New York, NY – Highlights from the January 2008 meeting of the AKC Board of Directors are as follows:
To Drive or Not to Drive: That Was Never the Question
driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For
some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a
horse on
or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder
at myself.
I’ve been driving now for some 40 years, right
through what will come to be thought of as the heart of the Internal Combustion
Era. There is no learnable skill — aside perhaps from reading and writing —
that is more a part of me than driving. My senses have completely engulfed the
automobile,
Closing the Barn Door After the Cows
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for the eventual
sale of meat and dairy products from cloned animals, saying, in effect, that
consumers face no health risks from them. The next day, the Department of
Agriculture asked farmers to keep their cloned animals off the market until
consumers have time to get over their anticloning prejudice. That is one
prejudice I plan to hold on to. I will not be eating cloned meat.
"....Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political
animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman
animals that behave like textbook politicians. Researchers who study
highly gregarious and relatively brainy species like rhesus monkeys,
baboons, dolphins, sperm whales, elephants and wolves have lately
uncovered evidence that the creatures engage in extraordinarily
sophisticated forms of politicking, often across large and far-flung
social networks.
Male dolphins, for example, organize
themselves into at least three nested tiers of friends and accomplices,
said Richard C. Connor of the University of Massachusetts
at Dartmouth, rather like the way human societies are constructed of
small kin groups allied into larger tribes allied into still larger
nation-states. The dolphins maintain their alliances through
elaborately synchronized twists, leaps and spins like Blue Angel pilots
blazing their acrobatic fraternity on high.
Among elephants, it
is the females who are the born politicians, cultivating robust and
lifelong social ties with at least 100 other elephants, a task made
easier by their power to communicate infrasonically across miles of
savanna floor. Wolves, it seems, leaven their otherwise strongly
hierarchical society with occasional displays of populist umbrage, and
if a pack leader proves a too-snappish tyrant, subordinate wolves will
collude to overthrow the top cur....."
Mariah is in her third week of a
basic agility class. She loves it and is very vocal while she waits her turn.
She gets bored with doing the same thing again and again and when they are given
the go ahead to string several obstacles together she goes as fast as she can.
She’s one happy and tired girl when class is over. Stu has set up a tunnel,
small vertical jump, broad jump, and pause table in the basement. This has kept
Mariah happy in the below zero weather when the walks get shorter and
shorter.
and was certainly the toughest to earn. It has taken years to finish. The
versatility NATCH requires a gazillion qualifiers in Regular (the usual standard
stuff but with distance challenges and tight times), Chances (3 tests in one-
distance, directionals at distance and discriminations at distance), Jumpers
(the usual, but fast), Tunnelers (just tunnels, and fast), touch N Go (contacts
and tunnels- hard to hit the contact zones at speed), and Weavers (three sets of
12 poles with tunnels in between, also done wicked fast). “gazillion” is
actually 13 in all the classes except regular, where you need 23. Not a cheap
title.