actually reading the studies he refers to in his posts.  His proclamations are often unsupported by the actual source material and at times directly contradicted.  If you point this out to him, you get labeled a “zombie” and your comments are no longer welcome.

His current favorite weapon is invoking the Dunning-Kruger effect, but as is his custom, he clearly hasn’t read the actual study which defined the effect because he horribly misdefines it:

The Dunning-Kruger Effect means the least competent and least experienced are often the most certain they are right, and that they are also quite certain they doing a better-than-average job at most of the tasks they are doing.

What’s that mean for dogs?

Well, for one, it means the least competent breeders are often the ones who are most certain they are quite excellent.
Conversely, the most competent and most knowledgeable dog men and dog women are often filled with self-doubt to the point they may go a lifetime without breeding a litter.

-Patrick Burns, empty vessel

The paper published by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in no way supports these statements by Patrick.  None of their experiments or those that followed have demonstrated that the “least competent and least experienced are often the most certain they are right” and his implied converse that the most competent are the least certain.  Patrick is proposing a negative correlation between performance and perception, yet the Kruger and Dunning study actually showed a clear and conclusive positive correlation between performance and perception.

The best think they are the best, the worst think they are the worst.

This chart from the actual study in no way shows that the most incompetent are the most confident. In fact, the least competent judged their abilities at the bottom of the perceived ability range and the most competent perceived their abilities at the top of the range.  What the data shows is that the least competent overestimated their ability, and the most confident underestimated their ability.  But at no point did any performance group surpass the self-assessment of another group who performed better.

It’s clearly not the case that the worst thought themselves the best and the best were wracked with insecurity.

Here is an excellent analysis of the often misunderstood and misrepresented Kruger and Dunning study:

As you can see, the findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are. People who perform worst at a task tend to think they’re god’s gift to said task, and the people who can actually do said task often display excessive modesty. I suspect we find this sort of explanation compelling because it appeals to our implicit just-world theories: we’d like to believe that people who obnoxiously proclaim their excellence at X, Y, and Z must really not be so very good at X, Y, and Z at all, and must be (over)compensating for some actual deficiency; it’s much less pleasant to imagine that people who go around shoving their (alleged) superiority in our faces might really be better than us at what they do.

Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn’t show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people.

…

The critical point to note is that there’s a clear positive correlation between actual performance (green line) and perceived performance (red line): the people in the top quartile for actual performance think they perform better than the people in the second quartile, who in turn think they perform better than the people in the third quartile, and so on. So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good. (It’s important to note that Dunning and Kruger never claimed to show that the unskilled think they’re better than the skilled; that’s just the way the finding is often interpreted by others.)

Patrick–and many other internet tough guys–likes this bogus interpretation because it’s a logic trap that he can use to bash opponents when he lacks evidence and persuasion. ‘I can’t defeat your argument with sound reason, so I will declare that you are confident and by misapplying Kruger and Dunning’s findings, I shall say that those who are confident are wrong, and since you are confident, therefore you must be wrong!’  This presents a Catch-22 to the accused, where a confident and correct rebuttal is simply brushed off as a symptom of the “Dunning-Kruger effect.”  Nevermind that in accusing others of being victims of Dunning-Kruger, Patrick is simultaneously being overly confident in his remote diagnosis and thus by his own logic would be a victim of Dunning-Kruger as well: a perfect example of Orwellian doublethink.

Given how very different the actual findings in the paper by Kruger and Dunning are from the misapplied “Dunning-Kruger effect” it’s safe to assume that anyone using the “effect” to win an argument has in fact lost by default.  Not only does the D-K trap require the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (If people are wrong, they are confident. You are confident, therefore you are wrong.), it also begins with the demonstrably false implication that those who are least correct are the most confident and those who are most correct are the least confident.  If you start with a provably false statement, and then attempt formal logic, you can prove anything that is false to be true.

So Patrick, have you confessed to your readers that you’re a hack yet?

Note that the naming of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” is not so much established by peer reviewed articles but by the blogosphere and opinion pieces in the New York Times who regularly misinterpret what was actually found.  The “cite a source” obsessed monkeys on Wikipedia had trouble finding even one published paper that used the term, but one can find tens of thousands of blogs using the “effect” incorrectly.

And before we enshrine David Dunning as future Nobel Prize winner (he has won the Ig Nobel Prize for this work), I’ll leave you with a quote of his from the NYT interview and see if you can spot the irony:

DAVID DUNNING: If you look at our 1999 article, we measured skills where we had the right answers. Grammar, logic. And our test-subjects were all college students doing college student-type things. Presumably, they also should know whether or not they’re getting the right answers. And yet, we had these students who were doing badly in grammar, who didn’t know they were doing badly in grammar. We believed that they should know they were doing badly, and when they didn’t, that really surprised us.

Poor word choice for someone whose work involved grading people’s ability to spot grammar mistakes. It would have been advisable to avoid the technically correct “badly” and instead use “poorly” and avoid reinforcing the common “bad” vs. “badly” mistake.

Terrierman doesn't know much about rats.

Patrick “I didn’t actually read the study I linked to…again” Burns recently posted a vapid comparison of dog population genetics to that of island rats.  His summary of the study is a complete fabrication that doesn’t reflect in any way what was looked at or concluded in the actual study.

Since he’s prone to editing his posts after the fact, here is the relevant section:

Imagine a pregnant rat jumps ship on to a large island that is 200 square miles in size.  The population of rats multiplies very rapidly but without any apparent long term problems due to inbreeding.  How is that possible?  Answer:  With rats, massive population numbers within a short period of time are possible, and a mid-sized island of 200 square miles (over 259,000 acres) can easily hold a million rats.  In this situation, genetic drift and mutation will eventually result in a population with little or no obvious genetic dysfunction.  On an island with 1,000,000 rats, in which each rat lives for a year or so, a 100-year old population of theoretically “inbred” rats will have very low coefficients of inbreeding, no inbreeding depression, and no discernible early mortality due to genetic weakness.  To be clear, this is not a theory; rats have colonized almost every island in the world exactly this way.

He tells us that the study describes his scenario EXACTLY.  But the study does no such thing.

First, the Rat study looks at a very small island:

We sampled and genotyped most individuals of a Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) reinvasion on Moturemu island (5 ha) in New Zealand.

5 hectares is about 2 one-hundredths (0.019) of a square mile, not 200 square miles.  Patrick botched the math by a factor of 10,000.

Second, the study looked at a total population of only 30 rats on the entire island:

Population size was most likely between 30 and 33 rats.

30 rats is nowhere near the 1,000,000 rats Patrick is hallucinating.  He botched this one by a factor of over 33,000.  Even if we consider his suggested density of 5,000 rats per square mile, that equates to 19.3 rats per hectare.  This study found a population of 6 rats per hectare.

Overall, our estimatesof reproductive success suggested the population was stable or declining, possibly as a result of density dependence after reaching carrying capacity. Density dependence plays an important role regulatinginvasive rat populations at the breeding level (Efford et al. 2006), however, survival rates of offspring and adults are likely to be high given the absence of predators on the island and abundant food resources following the previous rat eradication.

Given that the population was stable or declining and the conditions for survival were good, the rat population here as likely at a stable equilibrium point.

Despite the apparently increasing inbreeding the population of invading rats had still reached a high density and probably the carrying capacity of the island.

Third, the study does not support a very rapid expansion of population in the manner Patrick is suggesting.  Rats certainly have the potential, but we don’t see that being exploited here.

In high-density populations Norway rats can breed rapidly and, although not always, in all seasons, with a gestation period of 21–24 days and average litter sizes of 6–8 (Innes 2005). They have a life expectancy of 1–2 years in the wild

The population increased from perhaps as small as one pregnant female to 30 individuals over 2 years and appears to have petered out at that level.

After the Norway rats and mice were initially eradicated off of the island in 1992, several further eradications took place:

In order to prevent reinvasion poison bait stations were established and the island was monitored annually. The island remained rat free until February 1999, when rat sign was detected. A contingency response using traps and poison to confirm presence apparently resulted in eradication, although no bodies were recovered. No further sign was detected until April 2002, when a new population was confirmed on the island 10 years after the first eradication.  Therefore, it is likely that a new population became established in 2002, and 2 years later the eradication effort provided an opportunity to study invasion dynamics.

A new eradication was conducted in May 2004, providing us with a single opportunity to sample most individuals from an approximately 2 year old invasion of a small island.

Fourth, this observation also completely invalidates Patrick’s claim that the study was looking at “long term problems due to inbreeding.”  The title of the study is “Early colonisation population structure of a Norway rat island invasion;” note the use of the words “Early” colonization, and “population structure.”  The study looked at animals after only 2 years of assumed isolation and it analysed population structure, not inbred disease specifically.  This is neither long term, nor inbred disease analysis.

Breeding was most likely seasonal but breeding cessation may also have been linked to density dependence or increased inbreeding.  However, genetic effects on population demography usually only have long-term consequences on population persistence, and inbreeding is not likely once established beyond a certain size (Jamieson et al. 2007).

Fifth, it’s worth noting what the study did not look at.  It did not measure the individual health of the rats, it did not study the mortality rate or the fertility rate, and it didn’t even manage to compare the homozygosity levels of the island rats with a likely source population on the landmass near the island.

In order to obtain samples from the putative source population, trapping programmes were also conducted at three different sites on the surrounding mainland for a total of 400 trap nights. This resulted in the capture of 4 ship rats and 14 mice but no Norway rats were obtained, consistent with their rarity outside offshore islands.

So, long story short, there’s nothing in this study that contradicts anything I’ve written about inbreeding and population genetics as Patrick implies, and everything in the study contradicts or fails to support Patrick’s fantasy scenario.  I know he didn’t read the study, but I doubt he even read the abstract.  That, or the old-timers is kicking in.  He is clearly unburdened by facts and unhampered with reason.

Some people take the line that life is sacred and untouchable and that to even use animals is sinful. Many vegans are like this. I think they are crazy.

Other people have a more nuanced view of which animals can be hunted for food, for sport, and which are elevated to a higher status like pets. It would take a tome to decipher the various views and taboos and I’m not sure if any wide sweeping moral ethic would fit my views or the views of anyone.

For that matter, I don’t think a single moral code can be employed by even the strictest fundamentalist. If ALL life is sacred, how do they justify eating vegetables? And how can they justify their own immune systems killing off bacteria and viruses? The line has to be drawn somewhere, as it is impossible to live without something else dying.

Given that amazing amount of waffling, I find the following video rather disturbing. It depicts a handful of apparently modestly skilled hunters participating in a canned hunt for a male Lion. Their demeanor suggests that they don’t have a lot of strategy or preparation, there are multiple shooters standing in close proximity to each other and in each other’s lines of sight to the target. I think it’s a canned hunt because you can see what appears to be fence posts with wire fencing in the area, and no apparent vehicle which would be required if these fellows had to search the great open spaces to find a lion.

The fact that the South African and Colorado hunting companies advertise at the end of the video also leaves little doubt that this is a less than “organic” hunting experience.

Frankly, I don’t find the hunting of lions and elephants within my zone of comfort. I certainly would never do it, and I think the case that it should be banned wins out over hunting freedom.

When I watch that video, I have to ask, would I have cared if the Lion had ripped that hunter’s throat out? No, not really. That’s the risk you take when you go to the Lion’s house with your gun and are not that great of a shot, even up close. And hey, you’re there to kill the Lion, you’re going to get no sympathy from me if it kills you first.

These idiots don’t deserve a high-five for their efforts, the video clearly shows who is the better hunter and the higher species. I’m actually amazed that given their circular firing squad that none of the hunters got shot themselves. While there is more sport here than people who shoot from a sniper stand on the back of their trucks a mile or so away, it’s still not a fair game and I’d say that the outcome is highly unsatisfactory.

Speaking of unsatisfactory outcomes and animal death, someone forgot to tell Patrick that the election is over and he can stop his snotty mocking of Sarah Palin, especially over “Turkeygate.”

What exactly is the problem here worthy of blame? Palin didn’t slaughter the turkey, she was at the farm for the exact opposite reason, the customary “pardoning” of a turkey. And she’s an admitted hunter, outdoors woman, and unrepentant meat eater, so there isn’t any hypocrisy involved.

The scandal is clearly a set up by the media who framed the shot and adjusted the depth of field and focus to keep the slaughter in large crisp detail right next to Palin’s face while they asked her boring and irrelevant questions just to keep her there long enough for the deed to happen, twice. They clearly had an agenda to tie Palin with the slaughter and get footage of them in the same frame. But Patrick likes to blame the victim.

This is clearly some red meat for the Vegan/PeTA faction, and the other animal welfare folks. If we filmed Barack Obama giving a speech infront of an abortion clinic and you could see a fetus being sucked out of a woman and killed through the window, the “scandal” wouldn’t be about Obama, it’d be about the vile media constructing a shot to score points.

Where does Patrick and the other Obamatons think all that meat for Thanksgiving comes from? A nine-year-old was once at my house and asked me who hung all the apples on the tree in my back yard and why would they do that. The idiot didn’t know where apples came from. Do Democrats not understand where turkey comes from and that someone has to kill it, drain it, gut it, pluck it, wash it, and butcher it before it comes in those vacuum sealed bags in the grocery store?

What makes this incredibly stupid is that Patrick is a man how sends his dogs down holes to harass and kill wild animals for fun. He posts pictures of his exploits on his blog and those pictures include slightly bloody dead animals that he or his dogs have just dispatched. And he can’t stand to see some Turkeys humanely killed in proximity to Sarah Palin?

Only a jerk would go “super nova” over Sarah Palin merely being filmed at a Turkey farm when he himself actually kills animals every weekend and brags about it on his blog, for fun. And to boot, Patrick wants us all to know more about the historic dying art of terrier work, mostly because we’re too modern and antiseptic to recall days when rats ran through the streets and our homes and our food and had to be dispatched by nasty little dogs. Does it really make sense for Mr. Down-to-Earth Outdoorsy Rat Hunter to be appaled with the perfectly natural killing of a turkey or two, for food?

Being a Director of Communications, I guess Patrick likes media spin and distorting facts to create a message at all costs. In his comments he suggests that it’s a stupid move because Palin didn’t manipulate the media or prevent them from manipulating the situation and that it’s better that people don’t see things like turkey slaughter, especially near politicians who have to craft bullshit images pretending to be whatever is unoffensive and polls well. No surprise he voted for Obama.

If you want a manufactured image of a fawning media, believe what they say about Obama and go “super nova” over hunters being filmed near dead turkeys. Although Patrick couldn’t stomach including my comment, this one sums it up pretty well:

The Palin video serves as a litmus test to determine which omnivores can deal with where their meat comes from and which cannot–that’s how I see it.

Say what you like about Gov. Palin’s politics, she is someone who knows where the meat on her plate comes from.

Poultry raisers know that the cone works well to calm and hold the bird before its throat is cut.

This interview will probably turn out to have been filmed at the organic turkey farm favored by Anchorage yuppies.

- Chas Clifton

In other words, it’s only a scandal if you’re a sheeple who doesn’t know where your food comes from and would prefer being lied to rather than down to earth honesty. Patrick thinks Palin isn’t ready for prime-time, and perhaps he’s right that she and every other Republican has proven ineffective at being heard over the media spin. But I’m confident she’s ready for game time. She, unlike Obama, actually has a record of reform, of bipartisanship, and of delivering the goods. People like Patrick hate her for it, but again, he prefers the appearance of competence instead of the actual proof.

Funny that he hates dog shows so much, he’d make a perfect spokesman for the industry.

Once there lived and existed a great learned man with a beard almost as long as God’s. And one day the people came to this man and said ‘Go to the Lord, and tell him of our misery.’ ‘I will go,’ said the man. So he caught a great bubble, and sat down on top of it, and flew up and up until he pierced the heaven above us. And there he saw God and told him of our misery and God pardoned our sins and lightened our burdens. Then the great bearded man came down from the heavens and the people were happy. And for this, the authorities and the Tsar made this man a very great scientist.

Dmitri Mendeleev ponders the perfect Vodka.
(thanks to my elite Photoshop skills and a painting by Ilya Repin)

Patrick Burns posted a challenge on his blog to discuss the etymological ramifications of the Russian word “Razvodit” which means both “to breed” and “to dilute.” As a logophile, verbivore, and lover of etymology; how could I resist?

I’m sure Patrick is eager for a piece that discusses show breeding’s uncanny ability to dilute the original talents of a dog breed until they are either no longer extant or so watered down as to be a joke. But he’s already written that piece several times, so I’ll venture to talk about something else, namely: vodka. Don’t worry, I’ll get to dogs later.

The verb vodit’, razvodit’ (водить, разводить) which gives us “breed” and “dilute” also gives us Vodka. An early use of the word vodka comes from a pharmaceutical text discussing various tinctures and spirits used for medical applications, dilutions of various curatives in water and grain alcohol.

While saving lives is all well and good, the real success of Vodka is that it gets you drunk. The drink is believed to have originated in the bread basket region of Central Europe known for grain production that stretches through modern day Poland – Belarus – Lithuania – Ukraine – and western Russia. Etymology of languages from this region suggests that Vodka wasn’t always the drink of choice for wimpy college girls who didn’t want to taste the booze in their cocktails.

Peoples in the area of vodka’s probable origin have names for vodka with roots meaning “to burn”: Polish: gorzałka; Ukrainian: горілка, horilka; Belarusian: гарэлка, harelka; Lithuanian: degtinė (prior purification of Lithuanian language Belarusian loanword arielka was used); Latvian: degvīns; Finnish: paloviina; Danish; brændevin; Swedish: brännvin; Norwegian: Brennevin (although the Swedish and Norwegian terms refer to any strong alcoholic beverage); in Russian during 17th and 18th century горящее вино (goryashchee vino, “burning wine”) was widely used.

In other words, it was rather unpleasant and unrefined stuff that supposedly puts hair on your chest and turns many a newcomer in to a gasping fire breather. While it might not have taken a genius to figure out that if you water the stuff down a little bit it might not be so caustic, in the case of Vodka, it did take a genius. That’s where Dimitri Mendeleev comes in.

You’ll remember Mr. Mendeleev from such high school lectures as “the guy who developed the periodic table,” or “the guy who invented smokeless powder,” or even “the guy who postulated that oil doesn’t come from fossils at all,” but I doubt you were ever given the lecture about Dimitri Mendeleev, the man who brought Vodka to the world. Well, your school sucked.

Dr. LaRue, my high school CP and AP chemistry teacher (and the AP coordinator for the most successful AP school in a thousand mile radius) was quite the party animal in college. His graduate biochem lab hosted the best parties on or off campus because young Mr. LaRue and his classmates had access to untainted 200 proof alcohol. Coeds these days might enjoy a little “rectified spirit” or Everclear in their Orange Juice, but in the good old days on dry campuses in states with Blue Laws, the pure and unadulterated (non-denatured) ethanol was the best, and typically the only way to get your grad school groove on.

You see, pure alcohol has many uses both industrial and scientific, and to keep the workers sober, it’s a universal practice to “denature” pure ethanol with nasty and carcinogenic toxins to render it unfit for consumption (benzene, methanol, jet fuel). My guess is that there was probably a little bit of political pressure from the booze industry as well. Although the word denature has a specific scientific meaning, its use here simply means to remove the natural urge to drink it.

The additives also prevent the ethanol from spoiling. You see, pure ethanol is parched, dehydrated, and in search of any moisture it can get. It will even pull it right out of the air. So, to keep the industrial ethanol pure and effective, the additives hinder its ability to draw moisture out of the air. That property of pure ethanol is also the reason that Chemistry and Biology grad students have access to bountiful amounts of ethanol. They need pure ethanol for their labs, so the tainted stuff won’t work, but it also goes bad as the ethanol draws moisture out of the air and thus becomes unreliable as having a stable concentration of ethanol.

Well, instead of throwing it out, why not drink it?!

And that’s just what Mr. LaRue and Mendeleev did. The addition of water to the ethanol is what made it bad for science, but perfect for drinking. The question becomes, when you’re all out of juice for mixers (and who keeps such things in the lab anyway), what is the perfect ratio of ethanol to water to take the fire out of firewater but still leave you feeling warm and fuzzy inside?

The most all penetrating spirit before which will open the possibility of tilting not tables, but planets, is the spirit of free human inquiry. Believe only in that.
- Dmitri

And by spirit, Dmitri meant booze. Being the genius that he was, Mendeleev wasted no time in finding the solution and put his late night table-tilting parties in the lab and marathon of taste testing dilutions of booze to good use. So as not to detract from his studies, Dmitri made booze his study, and turned his little project into his Doctoral dissertation. In 1866, he published his dissertation “On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol,” and was awarded the title of Doctor of Science and Professor of Chemistry at the University in St. Petersburg.

“His research findings were expansive and beneficial to the Russian people.”

You bet they were. And his findings were also expansive to his waistline and beneficial to his notoriety in all the best bars in St. Petersburg. But his fame was not so beneficial to his first marriage and Dmitri ditched his first wife to lust after the pubescent friend of his niece, eventually marrying her against the doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church and condemning his soul to eternal damnation. But it worked for the two of them and they drank much vodka and had hot monkey sex and she bore him many children.

Dmitri became uber-famous and a national hero when his vodka-induced visions led to his ordering of the known elements into a table based upon the periodic nature of their properties and reactive natures based upon their atomic mass. Brilliant insight, although he probably would have made the final leap from atomic mass to today’s ordering by atomic number if he weren’t so damn drunk. No matter, it didn’t change anything, and Dmitri’s ability to not only predict the future but order the past earned him well deserved fame.

In order to clarify the matter further, I wish to draw some conclusions as to the chemical and physical properties of those elements which have not been placed in the system and which are still undiscovered but whose discovery is very probable. I think that until now we have not had any chance to foresee the absence of these or other elements, because we have had no order for their arrangement, and even less have we had occasion to predict the properties of such elements. An established system is limited by its order of known or discovered elements.
- Dmitri

Dmitri eventually ditched academia and took up a job on the government payroll, directing the Bureau of Weights and Measures. Like all good bureaucrats, Dmitri didn’t have much to do and a lot of time to do it in, so he turned his considerable talents once again to vodka. This time, he was going to prove that his preferred mixture of water and ethanol was the best, so he applied cutting edge chemistry to the task. Based upon the physical properties of the ethyl alcohol molecule, Mendeleev discovered that one molecule of ethyl alcohol shepherded on either end by one molecule of water (2 waters to 1 ethyl alcohol) made for the perfect vodka experience.

There was just enough water to prevent the ethyl molecule from robbing moisture from your mouth or stomach (creating the burn) and not too much as to waste precious space in the bottle, glass, and stomach with excess water. By volume, the mixture works out to be 62% water and 38% alcohol. At strengths less than this, vodka will taste watery, and in higher concentrations it will burn.

There exists everywhere a medium in things, determined by equilibrium. The Russian proverb says, ‘Too much salt or too little salt is alike an evil.’ It is the same in political and social relations… It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man – social and political – and to the entire universe as a whole.
- Dmitri

Dmitri’s formula didn’t solve the social and political problems in the entire Universe, nor even in Russia (the Vodka Wars are still going strong), but his work was so convincing that Tsar Alexander III instituted Russian Standards for Vodka Production based on the research and the new era of drinkable Vodka was ushered in. Almost every bottle of Vodka you can find in on store shelves today that is meant to be consumed neat will be sold at 40% alcohol by volume or 80 proof. The slight rounding has to do with ease of taxation (spirits are taxed based upon strength) and not on the actual mixture in the bottle.

Dmitri’s final words to his students upon his retirement from the University in no small way resemble the effects one gains when drinking Vodka in the perfect concentration:

I have achieved an inner freedom. There is nothing in this world that I fear to say. No one nor anything can silence me. This is a good feeling. This is the feeling of a man. I want you to have this feeling too – it is my moral responsibility to help you achieve this inner freedom. I am an evolutionist of a peaceable type. Proceed in a logical and systematic manner.
- Dmitri Mendeleev

So by bringing the perfect Vodka to the impoverished and downtrodden masses in Russia, Mendeleev did see God vodka while perched on a bubble (hik!) and told Him it of their misery. And in bars and homes everywhere across Russia and the world, God vodka is pardoning sins and lightening burdens.

Then the great bearded man came down from the heavens and the people were happy.

Try calling up a local rescue group and asking about a responsible breeder. Try finding a rescue group that has a link to one. Rescue groups build their philosophy around the ethic of waste not, want not. They recycle dogs and prevent (almost) perfectly good lives from being lost.

It is, however, also ethical and beneficial to breed quality animals, give them quality socialization, and find them quality homes. That last one is often more difficult than the first two, despite the the first two being difficult enough. And it is in the last task that breeders might take some notes from rescue groups.

Selling puppies is much easier than selling dogs. So it’s not a matter of sales technique that breeders can gain from rescuers, but of un-selling technique. Even more crucial, in spotting and not selling to a home that is unprepared for the challenge.

But from what I can tell, the rescue groups overlap to a degree with the “selling dogs is evil” crowd and some rescues are run by crazies. This isn’t fertile middle ground to meet responsible breeders on.

For working breeds like Border Collies, I also question the logic in breeders sending unsophisticated buyers to rescue groups said breeders don’t know much about. On average are new buyers really equipped to rehabilitate a high maintenance breed that’s already been rejected and possibly “ruined” by its previous owner? What if the rescue group is heavy with dogs and their standards for placement are lax? Not that those buyers would be better off with a puppy in the same circumstance, they’re likely to be the self-same buyers who “ruin” the dogs and ditch them in a shelter or rescue or return them to breeders.

Almost all of said dogs can be fixed by the right foster home and those dogs make excellent first dogs for new owners because they have been trained and have outgrown puppy issues. This is more a function of the right foster home and not of breed rescue as a whole though. Some rehab, others just collect.

I’m not sure more advertising for rescue, particularly from breeders, is what is needed. Social networking sites are abuzz with pro-rescue rhetoric and links. Craig’s List allows infinite rescue dog posts and shady “rehoming fee” posts, but not a single legitimate post from a real honest breeder is allowed due to the pinko stigma against money and the concept that animals should not be owned, thus they should not be sold. If anything, good honest breeders who spend more time and effort producing good dogs than they do advertising themselves need more Internet support.

I think that’s another message that Breeders can learn from Rescue: it’s critical to emphasize the morality of what they do.

A failing of both groups is their limitless love for animal life. They place mere living above living well. Sometimes dogs need to be put down. I don’t think people so wrapped up in Rescue and Breeding appreciate that. I’ve seen breeders sell puppies that were so inbred that their litter mates all died of an untreatable disease, but since one odd puppy or two didn’t show up a carrier or affected for THAT disease, they must be otherwise healthy, right? I’ve also seen a foster family take in a devil dog that scarred the family’s other pets as well as the rescuer’s view on animals in general. The dog was handed off to another taker, left to bring a bad name to the breed and cause more damage.

There’s one other point that I think is worth mentioning. It’s not (only) breeding that is the problem, it’s owners breaking their bond with their animals.

Good breed rescue is keenly aware that it’s the ownership, not just the breeding, that leads to most animals being sent to shelters. While their practices are sometimes draconian and nannying, it’s only because many relinquishers need to be nannied and potential new homes are most successful if rescue groups can weed out those likely to ditch even a dog they rescued.

According to “Exploring the Surplus Cat and Dog Problem” the top reasons for relinquished dogs (ignoring animals relinquished simply for age or end-stage disease where the human-dog bond is not betrayed) are:

1. Moving
2. Landlord issues
3. Cost of pet maintenance
4. No time for pet
5. Inadequate facilities
6. Too many pets in home
7. Pet illness
8. Personal problems
9. Biting
10. No homes for litter mates

This explains why informed rescue comes off as tedious and micromanaging. The first nine reasons all deal with people who don’t or can’t appropriately provide for an animal. Only number 10 deals with a breeder issue, and I don’t think I’d be wrong to conclude that most if not all of those abandoned litter mates come from mistaken breedings or people breeding for a reason other than selling.

The Border Collie Rescue site posts an interesting statistic:

Roughly a quarter of Border Collies entering rescue (though this varies with the region) are those that have not displayed strong enough herding instincts to make themselves efficient herding dogs on working farms. Rather than trying to work against the natural abilities (or inabilities) of the dog, the working family gives the dog over to rescue so that it can be placed in a more appropriate, pet home.
- BC Rescue, Do I really want a Border Collie?

I wonder how many dogs come from conformation breeders or dog sport breeders, and if they are, en masse or per capita, less likely to have the puppies they produce turned over to shelters.

Lastly, a point that is probably over emphasized but still worth mentioning. There are rescuers who run their homes very much like the “sanctuary” managed by the League Against Cruel Sports Patrick has written about. Too many dogs, not enough time and good intentions that lead to fetid conditions. If hunting is an effective solution to excess deer populations, why can’t euthanasia be an effective solution to excess dog populations?