Dogged Blog

Breeders Who Suck

There are lots of reasons why breeders can suck. I'm going to skip a bunch of them, because one in particular has me steaming mad right now, and why have a blog if you can't scorch your bandwidth now and then?

There is a very rare genetic condition in dogs known as canine cystinuria, that can cause dogs to form urinary stones and blockages. It comes in a couple of forms; one of them affects Newfoundland dogs and Labrador Retrievers, and there is a simple genetic screening test for the condition in those breeds. The other form affects the rest of us, including mixed breed dogs, and there is no genetic screening test and we don't know the mode of inheritance.

Just to muddy the waters further, many, perhaps most, of the dogs who have the condition don't have any symptoms, or don't get them until the very end of their lives. And females don't get the condition at all, but carry it.

So you can see that even for the most careful and ethical of breeders, this is a minefield. For those of us in breeds with very small numbers, it's also difficult to prioritize health problems, because if we demanded that every dog we breed be genetically perfect, our breed would cease to exist in the next generation. We call it "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

But there's a world of difference between making rational decisions with incomplete information in an imperfect world, and shoving your head so deep in the sand you come out the other side of the earth. And that is what a lot of breeders are doing these days.

This particular incident did not occur in my breed, and I won't name the breed involved. But a breeder whose stud dog tested positive for cystinuria at a younger age but has now tested negative is advertising this dog as "cystinuria-free" and, according to a friend of mine in that breed, bitches are flocking to him.

The problem with this little bit of delirium is that a negative test for cystinuria is meaningless. Dogs with this condition don't have cystine in their urine all the time, and normal dogs NEVER have cystine in their urine. So if this dog had cystine in his urine ever, he has cystinuria. He may never form cystine stones, but he has the condition and he can pass it on to his offspring (even though we may not know exactly in what manner that happens).

It's not like this is some big secret. This condition has been known for many years and this breed, like mine, is participating in an ongoing test at the University of Pennsylvania in the hopes of coming up with a genetic test or at least figuring out the mode of inheritance. Any breeder who claims that a dog is cystinuria-free after one negative screening test, even if that dog never tested positive in the past, is making a statement that cannot be substantiated.

And any breeder who who claims a dog is cystinuria-free after a negative test but who had a past positive test is simply lying, either to him or herself, or to the world.

And worst of all, any bitch owner who uses that stud dog is doing harm to his or her breed that might ultimately be incalculable.

I know the harm that cystinuria does, because I have produced three dogs with the condition, two of whom were stone formers, and I own a fourth who I bought from another breeder. This is a painful, life-threatening condition that requires bloody and expensive surgery to correct. I own the caninecystinuria email list, and the caninecystinuria website too. Although cystinuria is rare in dogs, it's frighteningly common in Scottish Deerhounds. And with our small numbers, the last thing we need is a widespread genetic problem.

But no matter how few or great in numbers a breed might be, none of us needs breeders who lie, deny, believe what they want to believe, and allow harm to come to the genetic legacy of their breed in the name of greed and ego. It is real dogs who pay the price of this deception, and real human hearts that suffer when our dogs do.

What Would Jesus Tag and Burn?

Via Mike the Mad Biologist (see, you really should hang out on the science blogs):

The United Church of Christ recently passed a resolution supporting gay marriage.  (Go Christian Left!)  In retaliation, some bigots attempted to set a UCC church in Virgina on fire and spray painted the church with anti-gay hate slogans. 

Set aside what you believe about homosexuality for a moment. In what twisted parallel universe do we commit arson and vandalism in the name of our RELIGIOUS BELIEFS?

Oh wait, I know ... the twisted parallel universe we actually inhabit.

Sunday Drive-By Blogging

OK, so some days I'm full of the milk of human kindness (mostly just when I'm writing about my dogs or my new baby nephew, really), and other days I'm just feeling mean and ornery:

Via AMERICABlog's  CafePress store:

Three and a Spare

She runs in her sleep.

Raven, I mean, my Scottish Deerhound who had her left rear leg amputated last month after bone cancer had eaten a big hole in it. She runs in her sleep.

Lots of my deerhounds seem to do that: Their closed eyes darting, their legs bunching and releasing, their necks extending and drawing back in. They're dreaming of running after a hare or a deer, or maybe just after one of the other dogs in a play version of the hunt.

When Raven does it, the remainder of her amputated leg still moves with the other one, draws up and extends in a dreaming double-suspension gallop. Her eyes dart and her neck pumps and when I put my hand on her side, her heart is racing. The chase is on and she's in it, coursing with the other hounds after a dream deer.

I sat on the bed next to her this morning at around sunrise, my knees drawn up to my chest and my feet tucked under the edge of my quilt. She was having a great run and once or twice she gave a muffled little bark of excitement. Since deerhounds run silent and only vocalize when they've caught their prey, I have to guess her hunt was a success.

And then she woke up.

Every day except when she was at her sickest after surgery, Raven has greeted me and the morning with joy. Her eyes light up, her tail thumps, and she gives me a slurpy kiss good morning. She waits until I've cleared the other dogs out of the room to get up now, though, as she's scared to jump off the bed and and catch her balance when they're around. Then she sails off and gallops outside to potty, one front leg moved back to form a stable tripod while she pees. Then I let my two oldest dogs out the gate and the three of us walk down to the edge of my property and back, Raven making better time and covering more ground than my four-legged senior citizen, Rosie. Sometimes she hops up the fairly steep hill next to the drive, sometimes she just looks at it appraisingly and decides against it.

Now and then, for a change of scene,  I shut the young dogs up in the house and let Raven into the meadow off my deck, and she races around on her three legs, in a funny little hitching gallop that would still outpace any dog but another sighthound.

She may never run with the pack again, never scare up a jackrabbit and fly after it like the wind, never put four legs to the ground and then into the air in the flying gait that's the hallmark and definition of her breed. That wasn't something that she lost because I had her leg amputated, as some people either ignorant or unkind, or perhaps both, told me when I made the decision. Cancer took that away from her, not the surgeon and not me. As the oncologist told me at the time, dogs are born with "three legs and a spare."

Will Raven be one of the 15 percent of dogs with osteosarcoma who has amputation and chemo and never has a recurrence of their cancer? Or maybe one of the 30 percent who makes it to two years? Those aren't great odds, but they aren't zero.  Obviously we're going for the 15 percent. Maybe all we'll get is two years or a year, or even a few months, of dreaming about the hunt and hitch-galloping around the meadow, of watching her flying after a deer in her sleep. Maybe she'll overcome her nervousness and fear and play with the young dogs again. Maybe, just maybe,  she'll fly again.

But I know one thing: Dead dogs don't play, or run, or hitch-gallop, or smell at the ground, or have their eyes light up in the morning.

They don't even dream.

New On Earth...

Please welcome my new nephew to the world, as of July 3, 2005, at 11:35 PM Pacific Time!

He is my third nephew, but the first child for my brother McKenzie and his wife, Meewon. Mother and baby are doing fine after a 24-hour labor followed by a C-section delivery. I'm deliriously happy. My brother groggily said he'd take a photo and email it to me, but it hasn't come yet - so for now, the news will have to do. I will update with a photo as soon I have one. According to my mother, though, he's adorable.

[UPDATE]: Photo!

I Should Have Had the Triple Espresso

I've been catching up on my reading, bill paying, and other vital tasks that took a distant second place to taking care of my dog, Raven, in the last month. One bit of reading I did today zapped  my brain fog better than a triple espresso.

According to Grade the News' Michael Stoll in  "Tax push catches freelancers by surprise,"  if you are a freelance writer and you do business in Oakland, California - by which I don't mean you live there and work there, but just so much as drive into town to interview someone - you owe the City of Oakland business taxes. Not an "income tax," which cities cannot levy under California law, but a business tax. Even if you make only one dollar a year, you owe at least $90 to the city - a Kafka-esque reality that makes regressive taxes look good.

Oakland freelancers have formed a Yahoo group to strategize and organize around this issue. And Media Alliance, a San Francisco-based  "29 year-old media resource and advocacy center for media workers, non-profit organizations, and social justice activists," published Stoll's article in the most recent issue of Media File, which is where I read it.

I won't pretend I'm exactly hopeful, though, about sanity ruling the day here. Desperation generally trumps common sense and fairness. And there's no question local governments are getting desperate:

The aggressive rooting-out of freelancers became possible after Assembly       Bill 63 of 2001 allowed the state to share federal tax data with local governments.       Cities have desperately sought to identify under-exploited revenue sources       to plug holes caused by federal and state budget cutbacks and a souring       economy. At a time when a growing number of Fortune 500 corporations are       paying no corporate taxes at all, local governments have been forced to       raise taxes on the smallest of small businesses -- arguably those least       able to afford it.

While Oakland appears to have the most draconian interpretation of business tax regulations, this is, Stoll tells us, something that is spreading across the country as towns and cities desperately search for funds to make up for the massive cuts our conservative "small government" administration is happily implementing.

Since "starving the beast" tends to result in actual starvation, infrastructure decay, and other genuine human tragedies, I'm not absolutely without sympathy for the need of local governments to replace this revenue.  Add to it that, in California, our governor has been cutting funding to local governments, too, as well as having expensive special elections without paying for them (all of which comes out of local budgets), and my sympathy only increases.

But the fact is, as a freelance editor and writer who works full time for companies all over the country, I simply can't conceive that anyone really expects me to figure out the local business laws and regulations that might, or might not, apply to me, nor pay local taxes in towns I've never even visited.

How absurd can this get? When Stoll contacted the City of Oakland to research his story:

(H)e was told that if he traveled to Oakland       from San Francisco to write the article, he would be charged $90 in fees       and taxes by the Oakland tax collector for the privilege of writing this       story ("doing business in Oakland"). Suffice it to say, he did       all his interviews by telephone and e-mail. But the writer was still not       off the hook. He still needed to apply for a $25 business license in San       Francisco for retroactive permission to write this story. And he discovered       that since he wrote a $300 freelance story in 2003, he owes $320 for several       years of accumulated business registration fees and penalties.

By this logic, if I fly to Daytona next year to cover the largest reptile and amphibian show in the world for the pet website for which I work as an independent contractor, I am "doing business in Daytona" and would need to find out if I need a business license and to pay taxes. And I guess my home county of Sonoma, CA, could get in on the action, too, because that article I'm researching in Daytona will actually be written in my home office.

This is insanity. Employees doing business in cities where they live, working out of home offices, are not subject to these taxes and fees; only freelancers and independent contractors are. It's not as though I'm not already paying my state and federal income taxes just like employees do, plus my own self-employment taxes at double the rate an employee would pay, plus my own health insurance too.

And it's not like most of us choose not to be employees of the companies we work for. Lots of businesses, small and large, are cutting costs by using independent contractors instead of employees. No benefits, no insurance, no retirement plans, no social security taxes, no payroll tax preparation fees, and hey - they don't even have to maintain an office for us! And now I get to pay fees and taxes I wouldn't have to pay, if I were doing exactly what I do as an employee instead of as a freelancer.

My mother always told me that life isn't fair, and I would have sworn to you I believed it before I was shocked by this article. Maybe I would have been better off with a triple espresso.

Goodbye, Ben

Gina at Dogma has lost her Flat-Coated Retriever Ben to a nasty cancer that strikes many dogs of his breed. I thought we'd all have more time, and that I at least would see him again. It was not to be, though, as his pain was unmanageable even with the best efforts of modern polypharmacy, so Gina did the right thing (which is also the hardest thing) and let him go.

Here are some memories of Ben's first visit to my house, swimming in my creek with Heather...

And his last.

Goodbye Ben. I'm going to miss you, although no one will miss you like Gina will.