SHAMELESS DOG POST

Note that they match the kitchen.

SQUEEEEEEEEEE!

Via Life With Dogs

Merry Christmas to All!

For Maximum Creepy, Just Add Coyotes

I just finished reading Susan Hill's The Woman in Black for the Slaves of Golconda, where I've just become a contributor. I'll be writing of post for Slaves within the next few days but for now I'd just like to comment on Hill's use of atmosphere. The Woman in Black is centered on a bleak old house in the wild, desolate English swamps. Ruins of an ancient monastery and crumbling graveyard are also located on the property. It's so reminiscent of "The Fall of the House of Usher" that I literally expected the house to, well, fall. But one thing that struck me as I was reading this book was the eerie sounds the protagonist often heard at night, alone in an isolated house alleged to be haunted. A child's scream, a disembodied whistle, the clip-clop of a ghostly horse.

Last night, while in laying in bed by an open window, I was awakened by a chorus of mad pipers. Crazed howlings spiraled out from the dark woods, winding higher and higher and reaching a piercing, fevered pitch.

I love coyotes, but they can be so creepy!

Wolves are such a cliché in fantasy and mythology. (So are felines, to a lesser extent, particularly lions.) Many have waxed poetic about the primal cry of the wolf, and werewolves are second only to vampires and zombies as pop culture's monster of choice. But what about coyotes? I know Patricia Briggs has an urban fantasy series about a werecoyote, but other than that, coyotes are so underrepresented! It really makes no sense - wolves are borderline endangered, whereas coyotes are found everywhere imaginable, from cities (Chicago has a large population) to suburbs to snowy mountains to the tropics. Millions from Alaska down to Central America are familiar with their yips, yaps, and howls and their haunting resonance through the night. So why, I wonder, are they so absent from fiction? They have so much potential!

Think of how much scarier The Woman in Black, or "The Fall of the House of Usher" or any other horror classic would be with coyote noises!

(This coyote is supposed to be expressing happiness but doesn't he just sound like he's in pain?)

WIN!

I finally had a LOLdog I made make it to the homepage! I was inspired by this picture of a selfish cat.

Dogs vs. Cats

From the LOLcats site, of course.

Wordless Wednesday

"Thunder" from the Daily Coyote. Photographed by Shreve Stockton.

For more about Wordless Wednesday, click here.

"The Coyote and the Cowboy"

The Eastern Coyote

It should come as no secret by now that I love coyotes. I have mentioned before that we have them here in upstate New York and that I can often hear them singing together in the woods at night. Just two days ago they came very near the house, practically in our backyard, around 8:30 in the evening. I was upstairs at the time and wanted very badly to see them, so I yelled at my sister to turn on the outside lights. So what did she do? She flashed the floodlight and scared them away! She said she doesn't want them eating Kelsey, to which I said, what are you talking about, at forty-two pounds Kelsey is bigger than they are! No she's not, my sister replied. These coyotes are huge!

Well no wonder. It turns out that the Eastern coyote isn't actually a real coyote!

Coyotes are not native to this area of the country. Mark Twain, traveling West during the Civil War, had never before seen a "cayote" until somewhere west of Nebraska, as described in his travel memoir Roughing It. Unfortunately, he isn't much kinder to the "prairie wolf" than he was to the Goshoot Indians. According to Twain,

The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.

He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely!—so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. . .

He will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-frequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat anything they can bite. It is a curious fact that these latter are the only creatures known to history who will eat nitro-glycerine and ask for more if they survive.

Of course, Twain became disillusioned with the Wild West in general and would sardonically tear down every last myth associated with the American frontier as the journey progressed. But Twain was partially correct in stating that coyotes will consume just about anything, although he errs in claiming that they subsist wholly on carcasses. Not only do they help maintain rodent and feral cat populations, they will also eat birdseed, pet food, fruits, vegetables, garbage, roadkill, leftovers at picnic sites, entrail piles left by hunters, fawns, foxes, geese, rabbits, skunks, annoying little yip-yap dogs, and other small mammals. In short, coyotes "take great advantage of an evolved mammalian trait too often derided by humans as lack of conviction or commitment: mental flexibility, a willingness to live with uncertainty and unpredictability so that more alternative courses of action are opened." Far from mocking them as Twain did, coyotes deserve our admiration. (Coyotes can also be either diurnal or nocturnal and can adjust their litter sizes depending on habitat conditions.) Unfortunately, when it comes to flexibility in humans, this trait is often regarded as cowardly wavering, a disapproving perspective we are all too willing to apply to animals as well. According to the "English poet John Keats [this is a] 'negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.'" I am sure Twain would agree.

Not only are they willing to alter their habits, coyotes are apparently happy to modify their physical makeup as well. There is now evidence that coyotes moved into the American Northeast through Canada, where they interbred with Canada's dwindling wolf population and eventually usurped their territory. As a result, the genetic makeup of the Eastern coyote is roughly ten to fifteen percent gray wolf. This accounts for their large size when compared to the normal coyotes who live in their original habitat, Mexico, the American West, and Central America. Shreve Stockton of The Daily Coyote has stated that her Charlie, a pure coyote, weighs around thirty pounds, "despite a diet that any coyote would envy" (they live in Wyoming). Eastern coyotes, by contrast, generally weigh about 35-45 pounds, with some larger males as big as 50-60 pounds.



(Oddly enough, it seems that domesticated dogs may have contributed to the gene pool of both the wolf and coyote in North America.)

The first sighting of a coyote in New York State occurred in the 1920s, and their numbers have been exponentially increasing ever since. To this day, however, I have yet to actually see one even though I hear them all the time at night. Coyotes are notoriously shy, which can only add to their image problem. All too often, they are often seen as "the idiot savant of the animal kingdom: as conniving as Machiavelli and as dumb as dirt." In reality, their elusive nature betrays a sharp intelligence that has helped them become the only large predator to thrive in the modern world.



(To read the article accompanying the first video, click here.

Introducing the Girls

Since I've previously expressed great love for all manner of canines, I thought I'd introduce you to my own doggies. You'll have to forgive the image quality - these were taken with my cell phone because I'm really lame and don't own a digital camera.


This is Kelsey, a 10-year-old Lab/Springer Spaniel mix who weighs 40 pounds. As you can see in this photo, she is very sweet and submissive. But that didn't stop her from treeing a bear when she was a puppy.


This is Sunnie, a 9-year-old Lab (75 lbs.) with just enough Chow to give her a ridiculously fluffy coat, a black mottled tongue, and an ATTITUDE. She is a female Marley who to this day will not even come when she is called (although she knows very well what "treat" means). She is an Alpha female who is very friendly towards people and Kelsey, but domineering and aggressive with other dogs.


Ooooh yes. You are at the V-E-T for your S-H-O-T-S.


Sunnie when she weighed 90 pounds. She was put on a diet and subsequently lost 15 pounds.

God's Dog: The North American Coyote (A Review)

A few weeks back, I posted an especially endearing passage from Hope Ryden's God's Dog: The North American Coyote. I felt it superbly illustrated what a wonderful creature this much-maligned predator actually is.

The excerpt also exhibited Ryden's strong dedication to her subject. She spent two years camping, often under difficult conditions, in isolated backwater areas of Montana and Wyoming, watching her coyotes for hours while trying not to alert them of her presence (not an easy thing to accomplish – they have excellent smell and hearing). At one point, her life became endangered when she got lost in deep snow. But most impressive is that she was actually able to keep of track specific individuals over the course of months. How she was able to recognize them after being away for weeks is beyond me, but the insights she gained as a result are well worth the effort and will doubtlessly transform any reader into a coyote lover as their eyes are opened to their hidden world. Coyotes are, after all, notoriously secretive, a trait that has undeniably contributed to their plentiful numbers and incredible adaptability. The puppy chapter is as adorable as expected (Dad is at one point described as "long-suffering"), although the parents' poor treatment of the "nanny" is rather sad. They also seem to have the astonishing ability to produce a mouse on demand for their babies to play with.

Although Ryden's focus was wild populations, a brief section that focused on "pet" coyotes is also highly informative. There was the female, for example, who took a black Lab as her mate for life and had a black puppy by him. Ryden's skills as a writer, as well as her obvious admiration for the animal, are at their best when she relates the story of beautiful Amber, whose mute sorrow tells of her betrayal by the humans who were meant to care for her. Charlie fans will certainly enjoy being able to compare Shreve Stockton's experiences.

It was actually Stockton's blog The Daily Coyote that first got me interested in the species, but it is God's Dog that contains all the requisite "technical" information that puts Charlie in greater context. Although the book was published in 1989, the field research was done in the mid-70's, which is reflected at times in Ryden's prose, particularly when she launches on a sort of hippie-esque rant about how the white man destroyed everything. But then again, her reports on the cruelty of "pest control" programs, as well as individual humans, may well prove her point. The bit about using guard dogs to watch sheep sounded very promising (instead of killing coyotes, they will often enact canine dominance rituals) and I wonder how widespread that has become since then. They should really come out with an updated edition, especially since the coyote's habitat has now expanded to all of North and Central America. Today, a book like this is more vital than ever.


But of course! "Crimes against humanity"! Let us all bow our heads and have a moment of silence in remembrance of a dark time in history, when a fanatical pack of coyotes rounded up millions of hunters and transported them to the gas chambers of Andersonville.

(Photos are from the Flickr group Honoring Coyotes.)

4 teh LOLZ

So here are some more pics I made for the LOLcats website. This madness probably needs to stop.





Anyone else notice that the more time you spend at that place, the more you start TALKING like it???

The Daily Coyote (A Review)

Back in November, shortly after the election, I blogged about The Daily Coyote, a website I had read about in a recent issue of People magazine and fallen in love with. Shreve Stockton is both an amazing woman and a highly talented photographer. Add that to a hunky cowboy boyfriend and an absolutely loveable menagerie of animals – Eli (cat), Charlie (coyote), and Chloe (dog) – and the result is irresistible. It's the ultimate off-the-grid fantasy. A book deal was inevitable.

The Daily Coyote, Internet version, definitely gives the impression of interspecies harmony of epic cuteness proportions. (A cat that bosses a coyote! Cuddly puppy! SQUEEEE!) There is a brief note of unrest, nevertheless, that comes in around February 2008, when Stockton briefly noted that Charlie's growing maturity had called upon her to become stronger and more assertive in order to maintain her alpha status. Also intriguing is the identity of the "MC," or My Cowboy, who is frequently mentioned as a coyote expert and dog owner but remains otherwise mysterious. And although Shreve is first and foremost a photographer, the written portions of the website – which originated as a blog here on Blogger – have always hinted at a strong writing ability as well. So what the book The Daily Coyote does is to basically fill in the cracks and answer everyone's burning questions, such as: Just what led a city girl to a Wyoming town of 300? What happened to the rest of Charlie's family? Where did Eli and Chloe come from? How did Shreve and MC meet, and what exactly is their relationship?

Actually, Shreve's prose gets a bit "purple" at times over the course of the book but the overall result is nevertheless a truly wonderful memoir that is as much about its authoress, the surrounding "big sky" West, and the hardy folks who live there as it is about Charlie. For the first several chapters, the story is wonderfully human and endearing; especially once Shreve acquires that tiny orphaned coyote who can barely open his eyes. The ensuing events will be familiar to anyone who's read the blog, but the book enables Shreve to go more in-depth, not only with regards to Charlie, but also her relationship with Mike ("MC") and his tragic past. Even when she actually incorporates written blog entries (such as this one) into the narrative, the surrounding context fleshes them out, whereas previously they were isolated islands on a photography-oriented site.

And obviously it is the photographs that are just the apex – so much so that having a pet coyote suddenly seems desirable. In fact, this was doubtlessly an issue of no small concern to those more familiar with wild animals. But that is really where the real value of the book comes in. I've mentioned that I more or less fell in love with coyotes thanks to Charlie, but finally reading The Daily Coyote was like a dash of cold water. Because Charlie grew up and became, well, a wild predator. In last week's live chat on Blog TV, Shreve stated that the January chapter was the hardest for her to write because it meant reliving such a difficult time in her life. And it is indeed acutely heartbreaking, even though the reader already knows that everything turned out all right.

But it also makes Eli seem all the more totally awesome. We already know that Charlie has never, ever challenged him for status, but reading about his troubles in that arena with Shreve seriously drives the point home. I was always one of those dog people who hated cats, but Eli has forced me to reevaluate that opinion. Now that cat is EPIC.

I was none too fond of memoirs either, nor was I ever one of those people ever to be inspired by another human being. (I'm kind of misanthropic like that.) But Shreve changed that for me. That woman is amazing on so many levels and I strongly recommend listening to this interview she did with motivational speaker Sue Thompson. Equally impressive is how understanding and respectful she is of the ranchers in her area, with regards to their feelings about the coyotes who eat their livestock. Her boyfriend (MC) even kills sheep-preying coyotes for a living! But definitely the general theme of The Daily Coyote is the holistic interconnectedness of nature, something that cannot be understood until one is forced to confront the elements and endure the hardships that come along with living on the edge. It's powerful stuff.

We romanticize that wild animals enjoy an idyllic life of freedom, when really, they are fighting to survive, for food and shelter and safety and against the infringements of man. Death serves in nature. The soil is fortified by the bones; animals and birds and bugs live off the carcass. In nature, there is honor in being eaten. To me, the poached deer was beautiful in providing its body to the living animals that were trying to survive. And I believe this works on a human level as well, although it is somewhat taboo in our society. I believe we can learn to use death, and let the gifts of the dead help us to become stronger. Our society responds to death by mourning, and usually, mourning is the stopping place. It is not the stopping place. I believe there is nourishment and strength to be found, if only we were not so afraid of it.

The book closes, however, to the tune of rebirth, in April, as Shreve considers acquiring a puppy-sister for Charlie. That is not, of course, the end, and there will hopefully be no end for a long, long time. Even after the reading is finished, there will always be more photos on The Daily Coyote to look forward to! Do, do, do read this book!

Also recommended: Hope Ryden's God's Dog: The North American Coyote as a companion book.

Note: Shreve's photographs on The Daily Coyote are copyrighted, so I am not going to reproduce them here. You will have to visit the website.

I can however, give you this wonderful video of Charlie and Chloe playing!

My New Dream Pet

Ever since I discovered The Daily Coyote, I've been wanting my very own canis latrans. Although I knew that it was very unrealistic, I thought a pet coyote sounded just so awesome! But reading the book and learning of Charlie's aggression issues has since put a damper on my enthusiasm.

But then I discovered the adorable fennec fox, native of the African deserts, who typically weighs only around 3-5 lbs, about half of that in the ears. But despite being a wild animal, it can indeed be kept as a pet!

How wonderful!






Photo sources: floridapfe on Flickr and the National Zoo

Poor Cute Doggies

A horrible video. How can people be so cruel?

A Passage from Hope Ryden's God's Dog

For the past few days I have been reading a wonderful book by Hope Ryden called God's Dog: The North American Coyote. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in these beautiful, intelligent creatures who mate monogamously for life. Here is an excerpt:

While speculating on these questions, I watched the greeting ceremony of the pair. Buff [a female coyote] scrunched down and waggled back and forth under the male's chin, puppy fashion. Each time she turned, she licked his muzzle and coquettishly brushed his chest with her hip. Then she seated herself squarely in front of him, raised her right foot, and pawed him entreatingly. She reminded me of a self-satisfied little dog who, certain that her behavior merits reward, actively solicits a response from her master.

And she got it. Suddenly the male broke into the most lyrical coyote song I had yet heard. For a few seconds Buff seemed rapt. Then she tilted her long nose in the air and joined in. Without repeating a phrase, they improvised a duet in which the two never sounded the same note. When the male inadvertently slid into a pitch Buff was holding, she instantly dropped two whole notes. And when she opted for the note he was sustaining, the male broke into a falsetto.

Although the two animals were so distant from me that when I was not viewing them through my spotscope they were barely discernible, their music filled the valley, bouncing back from so many directions that, had I not known where to look, I could not have located its source. If this magnificent duet had a natural purpose other than the pleasure it obviously gave its improvisers, it perhaps served to announce to Fang [a female coyote Buff had fought with] or any other potential rivals within earshot that a bond existed between these two animals.

Photos from the Flickr group Honoring Coyotes.

Another LOL!

I have made yet another coyote picture for LOLcats (only this time I submitted it to the LOLdogs section). You can view the original photo here.

My LOL!

Just made this for the LOLcats website. I REALLY wanted to use an image from The Daily Coyote, but, alas, those pics are all copyrighted. But I found this in the Wikipedia coyote article. According to its description page, it was taken by a woman who goes by the screen name emdot and was originally posted on Flickr. It's licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0, which basically means you're free to remix and reuse, as long as you attribute the original author (which I did).

Anyone familiar with the insanity that is LOLcats should recognize the allusion to this iconic image.

Coyote Cuteness

I got the new issue of People magazine yesterday because of the Barack Obama cover story. But what I found more interesting was the article about Shreve Stockton, a professional Wyoming-based photographer, and her pet coyote Charlie, whom she rescued when he was ten days old. I checked out her blog, The Daily Coyote, and it is so incredibly adorable!

I know people usually think of coyotes as being from the wide open spaces of the West, but we actually have them here in upstate New York as well. My house is located in a semirural area and we hear the coyotes almost nightly. I've never actually seen one up close - they seem to keep to the woods - but their howling is one of the eeriest sounds I've ever heard. Unlike wolves, coyotes are mostly solitary except for when they hunt, which they do as a pack. First you hear a frenzied yipping, like a horde of mad pipers, then they start their oooOOOOOOOOOoooing. I could write a Gothic novel with unseen coyotes as a particularly ominous aspect of melancholy atmosphere.

Charlie, however, despite the difficulties inherent to keeping a wild predator as a pet, seems to have none of that coyote creepiness. Although Stockton says he had some adolescent aggression issues, he is now obviously a loving member of her animal menagerie (which includes a puppy named Chloe and an Alpha-cat named Eli). In some photos he just looks like an ordinary happy doggy. The coyotes I've seen around here from a distance were all scraggy and mangy, but Charlie is so pretty! He looks kind of like an overgrown fox crossed with a wolf. And the puppy pictures! Soooo very cute.

It's too bad those photos are copyrighted, cuz there's some great LOLcat potential there! ("Bein a coyoteh. Ur doin it wrong.") I mean, when you think about it, wolves get all the attention – of both myth and kitsch (see left) – while coyotes are either ignored or shot at. It's about time they had someone like Charlie representin'. He sounds like such a sweetheart. Shreve is so lucky.

(Oh, and if she could give me this guy's number, that would be great too.)