Comments on: Labor Day

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 05:12:40 +0000

In reply to hipparchia. Yeah, well, 'good dog' has limited effect, but dog treats make an impression. If you watch one of the big dog shows, those dogs must gain a great deal of weight during the course of the showing. There is an almost constant hand-feeding going on in the ring.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:42:25 +0000

Truth be told, I wasn’t allowed to train our puppies because I would let them get away with everything.

my beagle puppy and i got thrown out of obedience school when i was a kid because i believed in using food rewards for training. still do, but at least now the rest of the dog training world has caught up with me. 😀

thanks for the link to haymarket books, steve!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:59:56 +0000

Be happy they haven’t done away with the library … yet.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 05:07:31 +0000

Haymarket Books (link in my comment above) offers serious English-language books on labor events and activities, history and practice, from a left perspective. If I had money, I think I’d read some of them. I suspect the chances of my persuading the public library to buy them are about zero. 🙂

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 04:07:12 +0000

I would be concerned about ped injuries, which happens if you train a team on roads. They could at least give them some astroturf or indoor-outdoor carpeting.

Truth be told, I wasn’t allowed to train our puppies because I would let them get away with everything.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 03:04:33 +0000

yeah i was thinking the same things – both that concrete runs are easier to keep clean and that puppies need to get out and run and play on natural surfaces.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:01:38 +0000

In reply to Badtux. I know it's easy to keep clean, as I have sluiced out a few dairy barns after milking, but these are puppies, not Holsteins, and need to get dirty and mess around. Well, when you are afraid of horses, as the Shrubbery was, pigs and poultry are about it.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:42:08 +0000

Bryan, concrete works better for livestock because you can clean it off with a high power water hose. For example, pigs nowadays are raised indoors on concrete pads that are hosed off a couple times a day to maintain good hygiene (of course, the pig crap then gets washed into open-air septic ponds that smell terrible and have a bad habit of their dams breaking and washing raw pig crap into the watershed, but that’s another issue). The result is healthier pigs (or dogs, in this case) compared to having them stomp around in a mix of dirt and urine and crap all day.

BTW, that was one reason why Preznit GWB’s pig farm always caused hilarity every time I saw a news story about GWB vacationing at his “ranch”. While GWB’s contractors tore down most of the pig barn on the pig farm to make room for the big house that GWB built, the two remaining were so obviously pig barns that I was ROFL every time the news cameras showed them in the background while mentioning GWB’s “ranch” :).

– Badtux the Livestock Penguin

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 17:46:07 +0000

Well, ‘liberal’ New York was always more traditional than the ‘conservative’ South.

It got its day, Steve, but just in the rest of world, not the US.

OT: Looks like puppy Gitmo, Hipparchia. They need some dirt.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:28:06 +0000

The Haymarket "affair" didn't get its day, but eventually it did get a publisher, Haymarket Books, that offers a rather interesting catalog.