CAIERE CHASE - The original e-zine and full service hunting dog registry for hunters in Trinidad & Tobago, that use dogs in the pursuit of game.
email:- caierechase@gmail.com
Every year we compile deer harvest estimates by state in our Whitetail Report and release them to the hunting public, and every year we receive multiple responses that go something like this:
“Those numbers can’t be accurate. I’ve never been asked how many deer I killed.”
It’s a common and perennial response, so here’s an explanation of how your state agency can have an accurate estimate of the deer harvest even if they didn’t talk to you, examine your deer, or require you to tag it. It’s possible through the science of random sampling.
Some states may be small enough or have a short enough deer season to physically count and examine every deer at mandatory check stations. But wildlife agencies in most states, like my home state of Georgia for example, cannot do this. Lengthening seasons, large land areas and massive numbers of hunters make it impractical. Instead, they use a survey method – usually a phone or mail survey – to randomly sample hunters and estimate things like days spent afield, harvest numbers, and species hunted. To get statistically accurate results with low margins of error, all you have to do is survey a large enough sample. Wildlife agencies do not have to survey anywhere near 100 percent of hunters to get a valid estimate of the harvest, an estimate that is more than adequate for tracking trends and making statewide management decisions. In fact, you might be surprised how few it takes to get a sound estimate.
Using an online random survey calculator, I ran my own numbers for Georgia, which has a population of around 250,000 resident and non-resident deer hunters. I would only need to randomly survey about 2,500 hunters (1 percent of the population) to get results with a margin of error as low as 2 percent, and be 95 percent confident in that error rate. Try the calculator for yourself. You’ll see that the smaller the population you are surveying, the higher the percentage you must survey to maintain accuracy. If your population includes a total of 100 people, you will have to survey nearly all of them to get the same level of accuracy you can get by surveying only 1 percent of Georgia deer hunters.
So, if my home state obtains random survey results from 2,500 hunters, they have an excellent idea how many deer were killed (Actually, Georgia WRD provides their survey information online, and I learned they annually survey exactly that number: 2,500 deer hunters).
No, they do not know the exact number of deer killed. No state knows that, but they don’t need to. They can get close enough to make statewide management decisions. More importantly, if the survey is conducted the same way each year, they get an excellent idea of trends in deer harvest. Knowing whether the deer harvest is climbing or falling over a period of years, and by how much, is more useful and important than knowing the exact number that were killed in any given year.
It’s important to note the word random throughout this discussion. People included in the survey must be chosen in a completely random manner or the results will not be accurate. Allowing respondents to choose to participate in a survey is one of the best ways to destroy the accuracy of results. In an open survey, people with an axe to grind (like those who aren’t happy about their recent deer hunting success) are more likely to participate so they can make sure the agency knows they are angry. People who are satisfied with their experience aren’t near as motivated to speak up through a survey. That’s how poll results become biased.
Some state agencies use random sampling to measure other things, too. For example, QDMA includes age estimates of the buck and doe harvests in the Whitetail Report for states that collect age-based data on their harvests. Again, they do not pull a jawbone from every deer killed in the state, nor do they need to. If biologists randomly visit deer processors or check stations during deer season and pull jawbones from all the deer they find, and do this throughout the state and throughout deer season, they can easily pile up a large enough sample to get an accurate look at the age distribution of the harvest – even though they didn’t age your deer.
Let’s be clear: I’m not claiming every wildlife agency has an accurate grip on their deer herd and harvest levels, nor do I defend or know the error rates of any given state’s survey data (If you want to know survey method, sample sizes, and margins of error, I suggest you ask your state’s Deer Project Leader). I am saying it is possible for an agency to have reliable estimates even if they never surveyed you, made you tag your deer, or asked you to check your deer by phone or at a check station.
Just published today in Canine Genetics and Epidemiology is a study of the population statistics and genetic diversity of all 215 breeds registered by the Kennel Club, using data from the pedigree database from 1980-2014. The paper is a welcome addition to the literature, updating and eclipsing the earlier (and epic at the time) study by Calboli et al in 2008.
If you've been wondering if you should take a course in population genetics (check out what ICB offers), this paper will convince you. The health of the dogs we breed depends fundamentally on the quality of the gene pool, and assessments of the genetic health of the gene pool are necessarily based on population-wide analyses. So there is much here about effective population size (Ne), which is determined by the rate of change in the average level of inbreeding in the population.
At the core of the paper are data for inbreeding over the years since 1980. Unfortunately, the data for individual breeds are not in the paper, or even in the supplementary documents available from the publisher (where they would be available in perpetuity), but instead are available as individual pdf documents on the Kennel Club website. If the address to that web page should ever change (and surely it will), the link published in the manuscript will be useless. So, download your favorite breed now, just to be safe.
Summarizing their findings about inbreeding, they say:
"The trend over all breeds was for the rate of inbreeding to be highest in the 1980s and 1990s, tending to decline after 2000...to sustainable levels, with some modest restoration of genetic diversity in some cases."
While there are breeds in which inbreeding does stabilize (e.g., the Labrador Retriever; figure on the right), it is certainly not the case that this is a general pattern across all breeds.
LABRADOR RETRIEVER
Below are some examples of breeds in which inbreeding doesn't stabilize after 2000, but increases continuously over the period of the study. Perhaps these are breeds that didn't benefit from a surge in imports after 2000 (wish we could see the data for imports), but there is no evidence that breeders have been adjusting breeding strategies to reduce the level of inbreeding. If that was happening, it would be evident in the distance between the observed and expected inbreeding lines in these graphs. The expected level of inbreeding assumes that breeding is random; the higher observed level indicates that the animals being bred together that are more closely related than the population average. This also indicates the potential magnitude of the reduction in inbreeding that could be achieved by a change in breeding strategy.
Average inbreeding coefficient over 1980-2014 Upper: English Cocker (left), English Springer (right) Lower: Akita (left) , Bull Terrier (right)
English Cocker
English Springer
Akita
Bull Terrier
As I noted above, the effective population size (Ne) is determined by the rate of inbreeding in the population. The rule of thumb used by conservation biologists as the minimum Ne necessary to maintain a sustainably breeding population has risen over the last few years from 50 unrelated, randomly breeding animals to 100, and even more recently 500, as biologists reassess the realities of both in situ and captive animal management (you can read about the latest argument over revision here). That aside, it is useful to look at some of the data on Ne from the present study.
Below I have graphed the data for Ne (from the Supplementary documents) for those breeds in which there were more than 50 registrations per year; that is, the more populous breeds. I have superimposed lines at Ne = 50 (red), Ne = 100 (yellow), and Ne = 500 (green), to correspond with the various rules of thumb under debate.
The impact of top-ranked popular sires is even more obvious in this figure of the maximum number of pups produced by a single sire in a year compared to the population average. Note that the y axis is logged, otherwise the data for the averages would all be to low to see.
(You can see more of the analyses of the Labrador data here.)
I would have to say that, after a few hours of fiddling with the available data, the paper's summary is rosier than the actual picture. The statement that levels of inbreeding are looking much better since 2000 is quite misleading - it could simply be an artifact of the importation of unrelated dogs, and there are plenty of breeds in which the rate of inbreeding has stayed on the same trajectory for decades and could very well continue. The number of breeds with effective population sizes well into the danger zone should be a heads up for breeders, especially in those breeds that could increase Ne with the simple strategy of breeding a larger fraction of available dogs and balancing the ratio of males to females (as I discuss here).
The caveat here is that these data are for an artificial population - the dogs registered with The Kennel Club. Before 2000, it was effectively a closed population, and since then has the addition of imports with only 3 generations of pedigree information, which makes them appear in analyses like this to be new, unrelated founders. At least The Kennel Club should be congratulated for including geneticists on their staff who have access to the pedigree data and the expertise necessary for these analyses. What a pity that the AKC does not do the same.
* A open meeting calling all hunters across Trinidad was held at the Inshan Ali Park in Preysal on Sunday the 20 of September.
*Around 5 pm the meeting got started.
*The objective of the meeting was to form a new hunters' association.
* A questionnaire was given to each attendee.
*Attendees were asked to form groups of ten to come up with a mission statement and vision statement.
*The meeting was organised by Richard Dabreau, Ravi Maharaj and Seeram Neebar.
* The reason given for wanting to start a new hunters'association was that neither any of the existing associations nor the Confederation of Hunters' Associations of Trinidad & Tobago (CHATT) does anything for the individual hunters or the sport as a whole.
* Mr Dabro made the statement that and I para phrase "We are in the condition we are today due to Mr Buddy Miller and Mr Sonnilal.
*Ex minister of environment Mr Reeza Mohammed was there touting his group the Wildlife and Forest Conservation Association and trying to get this new hunters'association to join up with him.
* An executive committee and trustees were selected from the attendees to start the association.
* This new hunters'association is to be called: New Generation Hunters Association of Trinidad and Tobago (NGHATT)
Caiere Chase wishes these boys the best of luck in their endeavour.
Edward II, the Duke of York wrote in his book “The Master of the Game”, when he was in jail following the defeat of Agincourt:
“The hound is a creature of reasoning and the best of all divine creatures.”
In 1937, Sir John Buchanan-Jardine published the book “Hounds of the World” which still constitutes the best study of the French origins of the Foxhound.
Before hunting the fox, England used to hunt hare and stag in the traditional French style, but with two different types of hound:
The first type was the Southern Hound which was mainly black and white with blue mottle and four eyes (meaning prominently marked round eyebrows above its eyes), and the origin comes back effectively to the gift of Gascon hounds from Henry IV of France to James I of England at the beginning of the 17th Century. Gascon hounds were slow of pace, with an excellent nose and had a passion for hunting hare. The descendants of this breed can still be found in kennels such as the Duke of Beaufort’s at Badminton in Gloucestershire.
The second type was the Northern Hound and is mainly tricolour. It was widely used in the 18th Century to hunt stag, such as in the Duke of Rutland’s hunt, at the Belvoir Kennels as well as the Brocklesby hunt of the Yarborough family in the north of England. This hound was much faster and was a cross-breed between the greyhound and the old Talbot. The Talbot was originally a blood hound bred in the monastery of St Hubert in the Ardennes, and brought to England in the early days of the Norman Conquest with the Grosvenors, William the Conqueror’s family, now the Duke of Westminster.
The history of the Foxhound is probably best described in the writings of the 8thDuke of Beaufort which first of all explains the disappointment of one of his forebears in 1743, when having hunted a stag too quickly, on the way back to Badminton Kennels, found a fox on Silk Road and had a superb chase across open land. Ever since then, the English started to hunt the fox on the vast open pasture-land after the deforestation of the 18th Century, which was undertaken to satisfy the construction of the ships in order to better conquest India.
The Foxhound developed from the combination of the qualities of both the Southern and Northern hounds. Lord Henry Bentick, at the beginning of the 19thCentury, was the first grand breeder of Foxhounds who based his selection on stamina and nose. Himself a very keen hunter, Lord Bentick hunted six days a week for more than half a Century.
At the end of the 19th Century, the Foxhound was standardised under the Belvoir type, and the fashionable standard at the time became an animal resembling a small lion but with little line, big bones, and legs resembling those of a four poster bed.
The First World War broke out with this fashion of hound, and then introduced new blood from the kennels of Sir Edward Curre. This animal was much lighter in conformation, and predominantly white in colour. The second transformation was done between the two World Wars with the direct injection of Welsh blood which produced a kind of French Griffon with long hair, a relatively supple hound with very strong and deep voice. This was known as the Welsh Cross.
The first hunt of this new type of hound was done by the 10th Earl of Coventry at the Kennel of Croome. He was also famous for building the railway line between the City of London and Croome in order to provide the King and his hunting guests easy access to their sport.
There is nothing better than to read the book about The Foxhound written in 1964 by Miss Daphne Moore, and to also study the MFHA Stud Book which has been published annually since 1841. This constitutes “the bible” of any Foxhound breeder. With this Stud Book one can trace back the origin of literally every single Foxhound since the middle of the 19th Century.
Every year, all the British hunts register their puppies. Outside the MFHA Stud Book of 1841, there are certain hunts which keep their own pedigree records, some going back more than 300 years. Brocklesby, for example, has kept its Stud Book since 1746. For instance Ringwood since 1788 was immortalised by a Stubbs painting in 1792. Also the Badminton Kennel has Stud Books dating back to 1728 and many of their hounds captivated in time by the paintings of Wotton.
The Kennel of Selore in France is fortunate to have “Colonel 2009”, a generous gift from the current Earl of Yarborough. This hound won the Best of his Breed in his category in the National Fontainebleau Competition and also at the World Dog Show in 2011. “Colonel” is a direct descendent from the Ringwood 1788 line. The Master of the Hunt at Selore also received another beautiful gift from the 11th Duke of Beaufort, a bitch called “Daylight 2007”. This hound won the Champion Bitch Hound at the Puppy Show of the Selore Hunt in 2009. She descends from “Justice 1805” (Badminton Hounds) which became very famous in the stories of 1930’s, among them Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour 1830.
In “Daylight” the entire history of the Southern Hound is there for all to see. Her loving eyes and blue mottle colour make you think easily of Gascon origins – from the pack offered by Henry IV to James I. (Henry IV in the early 17th Century, offered a Pack of Gascon Hounds to James I. James I hunted them as did Charles I (his son). Charles II was not a participant in the sport and in the 18thCentury, gave the Pack to Lord Worcester, who became the first Duke of Beaufort at Badminton).
The line that has been used for more than 100 years is “Rambler 1873” from the Earl of Coventry, and this descends from “Crasy 1840”, bred by Lord Henry Bentick. As a consequence, “Rambler 1873” can be descended like “Godolphin“in the Anglo-Arab standard of the breed. Therefore the blood of “Rambler 1873” is in every vein of every Foxhound existing in the present time. When you study the Stud Book, you have the proof of this extremely important fact.
The second most widely used line comes from a Welsh cross after the Second World War with a sire called “Salesman 1944”, a relatively white hound. “Salesman” is a descendent of “Marmaduke 1925”, from the kennel of Sir Edward Curre, and the white colour remains dominant in this bloodline.
The Foxhounds of the Equipage of Monique de Rothschild come mainly from “Salesman 1944”. Such as “Prestige 1979”, or “Boule-de-Neige” who won the National Hound Competition at Chambord twenty-two years ago.
The Stud Book is currently published by the Master of Fox Hounds Association (MFHA) of Great Britain which was inaugurated at the Boodles Club at St James’s in 1856. The MFHA was run during the second part of the 20th Century by Captain Ronnie Wallace, still now nicknamed “God” by the British hunting fraternity. Another great institution is the Peterborough Royal Foxhound Show – a true temple of the Foxhound – where since 1878, in June of each year, the very best Foxhounds come to be judged.
When showing, a bowler hat is considered de-rigueur and the hound is presented with great freedom and without leash, in order to observe his movement and engage his spirit. From 1887 to 1904, many champions have been observed from the kennels of the Warwickshire Hunt due to the bloodlines of “Rambler 1873” at the hand of its Master, Lord Willoughby de Broke. This is the ultimate reason why this hound can be considered the father of modern Foxhounds. Every hunt tries to outbreed with the Peterborough champions.
French hunting society often ignores the Foxhound. Often judged for being too speedy/quick, lacking nose and considered better adapted for hunting in open land after a strong scent such as the fox, but not very well adapted for hunting deer. When hunting as a road hound, the Foxhound can also be exceptional and even better than the best of the French hounds. The Foxhound can hunt in the forest after deer with a light scent. The hounds of Baronessa Rothschild who has a mixed pack of Foxhounds and French hounds, has been using the Foxhound pack with success in Compiegne (Northern France) to hunt red-deer for many decades. For example, more than twenty years ago, “Decembre”, put a stag at bay himself on the road of Crepy when all the French hounds had lost interest a long time before. In a mixed pack, it is not uncommon for the Foxhounds to be at the kill – they are most of the time! For example, Baronessa Rothschild recalled that “Navarre” had a habit of leading the pack the last quarter of an hour before a kill. Baron von Pfetten also uses these Foxhounds to hunt roe-deer, putting a few Foxhounds among a larger number of French black & white in the forest of Briffault. For instance, “Daylight” has been seen jumping on a deer at the end of a hunt, thus effectively increasing the number of kills over the last few years threefold, from five per annum to about fifteen.
The Foxhounds are very clever creatures, characterised by a particularly expressive look. Lord Henry Bentick’s “Regulus 1861” and his puppies are responsible for the majority of the road hounds, and trusted with a remarkable nose. It is true that the voice of the Foxhound is probably not as deep as that of the French hounds. Its cry is short and probably not as high; but these qualities of the voice have never been a criteria of selection in the last 200 years of Foxhound breeding. The best English breeders concentrated more on the spirit of the hound as well as the general aspect of harmony, symmetry, and sport, along with a deep breast with plenty of heart and lung room, and relatively masculine head. The quality of change is particularly remarkable in certain lines and can be found in Badminton and Brocklesby stock. The Welsh Cross is a lighter hound and very fast. It is interesting to note the admirable capacity of integration of behaviour and pace of the Foxhound when being introduced in a pack of French hounds and during the course of hunting stag, roedeer and buck.
The coexistence, however, in kennels of the two breeds can be rather problematic. Typically the English kennels separate males from females because they are generally hunted separately. In relation to feeding, English Foxhounds follow a diet based on red meat which is very different from the diet of the French hounds. Foxhounds eat very quickly and this is the reason why it is very important to control their feeding process, otherwise after six months, if gaining too much weight, feed must be regulated.
The Foxhound is relatively easily entered to a pack of its own kind and to participate and be trained as a pack hound. It interacts immediately with obedience to the Master who is serving it out hunting. When entered into a pack, it is at the same time free but under control of the eyes, the voice and the home of the Master. Individually the Foxhound enjoys being flattered and revels in the presence of human beings.
The Foxhounds has an exceptional capacity for acclimatization to its climatic environment, which is proven by the fact that they have been hunting in as far-flung places such as Hong Kong and India in the past, as well as hunts currently operating in Portugal, Italy, Australia and the USA.
These qualities are often misunderstood by the French hunting community and should be better discovered and known. This is the reason why it would be useful to create an International Association of the Foxhound with the mandate to promote the breed of Foxhound and publish a pedigree of young hounds outside the UK. We hope that this initiative will be able to better develop the standard of the breed and support our friends across the English Channel.
By Baron Jean Christophe von Pfetten & Baronness Monique de Rothschild. Translated by Clare Poole.
