Investigating the Origins of Deaf Dogs Scare-Stories and “Myths”
Summary
Legitimate dog-deafness research in academic facilities potentially, probably without intention, created events that became scare-stories in the hands of commercial exploiters. The scare stories were a kind of artificial agricultural “marketing” of disease created for businesses, serving to justify massive killing of deaf puppies by puppy-mills, and to send anxious adopters or owners of geneticaly deaf to BAER testing facilities where they could be urged to pay for the tests, killing of their deaf dog, and for disposal of the bodies. The pre-2010 deaf-dogs scare stories almost certainly originated in academic agricultural research environments and-or large-scale agricultural puppy-mills of the US. It is almost 100 percent certain that the deaf-dogs scare stories were NOT created in US domestic human-dogs environments.
By 2004-2010 some of the US deaf-dogs human community “pushed-back” against the misleading, misunderstood, and misrepresented facts and exploited the stories for training by calling them “myths." Use of the scare-stories as training-aids by calling them “myths” was ingenious but problematical in the long term for the best interests of genetically "heretably" deaf dogs.
The balance of values of exploiting the scare-stories as training aids versus the down-side negative unwarranted fear-publicity about virtually non-existent risks of socialized trained deaf dogs in homes compared to hearing dogs was unclear.
For the long term, the balance clearly opposed publicizing harmful “myths” used solely for the purpose of repudiating them in the guise of partially obsolete training instructions. That has become over time disingenuous, and potentially harmful to the US owners of genetically deaf dogs by marketing misleading, misunderstood and misrepresented fiction about deaf dogs and their owners in US homes. A kid’s joke comes to mind: “If you get lemons, make lemon-aid; but if you get dog-poo for gosh sakes don’t make —ade!.”
Discussion
Where did the deaf-dogs scare-stories and so-called “myths” come from? Why were the modern versions called “myths”, when even modest investigation show that they allegedly represented real events? In US public schools, myths were usually cute stories that traditionally came from ancient Greeks, Romans or Norse storytellers who (to eat regularly) began the stories as romance, lessons for peasants, and glory for rich aristocrats. Yet, because their use became largely abusive, it does matter who created the deaf-dogs scare-stories, who made them into “myths” and why!
For investigation, “scenes” were recreated “virtually” from interviews, public information in books and on the Web, as though recreating a “crime scene” for a court trial. The investigation process resembled a medical-forensic search for the natural geographical and biological origins of the AIDs virus. Medically, understanding the origins of diseases sometimes helps in finding a cure, rather than abetting concealment.
The potential source environments investigated included
1. Laboratory-industrial agricultural[i]-electronics and university research settings
2. “Agricultural” puppy-mills
3. Modern US domestic companion dog-human habitats
State-Space Control Theory concepts were used to estimates the time dynamic transfer functions that correlated the “input” actions and influences, with the “output” results in a consistent necessary and sufficient way for the “naturally deaf-dogs with humans” black-box environment. [Ref. College-level Control Theory and simulation engineering textbooks.]
Outputs were taken as the “myths” described in March 29, 2011 on the Internet, [Ref. Deafdogs.org where each was graphically described]. Outputs, for simplicity, were reduced to key-words, ranked by alleged risks:
1. confined almost all of every day in crates, from birth
2. painful tests with sedation and-or without sedation
3. no physical exercise
4. no mental exercise
5. no training except with voice commands
6. not socialized to humans, other dogs, other animals
7. arbitrary and capricious treatment by indifferent-hostile custodians and other people
8. austere costs operations
I. Laboratory Dog-Breeding “agricultural-academic ” Colony Matrix Scoring
Until rigorous laws were recently passed in the European Union and in the US [ii] dogs and common experimental animals were used in research laboratories[ii] for medical, agricultural, safety tests, cosmetics tests and so forth. Costs could be minimized and profits maximized by managing the animals as objects lacking significant awareness of pain, emotions, or needs for physical and mental exercise for health. Indeed their health was of little concern so long as their conditions didn’t interfere with the research objectives.
Training was of course minimal except as needed for research, and any dogs needing special efforts (such as deaf dogs) were a potentially unwanted profit obstacle. Socializing the dogs with each other and with humans (except for safety of the humans) and moving vehicles was plausibly an undesirable expense, and certainly all children would logically have been excluded from such facilities. Dogs individually confined to “runs” or cages could lose bite-inhibition, and if subjected to arbitrary and capricious actions and pain by humans could have become taught to act out of self-defense, as IEDs.
Dogs prevented from acquaintance with road vehicles and taught to be passive-aggressive would be likely to encounter severe difficulty in navigating US public roads traffic, to say nothing of the occasional pathological driver.
Least cost poorly trained staff plauisbly could tend to subject any “different” animals to particularly severe treatment, in particular exploiting the startle reflex of deaf dogs as punishment and for attention-getting, and reportedly regard any dogs unresponsive to voice commands as obstinate and untrainable; based on reports of field experience of poorly trained persons with deaf dogs [Ref: Private communications.] Further, the mental and physical condition of experimental subjects was probably unimportant economically if usually the animals were killed and a sample of them anatomized when the experiments of the project were complete.[iii]
Transfer matrix intersects were scored simply as “direct,” except that profit-loss was scored with a weight of 100.
[i] “Agricultural” in that the animals were consumable products equivalent to roaster chickens, eggs or veal-calves.
[ii] “The State of the Animals 2001,” Humane Society Press, edt D.J. Salem, A.N. Rowan
[iii] Coren, S; How Dogs Think, 2004, Free Press publ. ; Bekoff, M; Emotional Lives of Animals, 2007, New World Library
Legitimate dog-deafness research in academic facilities potentially, probably without intention, created events that became scare-stories in the hands of commercial exploiters. The scare stories were a kind of artificial agricultural “marketing” of disease created for businesses, serving to justify massive killing of deaf puppies by puppy-mills, and to send anxious adopters or owners of geneticaly deaf to BAER testing facilities where they could be urged to pay for the tests, killing of their deaf dog, and for disposal of the bodies. The pre-2010 deaf-dogs scare stories almost certainly originated in academic agricultural research environments and-or large-scale agricultural puppy-mills of the US. It is almost 100 percent certain that the deaf-dogs scare stories were NOT created in US domestic human-dogs environments.
By 2004-2010 some of the US deaf-dogs human community “pushed-back” against the misleading, misunderstood, and misrepresented facts and exploited the stories for training by calling them “myths." Use of the scare-stories as training-aids by calling them “myths” was ingenious but problematical in the long term for the best interests of genetically "heretably" deaf dogs.
The balance of values of exploiting the scare-stories as training aids versus the down-side negative unwarranted fear-publicity about virtually non-existent risks of socialized trained deaf dogs in homes compared to hearing dogs was unclear.
For the long term, the balance clearly opposed publicizing harmful “myths” used solely for the purpose of repudiating them in the guise of partially obsolete training instructions. That has become over time disingenuous, and potentially harmful to the US owners of genetically deaf dogs by marketing misleading, misunderstood and misrepresented fiction about deaf dogs and their owners in US homes. A kid’s joke comes to mind: “If you get lemons, make lemon-aid; but if you get dog-poo for gosh sakes don’t make —ade!.”
Discussion
Where did the deaf-dogs scare-stories and so-called “myths” come from? Why were the modern versions called “myths”, when even modest investigation show that they allegedly represented real events? In US public schools, myths were usually cute stories that traditionally came from ancient Greeks, Romans or Norse storytellers who (to eat regularly) began the stories as romance, lessons for peasants, and glory for rich aristocrats. Yet, because their use became largely abusive, it does matter who created the deaf-dogs scare-stories, who made them into “myths” and why!
For investigation, “scenes” were recreated “virtually” from interviews, public information in books and on the Web, as though recreating a “crime scene” for a court trial. The investigation process resembled a medical-forensic search for the natural geographical and biological origins of the AIDs virus. Medically, understanding the origins of diseases sometimes helps in finding a cure, rather than abetting concealment.
The potential source environments investigated included
1. Laboratory-industrial agricultural[i]-electronics and university research settings
2. “Agricultural” puppy-mills
3. Modern US domestic companion dog-human habitats
State-Space Control Theory concepts were used to estimates the time dynamic transfer functions that correlated the “input” actions and influences, with the “output” results in a consistent necessary and sufficient way for the “naturally deaf-dogs with humans” black-box environment. [Ref. College-level Control Theory and simulation engineering textbooks.]
Outputs were taken as the “myths” described in March 29, 2011 on the Internet, [Ref. Deafdogs.org where each was graphically described]. Outputs, for simplicity, were reduced to key-words, ranked by alleged risks:
- Aggressive-Startle
- Improvised Explosive Devices
- Nearly Untrainable
- Require Hearing Animals
- Children-Never
- Death by Cars, Trucks, Buses . . .
- Special-Needs-Owners Only
- Profit Potential
1. confined almost all of every day in crates, from birth
2. painful tests with sedation and-or without sedation
3. no physical exercise
4. no mental exercise
5. no training except with voice commands
6. not socialized to humans, other dogs, other animals
7. arbitrary and capricious treatment by indifferent-hostile custodians and other people
8. austere costs operations
I. Laboratory Dog-Breeding “agricultural-academic ” Colony Matrix Scoring
Until rigorous laws were recently passed in the European Union and in the US [ii] dogs and common experimental animals were used in research laboratories[ii] for medical, agricultural, safety tests, cosmetics tests and so forth. Costs could be minimized and profits maximized by managing the animals as objects lacking significant awareness of pain, emotions, or needs for physical and mental exercise for health. Indeed their health was of little concern so long as their conditions didn’t interfere with the research objectives.
Training was of course minimal except as needed for research, and any dogs needing special efforts (such as deaf dogs) were a potentially unwanted profit obstacle. Socializing the dogs with each other and with humans (except for safety of the humans) and moving vehicles was plausibly an undesirable expense, and certainly all children would logically have been excluded from such facilities. Dogs individually confined to “runs” or cages could lose bite-inhibition, and if subjected to arbitrary and capricious actions and pain by humans could have become taught to act out of self-defense, as IEDs.
Dogs prevented from acquaintance with road vehicles and taught to be passive-aggressive would be likely to encounter severe difficulty in navigating US public roads traffic, to say nothing of the occasional pathological driver.
Least cost poorly trained staff plauisbly could tend to subject any “different” animals to particularly severe treatment, in particular exploiting the startle reflex of deaf dogs as punishment and for attention-getting, and reportedly regard any dogs unresponsive to voice commands as obstinate and untrainable; based on reports of field experience of poorly trained persons with deaf dogs [Ref: Private communications.] Further, the mental and physical condition of experimental subjects was probably unimportant economically if usually the animals were killed and a sample of them anatomized when the experiments of the project were complete.[iii]
Transfer matrix intersects were scored simply as “direct,” except that profit-loss was scored with a weight of 100.
[i] “Agricultural” in that the animals were consumable products equivalent to roaster chickens, eggs or veal-calves.
[ii] “The State of the Animals 2001,” Humane Society Press, edt D.J. Salem, A.N. Rowan
[iii] Coren, S; How Dogs Think, 2004, Free Press publ. ; Bekoff, M; Emotional Lives of Animals, 2007, New World Library
Useful-hearing dogs were scored as null or zero for the profit-loss columns as the baseline.
In the plausible academic agricultural research environment the estimated real subjective “scare-story” scores for the deaf dogs and the other dogs were as indicated. The subjective population weighted ratio of adverse scare stories about deaf dogs was estimated at over 5,000:1.
Conclusion: Laboratory Industry-agriculture breeding and research environments, plausibly probably generated events and fact-based scare-stories during experimenting on and breeding of deaf dogs and hearing dogs.
II. Agricultural Large Scale Puppy-Mills
Conditions typical of large-scale “agricultural” high annual puppy production rates were assumed to be as described by the Humane Society 50 years review, and described in posted observations from rescue and shelter sites. [Small scale breeders’ homes where data were collected were nearly the same as typical domestic human-dog habitats.]
The “agricultural” puppy mills reportedly created domestic dog puppies to satisfy US mass markets mostly in cities and suburbs. Practically the large scale puppy mills were potentially comparable to chicken farms for roasters or egg production, or farms for veal and beef cattle. Similarly, their products were reportedly typically wholesaled to pet shops and such where ordinary customers purchased puppies for children. AKC registered breeds would typically sell for higher prices than ordinary breeds. Commonly no “owners’ manuals” were provided with puppies. At most, reportedly State typical regulations attempted to assert a minimum age such as eight weeks for transfer of puppies to the retail markets, and perhaps a few vaccinations. For some breeds the puppy’s ears could be cropped, or tails lopped off [iii], to comply with customary breed marketing conformations expectations.
In the plausible academic agricultural research environment the estimated real subjective “scare-story” scores for the deaf dogs and the other dogs were as indicated. The subjective population weighted ratio of adverse scare stories about deaf dogs was estimated at over 5,000:1.
Conclusion: Laboratory Industry-agriculture breeding and research environments, plausibly probably generated events and fact-based scare-stories during experimenting on and breeding of deaf dogs and hearing dogs.
II. Agricultural Large Scale Puppy-Mills
Conditions typical of large-scale “agricultural” high annual puppy production rates were assumed to be as described by the Humane Society 50 years review, and described in posted observations from rescue and shelter sites. [Small scale breeders’ homes where data were collected were nearly the same as typical domestic human-dog habitats.]
The “agricultural” puppy mills reportedly created domestic dog puppies to satisfy US mass markets mostly in cities and suburbs. Practically the large scale puppy mills were potentially comparable to chicken farms for roasters or egg production, or farms for veal and beef cattle. Similarly, their products were reportedly typically wholesaled to pet shops and such where ordinary customers purchased puppies for children. AKC registered breeds would typically sell for higher prices than ordinary breeds. Commonly no “owners’ manuals” were provided with puppies. At most, reportedly State typical regulations attempted to assert a minimum age such as eight weeks for transfer of puppies to the retail markets, and perhaps a few vaccinations. For some breeds the puppy’s ears could be cropped, or tails lopped off [iii], to comply with customary breed marketing conformations expectations.
Within the precision and accuracy of the investigation, the matrix and scores for the useful- hearing dogs in puppy-mills were essentially the same as in a plausible austere academic laboratory.
Conclusion: Within their environments, “agricultural” large scale puppy-mills probably could generate events and stories indistinguishable from those of plauisble academic austere laboratories for experimenting on and breeding of deaf dogs.
Conclusion: Within their environments, “agricultural” large scale puppy-mills probably could generate events and stories indistinguishable from those of plauisble academic austere laboratories for experimenting on and breeding of deaf dogs.
III Domestic Dogs-Humans Environments [US]
Taking as sufficiently factual the Internet message descriptions of the typical US domestic residential environments, research published by J. Serpell[i], A Semyonova[ii] and others and personal experience, the matrix of “inputs” were shown across the top of the matrix, and the hypothetical outputs on the left side. The virtual dog population excluded “damaged” dogs, both those hearing and deaf, obtained through rescues and shelters into typical homes.
With the hearing dogs and deaf dogs treated identically, except that voice commands were used with hearing dogs and sign-gestures commands with the deaf dogs, there was zero correlation of dog-human behaviors with the “scare-story/ myths”, i.e. for typical good homes of dogs in the US there was zero basis for expecting deaf dogs to behave in ways noticeable different from equally healthy hearing dogs.
Conclusion: Within US home environments shared with caring people, there were no [zero] detectable correlations of the scare-stories with reports of behavior of normal healthy domestic dogs, whether deaf or hearing of the same breed.
[i] Serpell, J, et al; “Evaluation of behavior assessment questionnaire for use in the characterization of behavior problems of dogs relinquished to Animals shelters”, J Am Vet Med Assc, 2005:227:1755.
[ii] Semyonova, A; “The 100 Silliest Things People say about Dogs”, 2009, Hasting Press
Taking as sufficiently factual the Internet message descriptions of the typical US domestic residential environments, research published by J. Serpell[i], A Semyonova[ii] and others and personal experience, the matrix of “inputs” were shown across the top of the matrix, and the hypothetical outputs on the left side. The virtual dog population excluded “damaged” dogs, both those hearing and deaf, obtained through rescues and shelters into typical homes.
With the hearing dogs and deaf dogs treated identically, except that voice commands were used with hearing dogs and sign-gestures commands with the deaf dogs, there was zero correlation of dog-human behaviors with the “scare-story/ myths”, i.e. for typical good homes of dogs in the US there was zero basis for expecting deaf dogs to behave in ways noticeable different from equally healthy hearing dogs.
Conclusion: Within US home environments shared with caring people, there were no [zero] detectable correlations of the scare-stories with reports of behavior of normal healthy domestic dogs, whether deaf or hearing of the same breed.
[i] Serpell, J, et al; “Evaluation of behavior assessment questionnaire for use in the characterization of behavior problems of dogs relinquished to Animals shelters”, J Am Vet Med Assc, 2005:227:1755.
[ii] Semyonova, A; “The 100 Silliest Things People say about Dogs”, 2009, Hasting Press