The Afghan Hound as Symbol of Conspicuous Consumption

I regularly troll eBay for images of Afghan hounds, specifically antique pictures. I find a lot of Afghans used in advertising, almost exclusively as a symbol to indicate how upscale a product is, or to give it a high class veneer. Like this television set:

Do you think she grooms the dog in that dress?

The modern Afghan itself, as presented in your average dog breed books and on televised dog shows and dog-related web sites, is an exercise in conspicuous consumption: time, grooming skills, hair products.

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, and my owner wields a mean hair dryer. (Bartosz Senderek, 2006)

I hate that image (general image of Afghan hounds as upscale high maintenance super models, not the specific image preceding this paragraph.) Afghan hound branding has gone all wrong. How do we go from this:

Shahzada, 1896

Straker, born 1919

from A Brief History of Afghanistan By Shaista Wahab, 2010

1936

Stockholm, 1932

Neelai, Pakistan

Pari, Pakistan

To this:

If you align the dogs nose with Orion and crank its tail just right, it will point the way to a secret chamber hiding alien technology. {http://www.flickr.com/photos/eschipul/196843486/)

And why is it bad if you want to reverse the trend? People are strange.

*I think the dog on the left in the Wahab photo is pregnant. So don’t be leaving comments saying it’s not even a sighthound, mmkay?

Angelina Jolie, Evolution and Pleiotropy

Reblogged from Science of Dogs:

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Angelina Jolie recently revealed she underwent a double mastectomy; a prophylactic measure to combat the risk of breast cancer associated with BRCA1 gene she carries. Like many other ‘disease’ genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 show evidence of positive selection, suggesting a fitness advantage. To understand how BRCA provides an evolutionary advantage we have to look at the other side of the BRCA coin and introduce the concepts of evolutionary tradeoffs and…

Read more… 676 more words

This post also fits nicely with the previously posted link about health testing. Read it.

The Limits of Health Testing

Christopher at BorderWars has an excellent post up about the limitations of ‘health testing’ in purebred dogs. Money quotes:

There are over 19,300 protein-coding genes in dogs and yet there are fewer than 200 Canine DNA tests, most of which are unique to just one breed and look at only a fraction of one gene.  Few breeds have more than 3 DNA tests and many have none at all.  How can we claim to have robust “health testing” in dogs when the number of tests we have is less than 1% of the number of genes?  We can’t claim that in good faith and we shouldn’t because the degree of our ignorance is even worse than the unknown and untested 99+%.

There are over 2.8 billion base pairs in the haploid canine genome which is carried fully in each dog sperm and egg, so 5.6 billion base pairs define each individual dog, which means that there are 11.2 billion bases {G,A,T,C} of DNA in every dog’s genetic recipe.

There are Canine DNA health tests that tell you about only one base. One base out of 11,200,000,000.  Other tests look at changes, additions, or deletions in anywhere from a handful of base pairs to several thousand base pairs.  But no DNA test looks at more than a tiny almost insignificant fraction of the code that makes up a dog.  Even if you applied every single DNA test available on the market you’d scarcely cover a noticeable portion of the canine genome.

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When we look at DNA results we MUST understand that we are only looking at a tiny fraction of what makes up our dogs and an even smaller speck of what makes up a breed.

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There’s no DNA test for stupid…

Please go and read the whole thing.

Dog Food Advertisement FAIL

This a real ad for a real brand of ‘natural, grain-free raw dog food,’ that was prominently featured on a blog I was reading today. The company says, “We named our company after Charles Darwin, whose work embodies this approach of being “Inspired by Nature, Informed by Science.””

I am sure the pug is a customers dog, and that’s very nice and sweet and all. But the juxtaposition of Darwin, the father of natural selection, and a pug made me laugh hysterically. Of course, I am easily amused. YMMV.

BTW, we have a dog named Darwin. And while I am pretty hard-assed about dog breeding NOT being comparable to natural selection…yeah, well, you probably get my drift.

Hell is Other People. On the Internet.

Or, this is why we can’t have nice things shouldn’t bother to write clever things.

Couple-three days ago I started getting a lot of hits on this post, wherein I hold a mock trial and convict some poor sap who DIDN’T READ THE BLOG POLICY BEFORE COMMENTING. Which is what it says to do over the very box one types the comments in.

The vast majority of the hits came from Maine, from whence my commenter who neglected to read the Blog Policy came. Perhaps there was some bosom clutching going on. I don’t know. Don’t care. You breaks the rules, you pays the price. Without rules we’d just have anarchy around here! ::glances at blog title:: Well, shit, that doesn’t precisely work, does it?

You might think that people would, maybe, go check out the Blog Policy to see what I was carrying on about. I would do that. But…nope.

Hits on the original post over a seven day period: 104

Hits on the Blog Policy, which is prominently featured at the top of the page: 9

Maybe it’s something in the water up there.

(I am just kidding. I have nothing against people from Maine, or people who may be erroneously tagged by Statcounter as coming from Maine. I’m sure Maine is a perfectly fine place, even if so many of Stephen Kings books are set there.)

 

 

Monkeys? I Don’t Think So

Today I ended up on the Time web site, a gallery of photos of the artist Picasso, taken by Gjon Mili, from 1948 to 1967. Everyone knows Picasso had Afghan hounds. So a certain photo caught my eye.

In 1967, for example, Mili returned to the South of France, where Picasso was living, in Mougins, with his second wife, Jacqueline Roque. Inside the artist’s workshop, he found a few small metal monkeys that Picasso had fashioned, seemingly on a whim (see slide #8). LIFE described Picasso’s technique in creating these wonderful, playful sculptures: “He made paper cut-outs, then had the patterns transferred to sheet metal which he folded into animals with lively personalities, turning his paper-thin material into surprisingly substantial works of art.”

Femme au Chien (Jaqueline avec Kabul), 1962

Jaqueline Roque, Picasso’s last wife, with Kabul, the Afghan.

From Picasso’s Dogs, Muse and mascot: the artist’s life-long love affair with his canine companions, by Stanley Coren:

Once I was in front of him, I quickly asked him in Spanish “Excuse me. I know that this occasion has to do with your art, but might I ask you a quick question about your dogs?”

On hearing his native tongue being spoken, he looked directly at me with the barest hint of a smile.

“Certainly,” he said.

“I have seen photographs of you with so many different breeds of dogs. Is there any one breed, or any one dog, that was your favourite?”

Now he did smile.

“I have had so many,” he said and as he started speaking his dark eyes drifted upward, “Some were gifts, some I found. Breeds… I do not usually get the same breed of dog again. I want each to be an individual and I do not want to live with the ghosts of the other dogs. Of course there was Lump, my Dachshund. I used to put him in my paintings when they needed something to make them lighter and more amusing. I suppose that I am fickle in my affections, but after a dog has left my life I try to quickly fill its place with another. Right now I have an Afghan Hound named Kabul. He is elegant, with graceful proportions, and I love the way he moves. I put a representation of his head on a statue that I created for Daley Plaza in Chicago and I do think of him sometimes while I am in my studio.”

He looked directly at me, and as he continued speaking, his right hand was making lines and curves in the air, as if he were drawing something on an invisible canvas in front of us.

“Often, if he comes into my mind when I am working, it alters what I do. The nose on the face I am drawing gets longer and sharper. The hair of the woman I am sketching gets longer and fluffy, resting against her cheeks like his ears rest against his head. Yes, if I have a favourite, for now at least, it is my Afghan Hound, Kabul.”

Not monkeys, no.

More pictures of Picasso’s dogs, including Kabul in old age, here.

Guest Post: Suzanne Phillips: Why dogs develop food allergies

Reblogged from The Retriever, Dog, & Wildlife Blog:

Suzanne Phillips has been a long-time reader of this blog. Earlier this week, she offered to do a guest post on the topic of why dogs develop food allergies. Much of what you read online about this topic is utter nonsense and she decided that this would be a good venue for setting the record straight. Her analysis is entirely based upon what the scientific research says about why dogs develop allergies to certain foods.

Read more… 1,621 more words

Good article on food allergies. Read.