something every kitten knows and that many humans forget:
DON’T TRUST DOGS.
dogs are born collaborators and from drugs to weapons and crowd control to sniffing out alleged disease, they will always help the authorities to monitor and oppress you!
We're not all bad. We sometimes just need to be pointed in the right direction.
Knowing a little bit about what goes into the training of a detection dog- hint, it's a LOT of time and usually a lot of money- I'd love to know what the actual hit rate of a COVID dog is for a virus that has existed less than 2 years. I strongly suspect the accuracy of a COVID dog in Sept. 2021 is about as good as a PCR test.
Cats are better critical thinkers on average, to be sure. But there are good dogs, and you can't do much better than to have one fighting for you. They aren't as easily distracted by laser pointers and feathers on sticks. :)
Russian shepherds are apparently the best in the biz when it comes to trace detection. They've got explosives dogs at Moscow Int'l that can smell particles at better than <1 ppm.
Beagles and labs are great economical choices for organics detection due to their breed strengths, as you pointed out. US Customs uses more beagles and labs than anything else.
A very interesting and handsome breed - and one that I would expect to be extremely hardy. I'm actually rather glad my sense of smell isn't as sensitive as theirs is! Wow.
After seeing your first comment, I did a DuckDuckGo search for Russian Shepherd Dog and came up with Caucasian Shepherd dog/Russian Shepherd dog. These appear to be a different breed entirely. ?? The Caucasian Shepherd is a huge dog with a very thick fur coat and looks as if it would be successful fighting off grizzly bears or wolves as they guard their flocks.
They did something similar at a sports stadium just as things were starting to open up. The optics of this are chilling. (But Gato,I am a dog lover I must confess.)
Early in the pandemic, someone did a big survey to see which activities best correlated with contracting COVID. Surprisingly, number one on the list was dog walking. Nobody seemed to be able to explain this. When I came down with COVID last fall, I was surprised for several reasons. I hadn't had a cold or flu in years, had been doing the quercitin-zn prophylaxis thing, and rarely went out, getting groceries etc. delivered. (am retired) BUT... I recalled that survey.. ah, ha! I take my dog out on a leash 5x/day, and we walk and walk. Still, I wonder how dog walking could be riskier in terms of COVID infection than grocery shopping, attending sports events, or going to a bar? BTW, I have had colds worse than C19, never stopped the dog walks (though I altered our routes to avoid people).
Well, they definitely found a correlation, so that's not BS. And it was significantly stronger even than living with someone infected with C19. Another surprise was that infection was more highly correlated with having groceries delivered than going out shopping for them. Here's a Yahoo article from November 2020 that summarizes the study findings.
Dude, love you like a littermate, but gotta disagree strongly on this one.
Pretty much everyone agrees that someone who is actually contagious should stay home. The problem is hysteria about people who are contagious but don't know it -- "asymptomatic" spreaders. Unfortunately that's craziness we have to deal with.
We should welcome a mechanism for detecting those asymptomatic spreaders. Not primarily to exclude those people -- although that might be the sales pitch -- but to demonstrate to everyone else that they barely exist and that it's a largely imaginary threat.
The dog that does not bark in the night (or the airport), as it were.
Granted: I'm assuming that the dogs alert only when someone is actually contagious -- not, like some over-cranked PCR test, whenever they sniff some meaningless trace fragment of viral RNA.
Asymptomatic spread is bullshit. It has always been bullshit. Creating theatre around its existence continues to feed the lie that it is a thing and creating any process incentivizes demonstrating the value of that process.
Exclusionary tools can only be used to exclude, not to hopefully create desired emotional states. People will see dogs and want the people the dogs bark at punished and will not care about false positives or how few people actually asymptomatically spread COVID.
There are SIX weakly-confirmed accounts of asymptomatic spread in the entire world of billions of humans.
You can feel free to welcome the COVID-sniffing dogs and show them your belly. I hope the dog doesn't bark at you.
After all, if we just keep complying, eventually they'll be satisfied and stop.
Dogs don't understand theater. That's the backhanded beauty of this.
By analogy, imagine someone's been convinced there's a radiation hazard. It's no good just telling him there isn't one. We have to make its absence objectively visible. Someone's got to get a Geiger counter and show him. That's not "theater". It's the exact opposite. We're not indulging the crazy. We're refuting it.
Yeah, we shouldn't need to do that. He should just get over his baseless beliefs and irrational fears. But there it is.
People convinced that asymptomatic spread is a thing aren't going to believe us when we tell them it's bullshit. Sorry. We have to make its absence objectively visible. Dogs, like the Geiger counter in the analogy, accomplish that. Dogs can't be dismsised as lying or biased or pushing an agenda. All dogs know is whether a particular smell -- which otherwise has no significance to them -- is present or not.
What I think you're positing is that dogs will react like over-cranked PCR tests, alerting when there's no actual risk of transmission. Maybe so. My guess is that they're probably under-sensitive rather than over-sensitive, but I don't know.
Let's not mirror-image Covid hysteria, however. Nobody's going to get fired or lynched or deported to the east just because a dog alerted. It's one layer of screening. And if it turns out they're unreliable, airports have every incentive to stop using them.
Granted, none of that screening is actually necessary or useful, just as the Geiger counter in the analogy isn't actually necessary or useful. But the only way to demonstrate that is by actually doing it and finding nothing.
If you can, watch this interview of Dr. Richard Fleming by Dr. Mercola before it disappears in ~26 hours. Dr. Fleming just released a book alleging that the virus as a bio-weapon.
Born collaborators!!! You are hilarious. When this is all over I hope to meet some of the people I have found via Twitter and sub stack. I’m thinking you all have a great sense of humor which is so much better than all the anger from the other side.
This argument is iron clad. There was once a dog who thought Adolf Hitler was the greatest man who ever lived. Conversely, there was a calico cat who wiped her ass on Hitler's little mustache while he slept. Her name was.....Lilith. These are facts.
Can’t dogs get infected? Are they not putting these dogs at risk and creating another spread vector? From drugs to explosives and now viruses, this seems like another intimidation technique above all.
Virus-smelling dogs (this has been done before) work by smelling the changes in the concentrations of various excretions in human sweat that are the (usually ignored and unnoticed) symptoms of those illnesses. Viral infections have subtle but extensive impacts on things like how much sodium and potassium our bodies metabolize, whether we become dehydrated, the production of different balances of stress and other hormones, etc., all of which alter the odor of sweat in ways that are quite perceptible to most mammals with more advanced senses of smell than humans.
There are mammals far better at this even than dogs, but dogs are easily trained to respond to specific scents in ways that are useful to humans.
We're not all bad. We sometimes just need to be pointed in the right direction.
Knowing a little bit about what goes into the training of a detection dog- hint, it's a LOT of time and usually a lot of money- I'd love to know what the actual hit rate of a COVID dog is for a virus that has existed less than 2 years. I strongly suspect the accuracy of a COVID dog in Sept. 2021 is about as good as a PCR test.
Cats are better critical thinkers on average, to be sure. But there are good dogs, and you can't do much better than to have one fighting for you. They aren't as easily distracted by laser pointers and feathers on sticks. :)
That poor dog doesn't even have a mask.
I would also like to know the successful "hit" stats!
Really, so they give them a pcr test to verify a positive "hit"!
Therefore... the dog was security theater. Just give the PCR test ( which is still garbage).
How do you train a dog to smell an "in silica" sequence? Do you show her a printout of As,Ts, Gs and Cs?
You'd think Beagles or other scent hounds would be the dog of choice.
Russian shepherds are apparently the best in the biz when it comes to trace detection. They've got explosives dogs at Moscow Int'l that can smell particles at better than <1 ppm.
Beagles and labs are great economical choices for organics detection due to their breed strengths, as you pointed out. US Customs uses more beagles and labs than anything else.
Did not know that about the Russian Shepherds - learned something new. Thanks!
They're an amazing breed.
https://www.russiandog.net/shalaika-sulimov-dog-best-sniffer.html
A very interesting and handsome breed - and one that I would expect to be extremely hardy. I'm actually rather glad my sense of smell isn't as sensitive as theirs is! Wow.
After seeing your first comment, I did a DuckDuckGo search for Russian Shepherd Dog and came up with Caucasian Shepherd dog/Russian Shepherd dog. These appear to be a different breed entirely. ?? The Caucasian Shepherd is a huge dog with a very thick fur coat and looks as if it would be successful fighting off grizzly bears or wolves as they guard their flocks.
Yeah, sorry for the confusion- "Russian shepherd" is a properly distinct breed from Sulimov Laika, which are what I meant. 😅
The dogs got 2 jabs or 3? What's the stats on dog cases/ hospitalizations/ deaths?
It's coming no doubt.
They did something similar at a sports stadium just as things were starting to open up. The optics of this are chilling. (But Gato,I am a dog lover I must confess.)
Yup - LOTS of us are dog AND cat lovers. Cat's may be better critical tinkers, but Dogs are more loyal (it just depends upon to whom).
Early in the pandemic, someone did a big survey to see which activities best correlated with contracting COVID. Surprisingly, number one on the list was dog walking. Nobody seemed to be able to explain this. When I came down with COVID last fall, I was surprised for several reasons. I hadn't had a cold or flu in years, had been doing the quercitin-zn prophylaxis thing, and rarely went out, getting groceries etc. delivered. (am retired) BUT... I recalled that survey.. ah, ha! I take my dog out on a leash 5x/day, and we walk and walk. Still, I wonder how dog walking could be riskier in terms of COVID infection than grocery shopping, attending sports events, or going to a bar? BTW, I have had colds worse than C19, never stopped the dog walks (though I altered our routes to avoid people).
Could it be that it seems strange because it's completely incorrect bullshit?
Well, they definitely found a correlation, so that's not BS. And it was significantly stronger even than living with someone infected with C19. Another surprise was that infection was more highly correlated with having groceries delivered than going out shopping for them. Here's a Yahoo article from November 2020 that summarizes the study findings.
https://news.yahoo.com/dog-walkers-more-likely-catch-coronavirus-first-lockdown-152050721.html
And here is a link to a summary and abstract of the study itself, full PDF paywalled.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935120311208?via%3Dihub
That's how Napoleon (the pig) was able to pull everything off in Animal Farm. No pups--no oppression
Keep the truffles away from the pigs and they might be better than dogs at sniffing out covid (or radical leftist democrats).
They are giving dogs a bad name.
https://imgur.com/a/BtpSrei
Funny!
Dude, love you like a littermate, but gotta disagree strongly on this one.
Pretty much everyone agrees that someone who is actually contagious should stay home. The problem is hysteria about people who are contagious but don't know it -- "asymptomatic" spreaders. Unfortunately that's craziness we have to deal with.
We should welcome a mechanism for detecting those asymptomatic spreaders. Not primarily to exclude those people -- although that might be the sales pitch -- but to demonstrate to everyone else that they barely exist and that it's a largely imaginary threat.
The dog that does not bark in the night (or the airport), as it were.
Granted: I'm assuming that the dogs alert only when someone is actually contagious -- not, like some over-cranked PCR test, whenever they sniff some meaningless trace fragment of viral RNA.
Asymptomatic spread is bullshit. It has always been bullshit. Creating theatre around its existence continues to feed the lie that it is a thing and creating any process incentivizes demonstrating the value of that process.
Exclusionary tools can only be used to exclude, not to hopefully create desired emotional states. People will see dogs and want the people the dogs bark at punished and will not care about false positives or how few people actually asymptomatically spread COVID.
There are SIX weakly-confirmed accounts of asymptomatic spread in the entire world of billions of humans.
You can feel free to welcome the COVID-sniffing dogs and show them your belly. I hope the dog doesn't bark at you.
After all, if we just keep complying, eventually they'll be satisfied and stop.
Dogs don't understand theater. That's the backhanded beauty of this.
By analogy, imagine someone's been convinced there's a radiation hazard. It's no good just telling him there isn't one. We have to make its absence objectively visible. Someone's got to get a Geiger counter and show him. That's not "theater". It's the exact opposite. We're not indulging the crazy. We're refuting it.
Yeah, we shouldn't need to do that. He should just get over his baseless beliefs and irrational fears. But there it is.
People convinced that asymptomatic spread is a thing aren't going to believe us when we tell them it's bullshit. Sorry. We have to make its absence objectively visible. Dogs, like the Geiger counter in the analogy, accomplish that. Dogs can't be dismsised as lying or biased or pushing an agenda. All dogs know is whether a particular smell -- which otherwise has no significance to them -- is present or not.
What I think you're positing is that dogs will react like over-cranked PCR tests, alerting when there's no actual risk of transmission. Maybe so. My guess is that they're probably under-sensitive rather than over-sensitive, but I don't know.
Let's not mirror-image Covid hysteria, however. Nobody's going to get fired or lynched or deported to the east just because a dog alerted. It's one layer of screening. And if it turns out they're unreliable, airports have every incentive to stop using them.
Granted, none of that screening is actually necessary or useful, just as the Geiger counter in the analogy isn't actually necessary or useful. But the only way to demonstrate that is by actually doing it and finding nothing.
My B.S. meter is going off... I think the humans need to stop inventing stupid ideas.
If you can, watch this interview of Dr. Richard Fleming by Dr. Mercola before it disappears in ~26 hours. Dr. Fleming just released a book alleging that the virus as a bio-weapon.
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/09/12/is-covid-19-a-bioweapon.aspx?ui=4a17d3b6fe408c57d13de9a0d009593c7e0a7f317f011c5beeddb1d6c9d7b16e&sd=20210405&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20210912&mid=DM990832&rid=1262405843
all i could smell were pop tarts and nuggies in that fatso's pocket ...
I think I have Covid in my knees... My dog keeps licking the back of them!
Born collaborators!!! You are hilarious. When this is all over I hope to meet some of the people I have found via Twitter and sub stack. I’m thinking you all have a great sense of humor which is so much better than all the anger from the other side.
But it will backfire on them when all employees are already vaccinated….Doh!
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJFp272w9u8
Humans are cats best friends, especially the patriotic ones!
https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1436846146345897986
This argument is iron clad. There was once a dog who thought Adolf Hitler was the greatest man who ever lived. Conversely, there was a calico cat who wiped her ass on Hitler's little mustache while he slept. Her name was.....Lilith. These are facts.
Can’t dogs get infected? Are they not putting these dogs at risk and creating another spread vector? From drugs to explosives and now viruses, this seems like another intimidation technique above all.
Serious question; can dogs smell a virus?
Virus-smelling dogs (this has been done before) work by smelling the changes in the concentrations of various excretions in human sweat that are the (usually ignored and unnoticed) symptoms of those illnesses. Viral infections have subtle but extensive impacts on things like how much sodium and potassium our bodies metabolize, whether we become dehydrated, the production of different balances of stress and other hormones, etc., all of which alter the odor of sweat in ways that are quite perceptible to most mammals with more advanced senses of smell than humans.
There are mammals far better at this even than dogs, but dogs are easily trained to respond to specific scents in ways that are useful to humans.
I don't know. I know there is some evidence they can smell cancer, so if an ill body gives off a particular scent, then maybe they could.
So you would prefer that The Soviet Union of Faucierica just stand by and let her enemies develop superior Plague Dog Technology?!
So true Gatito!