Westie Terrier Blog

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you have no doubt noticed the new header we deployed a couple of weeks age. I thought I’d take some time to explain how the header was created.

The image is a photo-collage of three other pictures. They get dropped onto photo-shop in layers, then you erase part of the top-most image to reveal the image underneath. I said photo-shop, but the same techniques would apply if you were using some other program like GIMP or Sumopaint.

One of the things I like about this banner is that Willow is in it three times, once as a puppy around eight months old, around two years old and around three years old.

The first picture is this one that was taken at the Maple Ridge Equisport Center in the summer of 2010. Willow was almost two when this was taken. Let’s put that on the extreme left.

 

 

 

 

 

The next picture selected is this one of Willow and my brother Jim. It was taken the day after we moved to Vancouver Island, so June 2011. Willow was almost 3 years old. The location in Cowichan Bay. We’ll drop that on the far right.

 

The third photo I chose for the center of the banner is this one. It was taken in 2009, soon after we got Willow. Puppy Willow is sitting on the ground on the right side of the photo. On the other side is a guy in coveralls holding two Westies and a Scottie. The two Westies are Willow’s parents.  Anyway, let’s see what we wound up with.

This is one of the first examples of the three images together. There are two things, at least, wrong with this early effort. First, ther’s too much stuff happening over on the right-hand side. Puppy Willow is crammed under Jim’s table, and the backgrounds are quite different. That’s going to make erasing the top image more difficult.

All those problems are relieved simply by flipping the photo. Now the gray of the deck boards and the gray of the pavement are easier to blend. The coffee-table that was squashing Puppy Willow is now over on the edge. Much better. Also, mature Willow will be standing right next to Puppy Willow, which I think is kind of cool.

The other problem with this layout was the order of the layers. This is just an example of some of my early efforts and I really had no idea what I was doing. The solution turned out to be putting the left and right pictures on one layer and the center photo on top. That way you are always erasing from the same picture to reveal the underlying image.

Be sure to save a back-up of your source image and keep it somewhere separate from the one you are working on. You will make mistakes and have to go back to the beginning several times if you haven’t done this kind of thing before.

There are two main settings that you use with the eraser tool. One is brush size. The other is opacity. Opacity controls how deep you erase each time you make a pass. I’m a real coward, so I kept the opacity around 25%. It takes longer to erase all the way down but you’re less likely to blow it by going too deep.

I found the best way to proceed was to work from some distance into the source image out to the edge. A couple of times I went too far and wound up erasing part of the image I was trying to reveal. Not a photo-shop pro! Sometimes you wind up with some pretty cool effects. For instance, if you look at the center image, the background was the office in our housing complex. Careful erasing made it look like AJ is standing on the cross-country course with Willow.

Once the blending of the images is done all that’s left is the lettering. It is possible to do the kind of fancy lettering I wanted in photo-shop, but an easier way is just to get somebody else to do it for you. I popped over to cooltext.com. There you can make your own logos in real time and download the final images. Open those images in photo-shop, drag them where you want them and you are done.

This has been a very simplified overview of the photo-collage technique. I didn’t get into much detail because I don’t want to put myself forward as some kind of pro with photo-shop. The article I learned how to do this from is available at the digital photography school.

<Begin apology for being off-theme>This article is about Pit Bulls. I could try to tie it in with the Westie theme of this blog by saying that both Pit Bulls and Westies are terriers, have common personality traits, yada-yada-yada. The fact is though, that I simply came across this article when I visited the Terrierman Blog this morning. Its a subject that I’ve put a lot of thought into, Patrick’s article was extremely good and I wanted to share it with you. </End of apology for being off-theme>

When Willow and I are out-and-about and we see a Pit Bull coming, I cross the street and take her away unless she gives clear signals that she wants to meet that particular dog. Willow has become a very good judge of character where other dogs are concerned, and I trust her judgement.

If I avoid Pit Bulls, its not because I fear them and it certainly isn’t because I don’t know anything about them. In fact, I’m quite fond of them. When I lived in Burnaby in the 1990s, my son and I owned a Pit Bull bitch named Ashley, and she was a wonderful dog. So I’m not against Pit Bulls per-se. It seems wise to me to be cautious when my dog is just the right size to be Pit Bull lunch.

Pit Bulls are way over-represented in the population as a whole. There are statistics on pet ownership available from the American Veterinary Medical Association that put the number of dogs in the US at around 72 million. Another statistic I saw said that there were 4.5 million Pit Bulls registered and probably twice that many unregistered. If that’s true, it means that every eighth dog in the country is a Pit Bull. Many of those dogs won’t technically be Pits, I suspect. They must have lumped in crosses, Staffordshire Terriers and so on. Still, that’s a lot of dogs.

What I don’t trust is their owners and their training. In Vancouver the usual scene was a young man being dragged down the street by a large dog. Dog and man are often connected by a heavy chain and the turkey often has the chain wrapped around his hand. Obviously, no knowledge of dogs and no respect for his hands. Its obvious that part of the macho impression he is trying to convey is that he is strong enough to control an untrained, dangerous dog and everybody had better give him a wide berth.

Here’s an excerpt from the Terrierman Article:

Pit Bull owners are more likely to be criminal, young, and ignorant than the average dog owner.

Clifton is too nice a fellow to say it that way, but Pit Bull owners themselves say it, don’t they?

Isn’t that the subtext of the Pit Bull apologists refrain that, “it’s not the dog, but the owner”?

Right.

But actually it’s the dog and the owner. Put amped-up canine genetics together with sub-par human intelligence, and sprinkle denial over all of it, and you get America’s Pit Bull mess.

Or, as Clifton puts it:

The central behavioral issue involving pit bulls is not a matter of “nature versus nurture,” but rather a matter of inherently problematic dogs being acquired by inherently problematic people, who then keep and train the dogs in a manner that multiplies the risk factors.

Bingo.

Pit Bulls in shelters

Pit Bulls are generally the most common dogs in shelters. When times get tough, people tend to get rid of their dogs, especially large breeds that are expensive to maintain. Another reason Pit Bulls are so common in shelters is because of factors listed in the excerpt. The tough guy types that love Pit Bulls as a symbol of their own machismo are often unable to provide a stable living situation for themselves, let alone provide special conditions to keep the dogs in. Their lives move from crisis to crisis and the dogs are often abandoned along the way or apprehended.

Only 3.3% of the dogs advertised for sale online are pit bulls, implying that only about 3.3% of all the dogs sold are pit bulls. Yet more than 16% of the dogs adopted from animal shelters since 2007 have been pit bulls, meaning that shelters are persuading adopters to choose pit bulls at about five times the rate that dog purchasers choose to buy pit bulls when they buy dogs from breeders.

Despite that extraordinary rate of success in pit bull placement, however, about 75% of the pit bulls and pit mixes arriving at shelters are killed, either due to dangerous behavior or simply because shelters are receiving pit bulls in ever-escalating volume. Each year from a third to 45% of the total U.S. pit bull population enters an animal shelter, a phenomenon never seen with any other dog breed….

The net effect of this is that Pit Bulls are also killed in disproportionate numbers. In 2010, 930,000 Pit Bulls were put down. Something needs to be done to cut down the number of Pit Bulls in the population as well as to increase the skill level of Pit Bull owners.

I don’t know what the answer will turn out to be. The approach that was put forward in the Terrierman article was a tax on the sale of the dogs, coupled with a very aggressive sterilization program. If that could be done it would certainly go a long way towards solving the problem of too many Pit Bulls. The only difficulty I see with this, is that it would only work on breeders and owners who were at least semi-legitimate and would leave the biggest source of the problem out of the  equation.

The simple fact is that the mix of dogs in the population and the way those dogs live is a direct reflection of what is going on in society as whole. Since I’m not an American, I can’t even begin to offer a solution and it would be presumptuous of me to do so. It does seem obvious, though, that as long as there is a segment of society that idolizes violence, weapons and rejects any kind of social control, that their dogs would suffer the same type of life as their owners. Unfortunately for Pit Bulls, they are the dogs of choice for this type of person.

The 2010 Winter Olympic Games were hosted at Whistler last year, and one of the popular attractions were the dog sled tours. When the games ended it was expected that business would continue to flourish, but that didn’t happen. Three companies wound up duking it out for the business. One of the biggest contenders for top spot was Howling Dogs of Whistler, a subsidiary of Outdoor Adventures. They had the biggest operation of the three and they were the first victim of the competition.

What do you do with the dogs when a company like that goes under? The answer turns out to be: kill them. That’s exactly what happened in Whistler last May.

The whole story of how the dogs died is just now coming to light. The reason it’s getting any coverage at all is because of the way it took place. A big hole was dug in the ground and all the dogs were shot or had their throats cut and were then tossed into the hole. The employee who did the deed was so traumatized that he registered with the Workman’s Compensation because of PTSD.

This kind of event is common in the dog mushing business. Its so common that Outdoor Adventures had no problem correcting the story. When it first broke, the number of dogs killed was listed as 70. Outdoor Adventures said that the actual number was one hundred, saw nothing wrong with culling 100 dogs, but threw the employee under the bus about the way the dogs were dispatched.

Everybody is expressing shock and outrage now, but, before we break out the tar and feathers there are some things to keep in mind.

For one thing, sled dogs are very difficult to rehome. This is because of their training and socialization, not their breeding. Basically, the only place a sled dog can go is to someone else in the business. He can’t just be adopted to a loving home and chase butterflies for the rest of his life. It takes a lot of retraining and desensitization before they can be adopted. They have lived their entire lives either working or on tethers, so its hard to make pets out of them. Howling Dogs advertised for months trying to find people to adopt some and got no takers. For more information about rehoming sled dogs read this article from 680 news, Healthy sled dogs slaughtered in Whistler. There’s a podcast on the page interviewing a dog musher from Prince George about the whole incident that provides an excellent look into the dog sled business.

Well then the dogs should have been euthanized by a vet, I hear you say. There are two things wrong with this idea, one cultural and one economic.

Here in British Columbia there is a strict policy by vets against the euthanization of healthy animals. I’m not saying that they couldn’t have found someone to do it, but it wouldn’t have been easy or cheap. Even if they had a vet that would do the deed, it probably would have cost around five thousand dollars to put that many dogs down. Outdoors Unlimited now condemns what happened, but they are a business and they haven’t reported that they offered to send a vet of their own or pay a local one to kill the dogs. It was strictly the employee’s problem.

Bottom line is that the employee was stuck in a situation where
1. He had one hundred dogs to feed and care for
2. Didn’t have money for food
3. Couldn’t give the dogs away
4. Had no way of disposing of the dogs humanely.
He was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place.

This type of thing happens with other animals all the time. Horses that aren’t of use anymore go to the knackers. There isn’t any channel set up to handle surplus dogs.

The SPCA is beating its chest now and wants the poor fellow hung out to dry, but they are in no position to provide a better alternative. The sudden addition of 100 sled dogs would have brought the system to its knees, especially with a no kill policy in place in shelters across the province.

New Information on this story

When I wrote the first draft of this story my impression was that Howling Dogs was no longer in business. That isn’t the case. They are still operating. The hundred dogs that were killed were not the whole pack as I thought. In fact, they had 256 dogs and had received bad vet reports on the way the dogs were being cared for. The remaining 156 are being better cared for and are doing well. December report says remaining dogs are safe. The SPCA is insisting that they were never approached about finding homes for the dogs, but this seems to be contradicted by reports from other sources. The RCMP is conducting a criminal investigation. Outdoor Adventures is now saying that they only took over the company after the herd had been thinned.

The real story, to me, is that there is an entire industry in which dogs are simply property to be used and then discarded when their usefulness is at an end. Color me naive, I guess. The word they use for this is culling and its such a normal part of the business that even the SPCA has no problem with the act, but only with the way it was carried out. This is what happens when dogs are regarded simply as property.  At some point the human race has to rethink the way we treat the animals we partner with.

Finally, there is total condemnation of the way these dogs were killed. Everybody is agreed that he’s a bad man and should have done something different, but nobody has stepped forward to say exactly what his better alternative was.

Here are some links to local stories in the press about this:
Sled Dog Watchdog – web site devoted to sled dog advocacy.
Dog-sled tour operator had plenty of choices
Rival dog-sled companies slam mass cull of Outdoor Adventures’ dogs
Massacre horrifies B.C.: Man shoots 100 sled dogs ‘execution-style’ after Olympic slowdown
Healthy sled dogs slaughtered in Whistler