From this charming thread, Sumerian proverbs about dogs.

"The dog understands, 'Take it!' It does not understand 'Put it down!'"

Corpus.

The evolution of dogs' expressive eyes

Indo-European dog and wolf sacrifice traditions: linguistic and literary sources now supplemented by archaeology? This speculation strikes me as very weak sauce scientifically, but it's intriguing and certainly quite romantic.

HT: LanguageHat

Dogs poop in alignment with the earth's magnetic field

Did the Nazis try to train dogs to talk? If this piece were dated April 1, I'd be very suspicious, and I still am rather. But they were crazy buggers, and even if it's not true, there are some great lines in the article:

"...attempted to build an army of fearsome 'speaking' dogs..." ["Oh God, the enemy wants another treat!"]


"...The bizarre 'Wooffan SS' experiment..."

"[The Airedale] was said to have speculated about religion, learnt foreign languages, wrote poetry and asked a visiting noblewoman 'could you wag your tail?' The patriotic German dog even expressed a wish to join the army, because he disliked the French."

"...a Dachschund named Kurwenal..." [for the Wagner fans]


"...there is no evidence it ever actually came to fruition and that the SS were walking around with talking dogs..." [You don't say. And neither do the dogs.]

Words fail, indeed.

Incantation for Dog Bite:

Long-kneed
Swift-running
Short of victuals
Lacking in food.
In his teeth
He carries his semen.
Wherever he has bitten
He leaves his offspring.

Hear it in the Babylonian! And in regard to all the obvious questions, I'll echo my source at DesertWindHounds: no idea.

A disturbing trend for coursing:


I have no doubt that the Querencia pack will be at the forefront of the noble counterinsurgency.

From Got Medieval, which documents plenty more of this perfidy.

Reasons I'm glad I'm Orthodox, #51: Giant schnauzer ministry. On a skateboard.

Hat tip: Chas, who has convinced me that Pueblo, CO is very odd indeed. Not that I needed much convincing; I've been there. And such oddities make it vastly superior to the rest of the front range.*

*When we lived in western Colorado, people asked us with rather appalling frequency, "So, do you visit The Springs [i.e. Colorado Springs, a.k.a. The Protestant Vatican] much?" My undiplomatic response was usually, "Good God no! Why would we do that?"

Most readers of this blog have probably already seen the Bodios' dog disaster that happened yesterday. It really was a freak accident. I hadn't even left the car, was still messing with a camera lens, when I heard Irbis yelping. It was the most gruesome injury I've ever seen, and I've seen quantities of blood and broken long bones before. I'm extremely glad that we were there to help, and that it happened so close to the car; it would have been even more of an epic if we'd had to carry him a mile.

How would you splint a dog's rear leg, anyway? Human limbs have the advantage of being able to go straight; I'd never thought about it before, but that's really convenient for us wilderness medicine types. My best thought for the dog was that if necessary we could sort of sling-and-swath the back leg up against the torso, basically wrap his whole rear half in padding. But he crawled with much yelping from the far back of our 4-Runner into the back seat. Libby got in with him, and he seemed relatively comfortable wedged between her and a box that happened to be there. Since he was fairly calm, it seemed best to let him be and get driving, rather than agitate, hurt and terrify him with temporary first aid.

Anyway, the outpouring of generosity in response to Steve's bleg has been really wonderful and touching. They have more or less enough now to collect him after the surgery tomorrow. No one has taken up my print offer from the comments, as everyone has proved too altruistic (or I was damn slow with this post); but some people will certainly be getting gifts.

My silver lining from this weekend is this shot from near Magdalena Saturday evening. Coming right at the end, it's one of my favorites of the year. Enlarge!

Double-nosed Andean tiger hounds. Photo here.

Via the fascinating Percy Fawcett, via Chas.

Apologies for the month of silence. But you haven't missed much, readers. A promising storm system in early March took me on a photo expedition to the great Socorro/Catron County outback of western New Mexico. Here's dawn from Hell's Mesa, some 20 miles north of Magdalena:

It's a bit of a New Mexico cliche, but who can pass up the VLA in good light?

The photo is quite dated now, but again, who can pass up tazi puppies?

Our big excitement was when Mr. and Mrs. Odious returned to New Mexico for the first time in several years. An excellent time was had by all, and Odious was given an airing in a landscape as little like western Oregon as possible:

We also had a very good visit to Dallas, of all places, for Mrs. P's sister's wedding. Bonuses included a very good time staying with Proclus (who really ought to blog a little now that he has some spare time) and his delightful new dog, an afghan/poodle cross, a mix we feel certainly qualifies as a lurcher; much good food; camels and bluebonnets on the drive; and a visit to the excellent if overpriced King Tut exhibition.

With any luck at all, we'll become interesting again soon.

A most thouroughly laudable python.

Video clip here.

And continuing the theme of surreal personality cults, good God, look at this: public architecture in Turkmenistan. I'd heard repeatedly of the golden statue of the late leader Turkmenbashi which rotates in a 24-hour cycle always to face the sun, but it's something to see the photos. The Wikipedia article cites some altogether remarkable presidential decrees (remember, this happened within the living memory of today's children):

ballet and opera were banned after Niyazov felt they were "unnecessary ... not a part of Turkmen culture"

In March 2004, 15,000 public health workers were dismissed including nurses, midwives, school health visitors and orderlies and replaced with military conscripts.

In April 2004 the youth of Turkmenistan were encouraged to chew on bones to preserve their teeth rather than be fitted with gold tooth caps

In April 2004 it was ordered that an ice palace be constructed near the capital.

In 2004 all licensed drivers were required to pass a morality test.

In February 2005 all hospitals outside Aşgabat were ordered shut, with the reasoning that the sick should come to the capital for treatment. All rural libraries were ordered closed as well, citing ordinary Turkmen do not read books.

The Turkmen words for bread and the month of April were changed to the name of his late mother, Gurbansoltanedzhe.

In fact, the President-for-Life renamed all the months and days of the week. Turkmenbashi also wrote the Ruhnama, which purports to be a national epic for the Turkmen people. History will judge; I will merely note that T-shirts appear to be available (though what's up with the Romanov eagle?).

Is this how types such as Galba and Otho would have behaved had they come to power in 1991? Was the Turkmenbashi in fact ahead of his time?

To end on a brighter note, Turkmen music is damn good.

Update: Ethnocynologist Steve Bodio reminds me that the Turkmens also have damn good dogs and horses. Well, they're Central Asians, so I take those accomplishments for granted. Always nice to ponder on them, though.

And still more, this time strictly Turkmen.

And here's one for Steve:

From the brush of Emperor Hsüan-tê. Here he is depicted by an anonymous artist:

Click to enlarge. From China: A History in Art.

Japanese dogs speak English. No, really.

Miscellanea:

Item: A robot controlled by slime mold (thanks, Chas).

Item: Snake-hunting terriers on Guam.

Our visit to the Bodios, chronicled in part below, couldn't possibly have been complete without taking their vast and ever-increasing pack of hounds for a good airing, outings which have the added potential of resulting in fresh hare for dinner. Mobilizing seven dogs, six of whom are primitive sighthounds, is not a simple task. Mrs. Peculiar and I took the two older and better-behaved tazi girls and the ever-intrepid wiener dog in our car, while the Bodios and a friend walked the male tazi, the lurcher and the two girl tazi pups on foot. We met at the fairgrounds and let slip the dogs. (My photos were taken with a manual-exposure, manual-focus dinosaur of a camera. Photographing tazis in action is comparable to photographing cheetahs. Please be charitable.)

  Das wüthende Heer: right to left, Plummer (lurcher), Ataika, Larissa (pretty sure), Lashyn (forequarters).

  Kiran, the male tazi. Tazi bitches like to be fea, fuerte y formal; Kiran not so much.

  

I really should come on one of these outings with more than half a roll of film. It's no problem at all to burn through frmaes tracking lightning-swift dogs through the New Mexico savannah. I took my last shots as we looped back around towards the car. Very shortly after, I was walking ahead of eveyone else, and bumped a jackrabbit. I yell, "Hai! Hai! Hai," the dogs are conveniently near, the pack wheels and pursues. Tazis seem fast at a lope, remarkably fast at an excercise pace; but these speeds are nothing compared to their pursuit. Already rocketing, the dogs suddenly engage a whole 'nother gear, flying ahead towards the rabbit, who suddenly realizes that these are not like other dogs and that he's actually in a good deal of trouble. A cottontail would be doomed, but jacks can fly along themselves, and twist and turn. The hare carves a serpentine path across the fields, a whiplash of sighthounds following and gaining. At one moment, the jack is running straight at me, the line of dogs behind, closing the gap on the straightaway; my camera, of course, remains empty. More twists, more pursuit. Lashyn is a noselength behind when she slips on a patch of mud. The hare escapes by the skin of its teeth.

******************************

  Ataika, a wind in the grass, a wind with fangs.

From our recent trip to visit Steve and Libby: a rather dated photo of Ataika and her puppies. At the time, they had just opened their eyes and were beginning to squirm. I don't doubt that now, two weeks later, they are considerably less sedate. Genetic gold, there! Their only fellow Asian tazis on the continent were lying in the next room with their mother Lashyn.