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Ranch dogs: Picking the best breed

They say that dog is man’s best friend. This is truer than most people think, especially in a cattle ranch, where dogs are also used to herd cattle.

Image Source: rangercreekranch.com

Dogs that can herd cattle extremely well are highly prized by experienced ranchers, like James Hughes and Charles Crispin. These dogs make the ranchers’ job easier and less stressful, as well as save them time and money by reducing labor costs. However, not all dogs can be cattle dogs. Cattle dogs have to be highly trainable and can move around livestock comfortably, without chasing or harassing them. In addition, ranches and farms are huge open places and require dogs that are disciplined enough to not wander off. Here are some of the preferred, if not the best, dog breeds for ranches: • Great Pyrenees. These are thick-coated, large, and extremely strong dogs that are bred specifically to protect livestock. One Great Pyrenees dog can protect a small herd of livestock from wolves, coyotes, and other predators.

Image Souce: pedigreedatabase.com

• Pembroke Welsh Corgi. These are smaller ranching dogs that are intelligent and get along well with people. They have short ears and short legs and are more suited for smaller herds.

Image Source: petside.com

• Australian Shepherd. These are herding dogs that are strong and fast, and are considered as loyal all-around farm dogs.

Image Source: de.wikipedia.org

• Border Collies. These dogs are extremely intelligent and hardworking. They can be trained to herd a variety of animals ranging from sheep to cattle.

Image Source: winpara.com

Any of these would do for a basic ranch dog, as all of them are intelligent, can easily be trained, and get along well with people. Cattle ranching is an extremely rewarding experience. For additional information, follow this Twitter page

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REPOST: Calculating the cost of disaster vs. the price of resilience

Read about the weight of disasters’ aftermath from this GreenBiz.com article.

Image Source: USAToday.com

By June 2012, many had forgotten the devastation Hurricane Katrina wrought on New Orleans some seven years earlier. Few had the foresight to predict Sandy and the crises it would cause New York City and environs. In the super-storm’s aftermath, most have been concerned with “getting back to normal.” A few are calling for resilient new ways to handle what’s now being dubbed the “new normal” weather pattern. And a very few are trying to calculate the real costs of the disaster. One of those is Prof. John Mutter, the Columbia University scientist and economist, who shared his prescient insights with me on the price of climate related disaster last spring. In the wake of Sandy, which occurred right in Mutter’s backyard (full disclosure: mine, too), he with me shared some more recent lessons learned and potential ways forward. What is striking about Mutter’s viewpoint is his focus on the longer-term economic and business costs of such climate-related disasters—versus an immediate fix—and his suggestions of opportunities to be reaped. Instead of reconstructing what was lost, he advocates taking a longer view to understand what the often lagging and lasting costs of such disasters are. That approach often means looking not at current losses and rebuilding what was destroyed, but rather at the costs—over time—to business and society, in the long aftermath of the event, including productivity gains that might have occurred without a disaster. It also means looking at any current destruction less as loss but rather as opportunity to create something completely different, perhaps elsewhere, with more wisdom, foresight, practical insight and technological know-how. In short, Mutter’s approach suggests a new and different way of calculating the costs of disaster, pointing out that the biggest loss to the economy—the chain of production, consumption and everything that goes into it—doesn’t happen in the moment of crisis but actually begins afterwards “with losses that go beyond the value of the built structures trashed at the time, beyond the capital asset loss, to a deeper economic loss that happens over time.” He adds that a climate-related—or other—disaster is a process with three key parts: build-up, event and recovery. The recovery period is where the risk of cost builds most—and where the opportunity for genuine correction also occurs, including boosting economic growth after the initial trauma. The post-disaster period is when we start to understand the “true impacts,” he says, adding that they will be “highly variable, and the length of time it takes to get back to where you were is uneven” for different businesses.

Image Source:StrikeDebt.org

Who loses what, when and how? One reason we need to look at the longer-term horizon to understand the price of disaster is that how much may be lost by whom and at what point takes some time to sort through. In the immediate term, the losses may hit one business—or kind of business—harder than others. “The disaster affects different businesses in different ways at different times,” says Mutter. “What this speaks to is the inequality in the effects. Some will cope, some will be set back, some will lose business in a way not recoverable.” For instance, when Sandy hit New York City on October 29, the storm would essentially decimate the Halloween business in and around New York, partly because costumes, candy and party favors wouldn’t be sold as expected (even the famous New York City parade was cancelled). On the other hand, some businesses, like any hardware store that could stock basics such as flashlights, batteries and so on, could hardly keep up with demand. Another case: a large grocery store chain may have enough business interruption or other insurance to cover any financial losses from a flooded store. But, he asks: “How many companies have that? A small business, like a bodega, probably wouldn’t have the same level of insurance.”

Image Source: Slate.com

Two-quarter estimate Mutter says it will likely take at least two quarters to estimate relatively short-term impact on most businesses after Hurricane Sandy, mainly because the process of sorting through the information (including devastation, restoration and future protection) necessary to calculate the costs of disaster takes time. An analysis would GDP numbers and quarterly profits, especially for large companies with lots of local branches, which “may be hard to see immediately in the larger figures associated with how a company is affected,” he says. “We’ll start to see some numbers at the end of the first quarter, but more meaningful data won’t start to come through until March” of 2013, he adds. Some businesses and industries will come back, and some will even prosper, he notes. For instance, “Construction will prosper, even though it’s a short-term thing and won’t help the local construction company that was trashed in the storm. Only those who weren’t hurt can actually help. Net/net, it may not make a difference, but locally it might, because the business that does the building” will likely be based elsewhere—where the disaster didn’t happen.” Effects on larger companies or some sectors may take longer to dissect, Mutter warns. For instance, a multinational company with stores all over the world, may not immediately be able to assess and calculate how much business was lost at what point where—or from what immediate cause, such as supply chain interruption, power outage, transportation or other infrastructure failure or even regulations, he says. What will be the eventual loss to businesses like gas stations—which lost power, couldn’t stock enough gasoline—and even the oil business? What will be the costs to retailers? What to the airline industry, hotel industry, utility and information technology industries? And what will be the advantages to some of those same industries over time—or to others?

Image Source: YahooNews.com

Opportunity in disaster? If we look at disaster opportunistically, what can we learn from Sandy? For one thing, says Mutter, “It’s certainly a time to think about simple things, how to protect things better, simple things like subway entrances with water-tight doors. This isn’t a feat of modern engineering.” He adds that a number of hospitals also had power failures or inadequate back-up systems, clearly things to correct. Perhaps more important, he says, “If your infrastructure is damaged, it’s an opportunity to think about doing things better when you re-start, how to do things in a more modern way.” That in turn means slowing down, “not rushing back to normal as quickly as possible, which would mean doing things over just as they were,” he says. “It becomes an issue of forced technological upgrades, using [the crisis] as a way to stimulate technology upgrades.” One example is transportation infrastructure, which suffered a lot during Sandy. “It took awhile to get electricity back,” says Mutter. “But some flooded tunnels weren’t working at all. So, while New York City’s public transportation system is good, it needs new thinking on how to do things more resiliently.” It’s also a time to rethink whether to build or rebuild housing close to the shoreline, since something like Sandy “will certainly happen again, whether it’s global warming or not, and even building barriers can’t protect some areas hardest hit,” Mutter says. That’s a lot of people to move and regulations to change, a potential opportunity for the real estate industrand another story. Charles Crispin specializes in management care operations and health care economics. To find out more about him and to get various lifestyle tips - both for urban and rural living - visit this Facebook page.

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A sneak peek of ranch life caught on camera.

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Justices order another look at key health care provision

This CNN article talks about the decision of the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the health care reform law.

Washington (CNN) -- The Supreme Court has ordered a federal appeals court to take another look at whether a key requirement in the health care reform law violates religious freedoms. A pending lawsuit from the private Liberty University had claimed, among other things, that the law would lead to taxpayer dollars funding abortions and contraception, a claim the Obama administration rejects. The justices issued their order Monday. The high court in June had upheld the overall law championed by President Obama, but left room for continued legal challenges to certain aspects of the law's application. The Lynchburg, Virginia-based school bills itself as the largest Christian evangelical college in the world. A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in 2011 unanimously concluded the university's lawsuit should be blocked on jurisdictional grounds. There is no indication when the appeals court will revisit the issue in the wake of the high court's order. After the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act's funding mechanism -- the so-called individual mandate requiring nearly all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a financial penalty -- it tossed out all other pending appeals. Liberty University then refiled its lawsuit, saying its objections to the law should be reconsidered in light of the court's 5-4 ruling affirming the overall law. The school believes Americans should not be required to purchase health insurance -- and employers forced to provide it -- if there are legitimate moral and religious objections to some provisions. It is one of several dozen pending lawsuits around the country filed to challenge the law's application since the June decision. The Richmond-based appeals court taking on the Liberty University case could ask both the federal government and the school to submit updated legal arguments. The Obama administration did not object to the university asking for another chance to press its claims. The case is Liberty University v. Geithner (11-438). Source : http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/26/us/scotus-health-care-religion/index.html

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This article from Forbes shares that "The nation’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, which provide health insurance for about one in three Americans, are poised for a new wave of consolidation."

http://onforb.es/104ZQrh

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"They found that in general, physical activity of any kind was associated with longer life." Read how activities as simple as household chores can help a person live longer from this article.

http://nyti.ms/ZGnUzv

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Antibiotics Are a Gift to Be Handled With Care

This New York Times article shares some interesting facts about antibiotics and why this type of medicine should be regarded as an important gift, which should be handled with utmost care. I should start by saying as clearly as I can that I love antibiotics. Recently I had dinner with a pediatrician friend, and she told me the story of the day’s sickest child. Before she sent the child to the emergency room in an ambulance, she told me, she gave her 50 milligrams per kilogram of ceftriaxone, a powerful antibiotic. “You probably saved her life,” I said, and my friend nodded; it was possible. Antibiotics represent a huge gift in the struggle against infant and child mortality, a triumph (or actually, many triumphs) of human ingenuity and science over disease and death, since the antibiotic era began back in the fourth and fifth decades of the 20th century. But new research is looking at questions about the complex effects of antibiotics — on bacteria, on individual children and on populations — building on a greatly increased awareness of how powerful antibiotics can be, and how important it is to use them judiciously. Over the past 15 years or so, spurred by new realizations — and new fears — about the risks of breeding resistant strains of bacteria, pediatricians in the United States have, as a group, cut back dramatically on prescribing antibiotics in situations where they may not be necessary. And parents, as a group, have become less likely to demand them. “It’s actually been a remarkable change in practice from the mid-’90s on,” said Dr. Jonathan Finkelstein, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital who studies antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance, “and we did that by physicians and patients recognizing that antibiotics are quite effective, quite safe, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and as with any other medical decision, we have to weigh the risks and benefits of every treatment.” No antibiotics are needed for upper respiratory infections — colds, coughs, runny noses — which are caused by viruses. There has been a lot of discussion about whether ear infections should always be treated with antibiotics, or whether in some situations (older child, less ill) “watchful waiting” might be appropriate — but it’s also true that many of us have become much more reluctant to diagnose ear infections in borderline cases. In a study that Dr. Finkelstein and his colleagues published this year, looking at antibiotic use in children in Massachusetts, the rate at which antibiotics were dispensed to the youngest group (3 to 24 months) had decreased 24 percent by 2008-9 from 2000-1. And that drop was largely driven by a declining rate of diagnosis of ear infections. We always knew there were immediate risks to antibiotics. Children could have allergic reactions. They could get diarrhea. Babies could get unpleasant yeast infections — severe diaper rash, thrush in the mouth. But still, the thinking back when I trained was that after the antibiotics, the body would return to normal. “When antibiotics were developed, they were miraculous for all the reasons that you know,” said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, the chairman of medicine at New York University School of Medicine. “With few exceptions, there was almost no long-term toxicity that was identifiable, and so everybody thought that if you took an antibiotic it could produce some immediate upset — it could produce a rash, loose bowels — and then everything would return to normal, bounce back to normal. But in fact there was no real exploration of that. It just became an article of faith.” Dr. Blaser has devoted himself to a study of what is now called the microbiome, the bacterial population that lives on us and in us, and the effects of perturbing that population by antibiotic use. He and other researchers are asking questions about whether alterations in the microbiome may be linked to many different patterns of health, growth and disease. It’s an area of investigation that is still new, but changing quickly. And there is the question of a connection between antibiotics and obesity, which arises in part, Dr. Blaser said, because of the practice of feeding antibiotics to livestock to increase weight — though the mechanism by which that works is not understood. Last summer, Dr. Blaser’s group published a study in The International Journal of Obesity in which they analyzed growth data from a large group of British children; those treated with antibiotics when very young (under 6 months) showed increased weight gain by a year of age, and were 22 percent more likely to be overweight at age 3. “This study, like others, suggests that we need a broader perspective in thinking about childhood obesity,” said Dr. Leonardo Trasande, a pediatrician on the faculty of N.Y.U. School of Medicine who was lead author on the study. The influence of early antibiotics on the lungs has also been examined; several studies in recent years have looked at possible associations between antibiotics in pregnancy, infancy and childhood and the later development of asthma — though a review last year concluded that the additional risk from antibiotics was slight. And a study in last month’s issue of the journal Pediatrics looked epidemiologically at another large population of children, and found an association between childhood antibiotic treatment and the later development of inflammatory bowel disease — and the association was strongest when the treatment was early (before the age of 1). Every one of these researchers started — as I did at the start of this column — with an antibiotic pledge of allegiance. “We clearly have to use antibiotics and are lucky to have them around,” said Dr. Matthew P. Kronman, lead author on the bowel disease study, who is a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Seattle Children’s Hospital. “It’s just that we are still learning what all of their effects are.” Children who need antibiotics should get them. But new studies challenge us to think about the effects of antibiotics on the bacterial populations that accompany us through life, and to treat the great gift of antibiotics with deeper understanding and respect. Source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/antibiotics-are-a-gift-to-be-handled-with-care/