YORKIES

The real name for Yorkies is Yorkshire Terriers, but most people just call them "Yorkies."  I think this is probably because "Yorkshire Terrier" is way too long a name for such a little dog.  In 2011, Yorkies were the 5th most popular dog breed in the U.S., according to the AKC.  This is likely because (1) they are really cute, and (2) they are so small that you can just stick one in your purse and take it along wherever you go.

Before the 19th century, there was no such thing as a Yorkshire Terrier.  But then what happened was that some Scottish people moved into northern England so they could get work in the cotton and woolen mills.  These people brought several types of small terriers with them, and the dogs were used to hunt mice and rats in the mills.

Nobody knows exactly which terriers were bred together to make Yorkies, but the Paisley Terrier was probably part of the mix because of its long, silky coat.  Also there might have been some Maltese bred in.  Anyway, the terrier that breeders ended up with was different from other terriers, and it became a whole new breed, the Yorkshire Terrier.

Mrs. Foster's "Huddersfield Ben"
and Lady Giffard's "Katie"

One of the most famous Yorkies ever was named Huddersfield Ben.  An authority on the breed wrote that "Huddersfield Ben was the best stud dog of his breed during his life-time, and one of the most remarkable dogs of any pet breed that ever lived; and most of the show specimens of the present day have one or more crosses of his blood in their pedigree."  Of course, nowadays we know that it's not such a good idea to use one sire so much because it limits the breed's gene pool, but back then people weren't thinking about stuff like that.  All the Yorkshire Terrier breeders wanted their puppies to look like Ben, and he started being called the "father of the breed."

Yorkies first came to North America in 1872, and the AKC registered the first one in 1885.  The breed was really popular during the Victorian Era, both in the U.K. and in the U.S.  But by the 1940s, people weren't wanting small dogs so much anymore, and the percentage of toy breeds registered was only 18%.  But then Smoky, the little Yorkshire Terrier who became a famous war dog, made people get interested in the breed again.  I told you the story of Smoky already and you can read it here, just in case you forgot it.

The coat of a Yorkshire Terrier is supposed to be silky, straight, and glossy.  In show dogs, the coat is grown out long and parted down the middle of the back.  The color is dark gray or steel blue, except on the head, chest, and legs, where it is tan.  Sometimes Yorkies have coats that are more wooly or cottony or are an off-color.  These dogs are not shown or bred, but they make perfectly good pets, of course.

When Yorkie puppies are born, they are black with tan points on the muzzle, eyes, ears, legs, and feet.  The black turns blue-gray as the dog gets older, but it might take three years for the coat to reach its final color.

Yorkshire Terriers usually have a lot of personality.  They are active, love attention, and are sometimes overprotective.  They are spunky and smart, and they trot around in a sassy, confident way.  Their temperament is not as soft as what some other lap dogs have.  Yorkies like to bark, which makes them good watchdogs.

The breed standard says that Yorkies should weigh between 5 and 7 pounds.  There are "teacup" Yorkies who only weigh about 3 pounds, but these tiny dogs may only live 3--7 years.  A normal-sized Yorkie will have a life span anywhere from 12 to 17 years.

The main health problems that Yorkies have are bronchitis, lymphangiactasia, portosystemic shunt, cataracts, and keratitis sicca.  I don't know what some of this stuff is, so if you want to know about it, you will have to look it up yourself.  Yorkies don't tolerate anesthesia very well, and they are more likely to be hurt or killed by falls, other dogs, or their owners' clumsiness.  Which means that if you have a Yorkie, you should be really careful not to sit on it or drop it or anything like that.

Oh, and one other reason why people probably like Yorkies is because they are just the right size to dress up with cute little clothes.  And also you can put bows in their hair.  So if you're into that kind of thing, you might want to get yourself a Yorkie.  And if you're not, well, you can use your Yorkie to catch any mice that get into your house.

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BAD NEWS FOR PETS AND VETS!

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) just did a great big survey of 50,000 American households to find out what's new in the world of pet ownership.  The results of this survey turned out to be rather shocking, because they show that pet ownership is DOWN for the first time in 20 years!  The AVMA does this study every 4 or 5 years because they want to know if anybody will still be bringing their animals to the vet clinic and paying to have them taken care of.  Because if nobody is going to do this, the veterinarians might as well start looking for some other kind of job!






Anyway, here is what the most recent survey learned about pet ownership between 2006 and 2011:

-- There are 1.9% fewer households with dogs
-- There are 6.2% fewer with cats
-- There are 16.7% fewer with horses
-- There are 20.5% fewer with birds
-- 36.5% of all households have at least one dog
-- 30.4% of all households own cats
-- The total cat population is about 74.1 million
-- The total dog population is about 70 million

One thing the survey didn't ask people was the reason why they have fewer pets than they used to.  So the AVMA had to come up with some theories to explain this sad trend.  One theory is that the Bad Economy has made it harder for people to afford pets.  So when their dog or cat or hamster dies, they don't get a new one.  Or sometimes people have to give up their pets because they can't buy them food and vaccinations anymore.

Another theory is that younger people are more interested in electronic stuff like iPhones and iPads instead of in playing with dogs and cats.  Also, some people like to travel, and they don't want to worry about what to do with their pets while they are gone.  

Okay, now here's the part about how much people spend on their animals at the vet's office:

-- Veterinary visits for dogs increased by 9.2% to 130.4 million
-- Veterinary visits for cats decreased 4.4% to 60.5 million
-- Dog owners spent $19.1 billion, which was 18.6% more than in 2006
-- Cat owners spent $7.4 billion, which was only up 4.2%
-- Total veterinary spending for dogs and cats went up 14% to $26.5 billion
-- Spending in 2011 for all pets, including horses, was $28 billion

These numbers sound pretty good, but if you adjust for inflation, then spending has stayed about the same.  Also, a lot of pets didn't go see the veterinarian at all during 2011.  Nineteen percent of dog households didn't visit the vet in 2011, which was up from 17% in 2006.  For cat households, 45% said they didn't go to the vet.  In 2006 it was 36%.  Personally, I think it would be a fine idea to take a year off from going to the vet's office, but Mom totally disagrees, even after I explained that it would save her money.  Sigh.

But anyway, while all these dogs and cats were staying home from the clinic, the number of small-animal veterinarians has been going up.  By 2007, there were 44,785, which was 48% more than in 1996.  I don't know how many there are now, but probably even more than that.

So here are the biggest problems I see in this whole situation:

1.  There are way too many homeless animals already, and now there are getting to be even more of them because people are giving up their pets, and fewer people can afford to adopt.  Which means too many dogs and cats end up getting put to sleep.

2.  There are more veterinarians than there are jobs, partly because people don't have as many pets now, and partly because people aren't taking their dogs and cats to the vet's office as often.


I wish I knew how to solve these problems, but I don't, and it is making me tired just to think about them, so the only thing I know to do is go take a nap now!

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MOM'S CONVENTION, Part 3

I am happy to tell you that this is the last blog entry about that convention thing Mom went to last week.    After this, I will be able to write about dogs and extinct animals and weird words and all the kinds of stuff I usually like to write about.

So anyway, on Thursday night at the convention, there was this event called "Authors' Night," and a bunch of people who wrote books were there trying to sell them.  Also there were some yummy snacks to eat and a bar where you could get drinks, and two guys were singing and playing instruments.  The two guys were called the Gum Springs Serenaders.  One of them played a banjo, and the other one played a fiddle, which is just another word for a violin.

After Mom ate some goodies and bought some books that she probably won't ever find time to read, she went and listened to the music.  Then she asked the banjo player why there were no frets on the neck of his banjo.  He said that was how they used to make them, and he said the banjo came from Africa originally.  Well, I think that is pretty cool, since basenjis also came from Africa originally, as I might have mentioned before.

Anyway, the man also told Mom that banjos were first made by slaves, but then white people started using them in comic acts in minstrel shows.  These white people painted their faces black and then they made fun of black people.  So the real black people stopped playing the banjo and started playing the guitar instead.

The banjo player at the convention wanted to know if anybody had a request for a song, and Mom asked if they had already played "Sweet Betsy from Pike."  He said they hadn't played it, and they had a version they could play.  He told Mom that that song came from England, and it had several different versions, including the one that most people know, which is mostly about going west in a covered wagon.  But since these two guys play music from before the Civil War, they sang "Sweet Betsy" with all different words.

 Here's a picture of the book room at the convention.  There weren't really a lot of books that Mom wanted to buy, but she did buy two there.  The rest of the books she got were in the silent auction.

One lady had a whole bunch of interesting old clothing from the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.  Every day she had some clothes on display from a different decade.

Also, this lady wore some old-style dresses that she had made, and she said she would make dresses for anybody that wanted her to.  You could pick the fabric and the pattern you wanted her to use.  Mom did not ask the lady to make her a dress because Mom doesn't really have any places to wear clothes like that.  Mom didn't even ask how much it costs to have a dress made.  I am sure that Mom would rather spend the money on dog food, and that's why she didn't ask.

The day that Mom was taking pictures of old authentic clothes was the day that the 1840s clothes were on display.  Here is a very pretty dress that you might wear on a nice occasion.

And here is the corset you had to wear under your dress to make you look small and slender.  After you got it laced up, you pretty much couldn't take any deep breaths the rest of the day.  Besides the corset, you had to wear a chemise and a couple of petticoats and a hoop skirt, at least during the 1860s.  It took lots and lots of fabric to make all these items of clothing, as you can imagine.

This is a bonnet, and in the background, there is a wedding dress.

In this photo, you can see a girl's dress and shoes.  Also there is a boy's jacket and trousers.

If you were just hanging out at home, you could wear something a little more comfortable, such as this dress, and you didn't have to wear a corset under it.  But if somebody suddenly showed up to pay a visit, you would have to put on a nicer dress or else pretend you weren't home.



So I will just end this by saying that people really dressed funny back in those days.  But at least they didn't dress their dogs up in goofy costumes, or at least we don't have any evidence to show that they did.  And that's a very good thing!

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MOM'S CONVENTION, Part 2

Today I am going to tell you about covered wagons, because when people used to travel halfway across the country to Oregon and California, they went in wagons.  If SUVs and interstate highways had been invented, I'm sure people would have traveled that way instead.  But sadly, nobody had thought them up yet.

Anyway, at the convention, there was an entire covered wagon that came right in through the double doors of the hotel.  Mom was there when the wagon arrived, and she held one of the doors open, but she did not pull the wagon because she did not want to feel like an ox.  At first, the wagon wasn't covered, but then the lady who owns it set up the hoops and put the cover over them.  That's what people used to do, back in the old days.  They started out with an ordinary farm wagon, and then they put up hoops, and they covered the hoops with canvas.  And that was the recipe for making a covered wagon.

Some people slept in their wagons, but usually the wagons were all full of stuff like food and furniture. So most people slept in tents or just out in the open.  Here's a picture of some of the bedding that people might have had in their wagons, such as quilts and pillows.  In my opinion, it would not be good to travel with your bedding hanging out of the back of the wagon like this because it would get all dirty and wet.  But Mom told me the quilt was hanging out of the wagon like that for display purposes only.

You had to have a lot of food in your wagon in order to make it all the way to Oregon or California without starving to death.  Mostly, people ate beans and bacon and biscuits and stuff like that.  Also they drank a lot of coffee.  Mom took a picture of some stuff that might have been in covered wagons.  Of course, there would have been great big bags and barrels of it, and not just these tiny little sacks.  Mom thinks that what's in these bags is corn meal, oats, corn, coffee, and maybe some kind of beans.  But she could be wrong because she says she is a city girl who is used to buying her food at the grocery store.

In this next photo, you can see the sort of dress like pioneer women wore.  Also they wore sunbonnets because they didn't have any sunglasses or sunscreen.

And these are the kind of shoes that women wore back then.  I think these shoes would fall apart before you could walk all the way to Oregon in them, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

If you have ever read any diaries that people wrote when they were traveling west on the trails, you will notice that they usually say how many miles they went each day.  Mom used to wonder how they knew the distance, but then she finally learned that some wagons had odometers on them.  Of course, then she wondered what an odometer for a wagon would look like.  But guess what!  The wagon at the convention actually had one of these odometers, and here's a picture that Mom took of it.

In order to make my blog more interesting and educational, I did about 15 minutes of in-depth research on how odometers got invented, and here's what I learned:  The rear wheel of a regular-sized covered wagon, which was 10' long and 4' wide, turned 360 times to travel one mile.  Before odometers were invented, a rag or ribbon was tied to one spoke of the wheel, and somebody had to walk beside the wheel and count how many times it went around.  I think if I had to do this, I would always be losing count.  But since I'm a dog, nobody would expect me to be able to count to 360 anyway!

Well, in 1847, some very clever Mormans named William Clayton and Orson Pratt were on their way to Utah, and they got tired of counting how many times the red rag went around when the wheel turned.  So they designed a "roadometer" with a series of cogwheels that counted how many times a wagon wheel turned.  A carpenter named Appleton Milo Harmon built the device, and it was used for the first time on May 12, 1847.

The roadometer could count up to 10 miles, and then it started over.  So somebody had to keep track of each 10 miles.  But this was tons easier than having to count every single turn of the wheel.  Odometers were covered by a box so that they wouldn't get wet if it rained, and they were taken off completely if the wagon had to cross a river.

So now you know where odometers come from.  There have been a few improvements since 1847, which is good, because otherwise you would have to make a note every time your car went 10 miles!

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MOM'S CONVENTION, Part 1

My blog is now officially not on hiatus anymore!  Yay!  Mom got home from the Oregon-California Trails Association's convention Saturday night, and then yesterday afternoon she came and got all of us dogs out of Pooches' Prison!  (Oops, I mean Pooches' Paradise!)  We were soooooo glad to get home.  And the worst part was that Mom even paid for us to get a BATH!  I hate, hate, hate baths, as I might have mentioned before!  But it's over now, and luckily I did not drown.  I won't have to get another bath until maybe next year.  Or the year after that.

Anyway, I am not going to tell you about what all we did at Pooches' Paradise for a week, because it was mostly the same thing every day:  eat, poop, pee, sleep, play, poop, sleep, pee, eat, and sleep.  Instead, I'm going to tell you about Mom's convention because she explained it all to me, and she took a lot of pictures, and it was all mostly more interesting than being at Pooches' Paradise.

Today I will start by telling you about the bus tour that Mom was one of the guides for.  This was the tour she practiced for earlier, and I already showed you some pictures from when she was practicing.  But these pictures today will be different because they came from the Real Deal bus tour, with Real People on it.  The tour was called the Independence Route, which I think I told you before.

The tour started at the Independence landing, where people used to get off the steamboats and then go in covered wagons to Oregon, California, or Santa Fe.  In this picture, you can see the people from the tour group standing by the fence, trying to get a look at the Missouri River, which was hard to do because it was down at the bottom of the hill, and there were lots of trees in the way.  Sadly, this is as close as you can get to where the real landing was, since it doesn't exist anymore.

A couple of people climbed up on a big rock to try to get a better view.  Luckily, they did not fall off and get hurt while they were going up there or coming down.

Here are lots of tour members reading the markers.  Remember how I told you that people on these tours always like to read every word of every marker?  Well, in this photo you can see that I wasn't lying to you.

After that, the bus went through the city of Independence and to the Frontier Trails Center.  Then the bus drove around in a lot of little streets, trying to follow where the trail used to go.  The next place where Mom took pictures was in Minor Park near the Red Bridge.  In this area you can see some really deep swales that come up from the crossing of the Blue River.  When Mom was there before, she went and looked at the new Red Bridge, but the real tour went to the park to see the swales.

In this photo you can see some people who are not in a swale, and you can also see some people who look like they are sawed off at the waist.  Those sawed-off people are standing in the swale.  The reason why there is such a deep swale in this place is because when the wagons and oxen came up the hill after crossing the river, they were all drippy, and they made mud everyplace.  So then the hooves and the wheels dug into the mud, and the ground got cut into deep ruts.  Here's another picture of people walking in a swale.

Back in 1909, the Daughters of the American Revolution put up a marker to show that the Santa Fe Trail went through here.  Of course, the Oregon and California Trails did, too, but the marker doesn't mention that.  In case you can't read the marker in the photo, it says:

SANTA FE TRAIL
1821--1872
Marked by the
Daughters of the
American Revolution
and the
State of Missouri
1909
RED BRIDGE
















Here's another picture Mom took at Minor Park.  You can see a couple of shallow swales, and also you can see people reading markers.  Plus you can see the bus.

Mom saw a bunch of stuff left over from fireworks at the park.  This means there were some very stupid people shooting off fireworks in the dry grass on the Fourth of July, which could have made a fire start.  And if the fire got really big and burned many acres of land, it could have burned our house down because we only live a few miles from this park.  Yikes!  I don't like to think about this!

After leaving Minor Park, the bus got on a big highway called I-435.  There is always some kind of construction happening on this road, so the bus got stuck in traffic for a while and had to go slowly.

Finally, the bus got past all the orange cone thingies and went faster.  And then the group arrived at Mahaffie House for lunch.  This is the place where Mom saw a stagecoach when she was there before. There was no stagecoach on the day of the tour because the Mahaffie house was closed.  Except that they opened it up especially for the nice people on the bus tour.

The stagecoach horses had the day off, so they were out grazing in the dead grass, which does not look like it would be very yummy.

This horse is an appaloosa.  This kind of horse is like the dalmatian of the horse world because they have spots, like dalmatian dogs do.

Here's a nice bay horse who came over to say hi to Mom.  She got to pet him on his nose and face.  Also, he posed for a photo.

At Lone Elm Campground, everybody got off the bus and went to read the markers.  By that time, it was about 105º so nobody wanted to stand out in the sun very long.  Most people didn't even use all the  time they were allowed to look around this place.  They just wanted to get back on the bus, where it was air-conditioned.

This might look like a wagon road, but it's really Cedar Creek, which goes through the Lone Elm Campground.  Except that right now, it's all completely dried up, so if you were a thirsty ox, you would be out of luck.

And speaking of dried up things, here are some prairie flowers that are.

Okay, that's all for now.  Another day I will tell you more about the convention.

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MY BLOG IS ON HIATUS!

Mom is going away to that convention thing, starting today, and she won't be back for a whole week!  Meanwhile, my brothers and I have to stay at Pooches' Paradise, and the cats have to stay at Dr. Patricia's office, and the foster kitties have to stay at PetSmart.  Which makes it a bad situation all around, if you ask me.  And the only one who might have any fun at all is Mom.

Anyway, I have not been able to write much in my blog lately because my Chief Research Assistant (a.k.a. Mom) has been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to get everything ready so she can go to the convention and have fun.  But when all of this is over, which will be on Sunday, August 12, Mom says we can go back to having a nice, normal, quiet life again.  I really, really hope she is right about that!

I asked Mom if I could go to the convention with her, but she said no.  This doesn't seem fair, since the hotel allows dogs to be there.  But Mom said it would be very boring and stressful for me because I would have to stay in a crate in the hotel room most of the time.  This does not sound like it would be much fun, but I do wish I could go for a ride in a covered wagon.  There is supposed to be a real covered wagon at the convention, but it will just be sitting in the lobby, and there won't even be any oxen to pull it.  So that seems kind of silly, if you ask me.

Well, that's pretty much all I can say about the fact that my blog is going on hiatus.  I was going to say it was going "on vacation," which sounds like more fun, but Mom said hiatus is a better word, and it almost makes my blog seem like a popular TV show or something.  Except that I am not leaving you with some big cliffhanger before the hiatus starts, which I think is really annoying when TV shows do that!

Anyway, I will only be gone about a week, so don't wander off and stop following my blog, okay?  Because I wouldn't like it if that happened!

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IT'S TIME TO LEARN SOME MORE WORDS!

A haboob in Iraq

The first word is HABOOB, which is kind of fun to say, even if you don't know what it means.  This word comes from the Arabic word habb, which means "wind."  A haboob is a really big sandstorm or dust storm.  It can happen in any really arid place where there is a bunch of sand just lying around, waiting for the wind to pick it up and blow it somewhere.  Haboobs like to make a big entrance by rolling into town as a wall of sand or dust that can be 3,000 feet tall.

Haboobs are common in countries around the Sahara Desert, such as Sudan, and they also happen in places like Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq.  Australia has haboobs in its deserts, for instance around Alice Springs.  A haboob might blow sand and debris several kilometers into the sky.  And after the haboob is over, there can be a foot of sand left behind.

In North America, there are sometimes haboobs in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.  I don't think there are any haboobs in Missouri, but if we don't get some rain soon, it could happen!

Exodusters on St. Louis levee, waiting
for steamboat to take them to Kansas.
Library of Congress photo

If you look at the word EXODUSTER, you might think it meant somebody who was making an exodus from a haboob.  But if you thought that, you'd be wrong.  Because it turns out that an exoduster was an African-American who left the southern U.S. in 1879-1880 and moved to Kansas.  The reason people did this was because there was all sorts of scary stuff going on, such as the Ku Klux Klan and racial oppression and rumors that blacks might have to be slaves again.  So people packed up all the stuff they owned, which wasn't very much, and they left.

Kansas was the place people wanted to go because John Brown had been there before the Civil War started, and he had freed a bunch of slaves and took them to Canada on the Underground Railroad.  Also, Kansas had entered the union as a free state -- after people first did a lot of fighting over the issue -- so Kansas seemed like a more tolerant state than some others.  There were several agencies that tried to help the exodusters, but most of these people still ended up being very poor.  After the summer of 1880, African-Americans pretty much stopped coming  to Kansas, and the Exoduster movement died out.



SPOONY is another funny-sounding word, and you can use it to describe somebody who is silly and sentimental, fond, weak-minded, or soft.  A spoony person is goofy and lovable, and just wants to have fun.

The word was first used in English popular literature before 1835.   It's a term that was used by sailors who were out sailing around in those big, tall ships.  When a storm came up that was really strong, the ship had to put right before the wind, which was called "spooning."  The same thing might happen to a young man who was in the storm of courtship.  When he was in danger of being swept away by a look from his lady, he might have to "spoon" in order to stay upright and afloat.

The last word is FOMITE, which is a very important word to know if you want to keep from getting sick.  Any inanimate thing that can help germs get from one person to another is a fomite.  Some examples are towels, money, clothing, dishes, books, and toys.  This is one reason people use hand sanitizer after they handle something that might be a fomite.  Some of Mom's favorite fomites are (1) money, (2) gas pump handles, and (3) stair railings.  She tries to wash her hands after she touches any of these icky things.  Dogs don't usually worry too much about fomites.  But ear mites are a different issue!

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