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Peony, a Carolina dog. Some of the breed’s rare traits include a fishhook tail, a pointed, somewhat lupine face and the habit of digging snout pits.

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July 15, 2013

D.N.A. Backs Lore on Pre-Columbian Dogs

By JACK HITT

BISHOPVILLE, S.C. — Inside a fenced acre on the swampy Lynches River flood plain in central South Carolina, seven of Don Anderson’s primitive dogs spring into high alert at approaching strangers. Medium-sized, they fan out amid his junkyard of improvised habitat: a few large barrels to dig under, an abandoned camper shell from a pickup, segments of black plastic water pipe and backhoed dirt mounds overgrown with waist-high ragweed.

These are Carolina dogs, and though they are friendly, one can instantly sense they are different from other dogs. Several rush to the gate, their whole bodies wagging eagerly. Others sprint off and take position — their jackal ears fully erect, their fishhook tails twitching like flags in a stiff wind. A black pup scrabbles away in crablike submission that eventually takes her into an underground den, dug deep enough that she is not seen again.

Walking into the pen is dangerous for only one reason: one of the dogs’ defining habits is digging snout pits, or gallon-size holes in the ground, perhaps to root for grubs or munch the soil for nutrients.

“It’s like a lunar landscape,” Mr. Anderson warns as we tread carefully into the underbrush.

Some Carolina dogs still live in the wild, and local people have long thought they were one of the few breeds that predated the European arrival in the Americas: “Our native dog,” as Michael Ruano, another enthusiast who often works with Mr. Anderson, put it. “America’s natural dog.”

Now, a new study of canine DNA backs up the folklore. A team led by Peter Savolainen at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has reported that several dog breeds in the Americas — among them the Peruvian hairless, the Chihuahua and the Carolina dog — are without some genetic markers indicative of European origin, suggesting they arrived in an earlier migration from Asia.

The study also reawakens the long debate about where and how dogs were domesticated. Current theory speculates that they are descended from wolves that somehow became attached to humans perhaps 12,000 to 33,000 years ago — an early amity that has an extensive pedigree in human folklore. (Think Romulus and Remus.)

But where that may have happened is not entirely settled. Some say the earliest dogs emerged in the Middle East. Others point to an area south of the Yangtze River in China. Dr. Savolainen’s study provides more evidence for the China hypothesis and, as a result, lends support to the idea that the earliest domesticated dogs crossed the Ice Age land bridge known as Beringia some 12,000 years ago.

Carolina dogs, then, could be camp followers that wandered off from their Paleo-Indian masters and took up residence in swampy areas where they can easily hide out from their own natural predators.

Encounter With a Puppy

Mr. Anderson, 79, is a Virginian who moved to South Carolina in 1961. He’s a garrulous man dressed in comfortable blue stretch pants, a pair of Crocs on his feet, and a headband to hold back shoulder-length hair that stubbornly retains some glints of blond.

He remembers the day, back in the Nixon administration, when he had his first encounter with these wild dogs. Down by a nearby water hole on his land, he spied a mother and three pups, and they immediately bolted.

“Two of the puppies went east, and one puppy tried to get out west and he got stuck,” he explained. He took the pup home and named him Tadpole.

Not long afterward a stranger saw the dog and offered Mr. Anderson $300 for what his neighbors called a “Lynches River wild dog.” He refused the deal, thinking, he says now, “if he’s worth $300 to you, then he’s worth $300 to me.”

Mr. Anderson soon learned that others called them Carolina dogs, a name given to them by I. Lehr Brisbin, a biologist with the Savannah River nuclear power plant, near Aiken, and the man most responsible for the current interest in the breed. In the early 1970s, Dr. Brisbin was employed checking out the wildlife on the periphery of the plant and often came upon these wild dogs in the swampier parts of his domain. He took a few in and today maintains an 18-acre enclosure where he has his own pack.

Dr. Brisbin got the Carolina dog recognized by the United Kennel Club and was the first to describe some of the breed’s rare traits, including the fishhook tail, the pointed, somewhat lupine face and the habit of digging snout pits. The dogs cooperate as a pack when they hunt a field mouse or a rabbit, possibly using their white hindquarters as signals.

“That white fishhook can be hoisted like a white-tailed deer’s and can flash back and forth,” Dr. Brisbin explained. “I saw them do it, and I saw the rest of the pack honor it.”

Carolina dogs typically go into heat once a year, like wolves, instead of twice, like domesticated dogs. They cover up their scat by pushing dirt over it with their noses, not by using their hindquarters to scratch the ground.

Still, determining just what is and is not a Carolina dog requires a kind of gut instinct. To Mr. Anderson, it’s a matter of “I know it when I see it”; Dr. Brisbin is more blunt.

“The Carolina dog is a breed created by Brisbin,” he said, referring to himself in the third person, “by picking dogs he likes, the type that he thinks typify the ancient dog.”

This is not to say the Carolina dog is more mythic than real. But the problem is that some of the wilder dogs have mated with other breeds — local dogs and even coyotes. Determining just what is a Carolina dog means becoming more finely tuned to the sense that anyone feels stepping into Don Anderson’s enclosed acre. Experiential knowledge is crucial, being able to sense the entirety of the animal and in that way recognize which dog is almost purely Carolina and which is more of a mix.

Most Carolina dogs are ginger-colored, like Australian dingoes, but they can also be black and piebald. Most, but not all, are short-haired.

Some have tiny patches, right above their distinctive almond eyes, that look like a spare set of eyes, what Mr. Anderson calls “spirit eyes.” Some have an unusual white stripe at the shoulder. There are the noticeable ears and the tail, but also the athletic tucked-in stomach (like a Doberman). DNA studies may soon make it easier to assert the Carolina’s distinctions from other dogs.

Early Sightings

Awareness of this unusual dog has its own history. According to Mark Eden, another enthusiast working with Mr. Anderson, the journals of the 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto include possible references to Carolina dogs.

In the essential narrative of early American natural history, William Bartram’s 1791 book “Bartram’s Travels,” the author runs across a Seminole Indian maintaining some horses and writes: “One occurrence, remarkable here, was a troop of horse under the control and care of a single black dog, which seemed to differ in no respect from the wolf of Florida, except his being able to bark as the common dog.”

In his journal for Feb. 16, 1806, Meriwether Lewis writes of an “Indian dog” that is “party coloured; black white brown and brindle” with “ears erect and pointed like those of the wolf” and used by American Indians to hunt elk.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dog’s wildness and its ginger coat — and probably its use by the poor as a hunting dog — led to the name “yaller dog,” typically spelled that way except by the kind of manor-born people who say “chitterlings.”

And that may have given rise to the term “yellow dog Democrat” to describe the anti-Republican die-hard in the South, as in the 1920s slogan “I’d vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket.”

The occasional revival of interest in the Carolina dog happens this time just as enthusiasts make the case for its inclusion among the ancient dogs the world over. Dr. Brisbin also suggests that the Carolina dog fits in the niche of “pariah dogs,” dingo-like and appearing to survive in difficult habitats, like Don Anderson’s swamps, typically on the outskirts of ancient human migration routes.

There are many of these older dogs: the Canaan dog of Israel, the Santal hound of India, the Jindo of Korea, the Telomian of Malaysia, the New Guinea singing dog, the Kintamani dog of Bali, the African basenji — and the images that pop up in a Web search are oddly similar to those of the Carolina dog.

Continents and millenniums aside, they possess many of the qualities Dr. Brisbin and Mr. Anderson describe. These primitive dogs started living near people tens of thousands of years ago, finding a place just out of sight of human encampments — where, if the current studies hold up, they steadfastly remain.

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Jim Buck NYTimes Obit

Jim Buck, near Central Park in 1964, is considered the first professional dog walker in New York City. He ran a business in which he and two dozen assistants walked more than 150 dogs a day.

July 12, 2013

New York Times

Jim Buck, Who Made Walking Dogs a Job, Dies at 81

By MARGALIT FOX

There are eight million occupational stories in New York City, and none cries Gotham louder than that of the professional surrogate — the shrewd city dweller who spies a void that other New Yorkers are too hurried, harried or hard-pressed to fill and rushes enterprisingly in.

Over time, the city has spawned professional car-movers and professional line-standers, but its most visible — and audible — paid surrogates are indisputably its professional dog walkers.

By all accounts, Jim Buck was the first of them.

Mr. Buck, who died on July 4 at 81, is widely described as the first person to professionalize dog walking in New York City and, by extension, in the United States.

Starting in the early 1960s, Mr. Buck, the scion of a patrician Upper East Side family, rose each morning at dawn to walk passels of clients’ dogs, eventually presiding over a business in which he and two dozen assistants walked more than 150 dogs a day.

When he began that business, Jim Buck’s School for Dogs, it was the only one of its kind in New York. Today, the city has scores of professional dog walkers.

During the 40 years Mr. Buck ran his school, he was an eminently recognizable figure: an elegantly turned out, borzoi-thin man of 145 pounds, he commanded the leashes of a half-dozen or more dogs at a time — a good 500 pounds of dog in all — which fanned out before him like the spokes of a wheel.

He walked in sun; he walked in rain. In wintertime, his charges might be clad in small sweaters bearing the logos of the European resorts where their masters skied.

Jim Buck’s School for Dogs was equal parts exclusive preparatory academy, exercise class and reform school. In a 1964 profile of Mr. Buck in The New York Times, Gay Talese described him, plying his trade, as looking “like Charlton Heston in the chariot-racing scene in ‘Ben-Hur.’ ”

But with hindsight, it is more apt to liken Mr. Buck to Lee Marvin in the 1967 film “The Dirty Dozen.”

Mr. Buck’s clients were refined. Their dogs were less so.

The clients, mostly Upper East Siders, included some of the city’s most prominent names in the arts, government, finance and industry. (Continuing the tradition of walker-client confidentiality to which Mr. Buck long hewed, his family declined to name them. It did confirm Mr. Buck’s death, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, apparently of complications of emphysema and cancer.)

The dogs included the intractable, the obstinate and the profoundly pampered.

One, an otterhound known to Mr. Buck’s staff as Oliver the Awful, was used for some years to audition prospective employees.

“Oliver knows when he’s testing someone new, and he can be counted on to leap into the first phone booth along the way and slam the door and wedge himself against it,” Mr. Buck told The New Yorker in 1965. “Brute force is of no avail; the only way to get him out is to remain poised and quietly talk him out.”

James Augustine Farrell Buck was born in Manhattan on Nov. 28, 1931. His family, socially prominent, had prospered in steel and shipping. As a youth, Jim showed dogs; he also trained horses at the Connecticut country homes of his uncles.

Footloose, determined and eager to flout convention, Mr. Buck bypassed college.

But by the early ’60s he was leading the sort of gray-flannel life of which he despaired, chafing in New York as a salesman for an electronics concern.

Mr. Buck knew dogs — as a young man, he bred Great Danes. He also knew New Yorkers. Before long, a void was filled.

By 1964, The Times reported, he was making $500 a week, more than his electronics job paid.

His cobbler enjoyed a regular cut: Mr. Buck wore through the soles of his shoes every two weeks.

Mr. Buck’s marriage to Ann Sage ended in divorce. A resident of Manhattan, he is survived by three sons, Jonathan, Christopher and Graham; two sisters, Mother Debra Joseph, a Benedictine nun, and Connie Buck; and a brother, Richard.

Jim Buck’s School for Dogs is gone now, closed a decade ago when Mr. Buck retired. But its legacy endures: some of the city’s professional dog walkers are his former employees.

As the city changes, so too does their work. There are no more telephone booths for latter-day Olivers to barricade themselves in. Few cobblers remain.

And in years to come, in perhaps the keenest loss of all, there may well be no more newsprint. A 20th-century artifact increasingly deemed redundant in the electronic age, it remains, for New York’s dog walkers, a vital, and indispensable, means of upholding the law.

Awesome...

Lad: A dog - a book for the dog lover

Any man with money to make the purchase may become a dog’s owner.  But no man – spend he ever so much coin and food and tact in the effort – may become a dog’s Master without the consent of the dog. Do you get the difference? And he whom a dog once unreservedly accepts as Master is forever that dog’s God.

Ladd: A Dog

Albert Payson Terhune

Happy 4th of July