The 5 Best Dog Breeds For The Homestead?

Labrador. Image source: Pixabay.com

I didn’t have a dog growing up. My mom hated them, and thought them messy and expensive. Dad didn’t care too much for them, either, and I guess I can’t blame them. Sure, we lived in the country and with several acres it was ideal for a pooch, but alas, my forays into the woods went unaccompanied by man’s best friend.

When I was a farmhand we had a few dogs on the property and I began to realize the importance of a dog on the farm or in the country. They guarded our livestock and warned us of approaching visitors, and made a day in the woods not so lonely. When I met my wife, I was shocked when I found out her parents had not one or two but nine canines. And so, since then, my life has had plenty of four-legged buddies.

If you live in the country, hunt, farm or just want some additional security, I have narrowed down a few breeds that are great for country living. Of course, there are many different opinions out there, but these are my choices.

Before you purchase, consider three things: First, do you require a hunting dog or additional help on the farm? Both avenues require training. Some training you can do yourself, as in the case with a waterfowl dog. However, you throw the idea of cattle school into the equation, the cost can increase dramatically. Also, if you buy a certified puppy you can pay north of $1000 for the pooch.

1. Labrador retriever. These are great dogs if you have a family. Very gentle in nature, relatively easy to train, the Lab is a great dog for anyone who hunts upland birds and waterfowl. They are also a great dog to have around the farm.

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They do have a tendency to gain weight and develop hip and joint problems, but a healthy animal can live as long as 14 years.

2. Weimaraner. Another good family dog. Weimaraners are very popular with bird hunters across North America. They make a good family pet as well, and are gentle in nature similar to a Lab.

In my humble experience, Weimaraners are better as solitary dogs and I have developed the opinion that they don’t get along with too many other canines.

3. Beagle. Beagles are an excellent breed of scent hounds, and excel at chasing rabbits and can even be used for upland game. They do best when in a pack, and so it is recommended you own at least a few of these dogs together as they are highly social animals.

Kids love them, and often their first experience with a hunting dog will be a beagle circling a rabbits or treeing a raccoon.

4. German shepherd. Known in the U.S. for their work with police and security, German shepherds are prevalent on homesteads in Germany and all through Europe. The German shepherd will protect your children, especially if raised with them from a puppy. It also will protect your livestock if you train them right. Coyotes are no match for a German shepherd or two, although these dogs are vulnerable to wolves and cougars. Though a bit intimidating, a German shepherd can make a very good family dog, and will lay down its life for your kids.

5. Border Collie. Considered the most intelligent of all the domestic dog breeds. One of my personal favorite breeds of dog. The Border Collie is great around children and will quickly become one of the family.

Border Collies do great herding sheep and even cattle. They are the perfect farm hand for the rancher or the farmer with a dozen sheep or a few Black Angus.

What breeds would you add to this list? Share your own list in the section below:

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Why Congress Should Not Ban Cat and Dog Meat

Via The Daily Bell

Finally, Congress is doing something about a serious issue on everyone’s mind; they have introduced a bill to ban dog and cat meat from being sold and eaten in the United States.

But wait, isn’t this cultural insensitivity towards those from countries who regularly eat dogs and cats?

China is still the most likely country to see dog or cat meat eaten, even hosting a dog meat festival every year. But lately, the festival has been subjected to protests from people who think the practice of slaughtering dogs for meat is inhumane. Some of the pressure to stop the practice has come from the West, but there are also elements within China who think it is wrong to eat animals regularly kept as pets.

I’m only half kidding about the cultural differences. In Australia, they eat kangaroos, in Iceland, they eat horses, and all over rabbits are regularly consumed. Is America’s culture so superior that we know for certain we have found the right combination of animals to slaughter for meat? Or is culture an appropriate issue to legislate, enshrining the “American way of life” into law?

“We live in a global economy and we live in a very transient society,” [Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society] said. “We need to be morally consistent and ask other countries to act in a way that is consistent with our own policies.”

Apparently, America should force the world to align with its cultural standards for meat consumption.

It is fine to be against the practice of eating cats and dogs, just as many also protest eating pigs, cows, or any other animal not commonly kept as a pet. But this is still ultimately an opinion. It would actually make more logically consistent sense to be for or against the eating of all animals, or none.

But then many people draw a line based on the intelligence of the animal. This means dolphins and chimpanzees are clearly off limits, while fish and chicken are good for munching. But what about those confusing middle ones? Some evidence suggests pigs are smarter than dogs. Can we really say a cat has more intelligence than a cow, or do they simply have more personality–a subjective value judgment?

In America, if someone is eating cats and dogs, that is probably a sign that they are in desperate need, and hungry. So the only people that would be ensnared by such a law would be the extremely poor, those with different cultures, or the mentally ill.

When we treat cats and dogs as property, that means it is already illegal to steal, kill, or eat someone’s family pet. This is not the issue. Nor is the issue if the cat or dog meat shows up on your plate in a restaurant instead of beef; that would clearly be fraud, and whether you agree with the laws or not, would violate meat processing standards. So all the ways in which the eating of cat and dog meat harms more than your emotions are already illegal.

Arbitrary issues like these should not be decided by governments. Otherwise, there is nothing to stop a dominant faction from subjectively banning the slaughter of their favorite animal, as many Indian states have done when it comes to cows.

It is not for governments to make this judgment, it is absolutely up to individuals, and the market. If no one is buying dog meat, then no one will be selling it.

In fact, a larger issue in more urgent need of redress is the cruelty with which common meat animals are treated. In these cases, the government is complicit through their protectionist regulations and false assurances that they are keeping an eye on the processes.

But seriously, how big of a  problem is this really? As cute as they are, shouldn’t people have the freedom to eat cats and dogs if they want? Even though I personally love cats and dogs, and would never want to eat one, I’m not seeing more than a cultural or emotional difference between cows and pigs, versus cats and dogs being eaten.

Bills like this are indicative of a larger political problem; no one is addressing real issues. The politicians introduce bills that make people emotional but don’t really matter significantly. The USA could collapse from the debt of almost $20 trillion, but let’s make sure no one is eating cats and dogs.

America bombs and wages war on entire regions of the globe, with disregard for human lives lost. The hungry innocent victims left in grinding poverty without a home would surely jump at the chance to eat a stray cat or dog, while the politicians who caused their turmoil sit safely in Washington talking from their pedestal about the inhumanity of eating cats and dogs.

If–or when–the dollar crashes and the policies of the U.S. government plunge the world into economic turmoil, we may be singing a different tune on how yummy Mr. Kitty looks.

Pack Instinct (Fertile Grounds For Meatheads)

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

On Monday, I shared with you a conversation I had with an entrepreneur Mahdi Kazemzadeh, who"s built a business in Iran.

Here"s the astonishing thing: despite being Iranian Mahdi isn"t a terrorist. No, really!

The mere mention of Iran gets the dog-pack enzymes flowing with an easily influenced Western media-fed crowd. Pack mentality surfaces, except that those who are exhibiting it don"t call it that. No, instead they call it patriotism (discussed here), which miraculously is seen as a good, honourable, virtuous quality rather than a mental disorder.

I"ve spent a lot of time discussing the qualitative aspects affecting the global macro landscape and I receive hundreds of emails each month thanking me for sharing them. I"m deeply humbled and in fact 99.9% of readers are kind, curious, engaging, and where they disagree they do so in an intelligent and intellectually stimulating way. I genuinely love it, even if I can"t respond to all.

I like to think of Capitalist Exploits as a home for independent, objective thought. The ability to step back, observe, question where the consensus may be wrong, look to economic history for guidance, and to then objectively invest according to probabilities is at the very centre of how I feed my family and what this little corner of cyberspace is all about.

We"re here to make money, not to be popular.

As such, it"s amusing when occasionally a moron pops his wee little head up.

Fortunately, morons are desperately easy to spot. They stick out like a giant zit on a prom queen. Logic has left the building, wild accusations are used, and the pack instinct is alive and kicking. They operate purely from an emotional level, not unlike a 4-year old who"s been told Santa isn"t coming this year.

After publishing the conversation on Monday discussing Iran with Mahdi I received the usual thank yous and then this doozy:

"Listen you kangaroo meat eating hill billy...

you better quit talking ignorant bullshit about the U.S. and Trump, two subjects you know absolutely nothing about. I know you"re probably upset with yourself since you turned out to be a shit money manager and are having a very tough time dealing with redemptions but why don"t you concentrate on educating yourself and start practicing some class."

Bless this poor intellectually retarded soul.

The reason I share this with you is to demonstrate something that we"re all going to have to get very used to.

The seasons have changed. This, folks, is the pack animal zeitgeist that I"ve written about in "What the Incoming "Strong Men" Mean for the Global Economy" and elsewhere in these pages.

Humans have an insuperable tendency to form packs and proceed to bark at other packs. When a neighbour"s dog walks past my property, my dog rushes to bark at it. Every time! The neighbour"s dog isn"t a threat, it"s just what dogs do.

When a Japanese military recon plane enters Chinese airspace, fighter jets scramble furiously to bark at it. They know it"s not going to bomb China. It"s what pack animals do.

I"ve little doubt that the clown who emailed me (the one with the intellectual capacity of ringworm) gathers his knowledge of Iran from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed. A pack animal. Grrr! Woof! Bow-wow!

The odds he"s visited Iran? Slim!

Ever been threatened by Iran? Nope. Grrr! Woof! Bow-wow! My guy says it"s so. The hoi polloi never learn. Remember Bush"s Iraq war? The one where Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? Same pack response then. Same pack response now. Grrrr! woof!

Paradoxically, when I was writing about why "the ginger ninja" was going to win the presidency (for example, this one) I received a good dozen emails which could be summarised as, "Whoo yeah! Go Trump, stick it to em!".

I get it. It was the point I was making : the rising anti-establishment zeitgeist. The thing is - and I made this clear but it still falls on deaf ears: I"m interested in outcomes. It doesn"t matter one iota what I might wish to happen. If I was to trade based on what I wish would happen I"d not be able to afford this fancy machine I"m writing to you on.

No. The only thing that matters is outcomes and attempting to protect yourself and profit accordingly. Some seem to have unfortunately mistaken my identifying a trend for my supporting of a trend.

The response that I get when I say this is, "Oh, so you support Hillary then?". Well, no.

Actually, I was tickled pink that the reptile was kicked to the curb but that doesn"t mean you don"t question what"s taking place, and it certainly doesn"t mean that you need to support the opposition either. It"s useful to remember that your vote is statistically meaningless, anyway.

I wrote an entire article about why voting is a terrific waste of your time years ago:

"The reason I don’t vote, apart from the mathematical certainty that my vote is meaningless and the near mathematical certainty that I will be contributing towards propelling a parasitic self serving, egotistical, yet entirely ignorant, podium doughnut towards stardom is that I don’t care for any political party either. Not the Reds, Whites, Pinks or Browns, the Tea party, Libertarian party, or any other party.

 

They all end up the same way, with some folks moving to expand their sphere of influence to the detriment of others who disagree with them. Voting is meaningless in its present form. “The people” are presented with a select group of egomaniacs with whom they have no connection, and who have proved repeatedly that they will never “represent” said “people” anyway. What a charade. I would go so far as saying its unethical to participate in such a fraud."

Despite what you"re told by the media and any given podium doughnut, George Carlin was right:

Simply investigating multiple angles is a mental challenge few are prepared to engage in, especially where it conflicts with their chosen "guru"s" ideology. Far easier to shut your mind off and follow. Just follow. Read history and tell me it isn"t so.

The psychology of a gas station lout says that if you "diss" my guy, then I"ll beat your head in with a brick. It matters not what "your guy" has said or done. The reason this matters to us as investors is because the pack actually dominates humanity.

Patriotism is simply the loyalty of dogs in a pack. 

 

Consider this: the German soldiers who murdered millions in World War II were patriots as were the Japanese pilots bombing Pearl Harbour. In fact, we can objectively say that the the thugs who drove a truck into a crowd in Nice were patriots.

Do we admire them for patriotism? No, they"re not "our" guy.

Do their own admire them for their allegiance to the pack? Sadly, yes.

Patriotism, like love, is blind because it"s driven not by logic but by emotion. It"s irrational thought at it"s finest.

Which brings me to how patriotism, nationalism, and meatheads all come together in our world of global macro finance.

I just hopped off the phone with a friend, the gracious, humble, and razor sharp Grant Williams. We were discussing this very theme. Grant, of course, wrote about this in late 2015. War is the likely outcome. Back then few thought it possible. Increasingly, it"s not only possible but highly probable. I fear Grant is probably right.

You see countries behave as idiotically as pack animals. Politics itself rewards unprincipled behaviour. The aggressive, arrogant, and self serving are drawn to the power it represents like moths to a flame. In order to achieve the top spots they fight, cheat, steal, and lie to get there. How is this different to dogs fighting for alpha status in a pack?

Once in power, these pathological ego-maniacs (that"s how you become an alpha dog) send entire countries to war with little crackpot third world nations that the electorate has never heard of, can"t pronounce, and can"t find on a map. Given the "right" information (remember Saddam"s WMD) the crowd bay for blood. Grrr! Woof! Bow-wow!

Read that email response to my podcast on Iran again and tell me this imbecile wouldn"t be one of those pack animals baying for blood in any altercation his "guru" leader tells him is just.

Humans have incredible powers of compassion, kindness, creativity, and loyalty. They also have another side, and right now from sea to shining sea lines are being drawn and the "other side" is rearing its ugly head.

A Question

Let me ask you a question, and this is a question irrespective of your nationality, religious, or political persuasion.

Tell me, have you experienced in the last few months heated debates or even outright arguments about political outcomes and those elected or those up for election?

If so, is this unusual to you? Are you finding that siding with one political party over another is today causing problems it wouldn"t have caused in the past?

Do you sense the shift on the ground wherever you are?

Can you feel the lines being drawn in the sand?

I"d love to have your thoughts and feedback in the comments section.

From where I sit I believe we"ve solidly entered an environment where pack animal behaviour is going to rule the day. You don"t need to be a genius to figure out that the probabilities of barking dogs getting into a scrap have been magnified.

- Chris

"Humans are the only animals who will follow unstable pack leaders." — Cesar Milan (The dog whisperer)

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