Snoopy came from the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, and that strip got started in the '50s. I don't know if it said that early that it was where he was from, but it was pretty early in the strip, anyway.

Actually, it's more the relative size of brain to body mass, as I understand it. Yes, your cats--and mine--are smarter than greyhounds but have smaller heads. But it's not by as much as their bodies are smaller than a greyhound's.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I had an Irish Setter as a child. She probably weighed about 25 kg, but she was amazingly strong. She loved to play tug-of-war and she could close to drag me around if she wanted too (let's say I was about 12 at the time). She wasn't greyhound fast, but she could certainly leg it out and easily out run me. We had a six foot (~ 2 meter) high fence around the yard and she liked to jump up so she could take peeks over the top, which she could do pretty easily (the neighbors told us it was funny to see this red head bopping up and down over the fence). You could give her a fresh bone or piece of rawhide and she could actually completely chew it up. But on the flip side, she could retreive things so gently that even breakable things wouldn't be broken and would hardly be damp.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

I was 5 when O'Brien (Irish setter) was born. He ended up somewhere in the 120-140 pound range, 55-60 kg. That's about double "normal". His mom was huge too. She dragged me across a two lane highway once.

That dog was stupid though. We're talking that special kind of stupid that ends up in research papers. One summer, on three different trips, he bit a porcupine. He also used to love chasing rabbits, until he finally caught one.

There are times I really miss him.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Sometimes "dumb" in an animal really means "deaf". Dalmatians are prone to hereditary deafness.

Used to show Newfoundlands in Ontario, New York & all over New England in early 70's. Puppy farms had a bad name then.

The dogshow crcuit spoiled a lot of breeds, with so much attention and argument over arcane points of anatomy, stance, gait. The unpopular as opposed to the popular working breeds come off best.
Have a dog now that is just like the dog my dad had when I was a kid, and works the same, points, retrieves, tough as nails. Will never be just a pet breed: too lively & boisterous, sheds like no other breed, every single day of the year, but what a gun-dog.




It's a Wire-haired Griffon Pointer or Korthals' Griffon. Lots of them in Texas and Quebec (originally a French dogbreed, bred by a Dutchman in Germany!!!)

Oh my gosh, yeah that's huge for a setter. Kerry (as in Kerry O'Red Snapper, her AKC name) was pretty typical and about half that size.

I've heard conflicting reports about setter intelligence. Most I've met are probably about average on the dog scale; Kerry was pretty bright (for a dog). But all the reports about their energy level and hyperactivity are correct - setters are pretty high energy, high strung dogs.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

All gun-dogs should be. But Irish setters became too popular & were bred for looks not work. Their hyperactivity stayed or got worse.
If any Irish setter owners see their dogs go lame, try Vit C it may be scurvy-arthritis. That's the only breed I know where the Vit C synthesis fails at times. But then I'm not a vet.

Yet another threat gone to the dogs.

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At least this thread isn't the cat's meow.

I prefer an active thread to idle threats.

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(_8(|) "D'oh"

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You guys are barking up the wrong tree.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

At least they aren't dogging eachother. They are just trying to yelp eachother out.

Such things will happen when you sniff around BAUT. But... That is a tail for another time...

Brains scale roughly as the 2/3 power of body size within classes, but there can be significant variation within class (human brains are about x5 bigger than they 'should' be from strict allometric scaling) and even bigger differences bteween classes (say mammal vs. reptile).

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