Who's the worstest blogger in the world?

Me, because I'm crazy busy finishing up my second master's degree and planning a move across the country (Ryan and I are taking a break from academia due to a change of academic plans).

But, I found this map (thanks Bill!) and had to share:



The redder a place is, the more remote it is. I am here to tell you that this map is highly delusional. Just because there are roads somewhere does not mean you can drive in the same way you can in America--a dirt track in India (or, for that matter, a paved road) is very different from the equivalent road in America. Anyone who thinks they can practically drive across Uganda in six hours is fricking delusional--a day if you're really lucky, have a good four by four and a good driver. And sure, you can get up the Congo river in a couple of days--if there's fuel available, and often there isn't. Roads in Papua New Guinea flood frequently or are blocked via tribal violence. The cost of traveling by each of these different methods is an interesting factor--in order to travel according to the speeds they're suggesting in some of these places, you might as well charter a helicopter, cause the cost won't differ much in terms of how many helpers you'll have to pay, how many people you'll need to bribe, etc.

So all you adventurers out there, don't think that the world is quite so connected as this might make it seem. Just because you can get cell phone reception on safari in Tanzania (trust me, I have) does not mean that the only place you can go that's remote is Tibet. If I can find places that *I* think are remote (and my standards are high), then you can too.

Places to start, based on our experiences:
Indonesia
Papua New Guinea
Congo
Western (or eastern, or northern) Uganda
Namibia, especially near the border with Angola and Botswana.
Northern India
Northern Vietnam
Coastal Tanzania
Northeastern Zanzibar
The Beqqa Valley, Lebanon

For goodness sakes, people, just get away from the cities, away from the tour guides, and find a way to deal with just yourself and your traveling companions. See how much you can communicate with just gestures and a few words--Please, thank you, yes, no, hello and goodbye all go a loooong way. People say you need to know numbers, but so long as you have hands, numbers aren't that hard to convey. Eat the local food, drink the local liquor (cautiously--usually it's safe, but that doesn't mean it doesn't pack a punch), make kids laugh by showing them their pictures on your camera's screen and the games you used to play as a child. Bring gifts, and accept them, and realize that the important thing this map shows is not how easy it is to travel, but how interconnected we all are.

That's all for now.

Return to everyday life

Ryan and I are back home in Cali, settled into our new apartment and studying during the new school year. Oisin is with us, and though I occasionally miss the excitement of going a new place every day, I'm still somewhat giddy to be back going through the motions of my every day routine in Davis. Cooking my own food is a wonderful task, as chasing around a toddler, for the most part. He's back in day care during the week and so far seems to be enjoying himself immensely, which helps.

I'm back to teaching and class and research, and keep finding wonderfully interesting new papers. I'm going to try and write about the most interesting things I find, and the interesting parts of being a graduate student, but they're fewer and farther between when I'm not in the field, so once the beginning of the quarter calms down a bit, I'm going to try to post some of the stories we didn't get to tell yet about the summer. For now, I leave you with a second video of dog sampling, this one of me taking the blood, so you can see what we're talking about. As a note, the calm reaction this dog has is the standard reaction we got--even the dog in the last video was this relaxed once we got the muzzle on.

Welcome to the 19th century

We've just spent a few days in Hazaribagh, a town in India so completely off the map that visiting there was a bit like stepping back into the Raj. But then, that may just have been the person we were staying with.

Meet Bulu Imam:



Bulu is a true gentleman scholar, in the sense of the gentlemen who used to do all great scholarly research. He has time, and boundless energy, and so has devoted these two things to:

1. Stopping global warming, especially via coal mining near his home.
   
2. Conserving, discovering and studying the prehistoric antiquities of the area near his home
3. Conserving and studying the current culture, specifically the art, of the area near his home
4. Dogs, and promoting the Santal dog bread
5. Sharing his vast knowledge with as many people as he can manage
6. Writing poetry and prose
7. Painting
8. Tiger hunting, or, nowadays that it's no longer leagal or fashionable, telling tiger hunting stories
   

Not necessarily in that order. Bulu is deeply charming, tells wonderful stories, and knows all about the dogs of his region. After all, they're part of the people's lives here, much in the same way they've always been part of his life, traveling around on hunts and chasing after small game. This is Rosie, his pride and joy, archetype of the Santal breed, save for being just slightly too large:

Bulu's house is large and made of several different outbuildings, including a huge maze-like building build of mud in the traditional style, with all the wonderful built in quirks that a child building a snow fort might add, except more permanent. There's also Bulu's large family's home, a museum of local art, and another outbuilding with a few more rooms where we stayed, all set amdist a gorgeous mossy overgrown tropical garden. Complete with servants (for someone who can barely handle room service, this takes getting used to), meals cooked over an open fire, mosquito nets, huricane lamps, and full libraries, it was a bit like living a very long time ago for a few days. I can't say I agreed with everything, but we got our samples, and enjoyed the company and a bit of rest for a few days. Every bit of India will manage to be different, I think, but this was probably the bit I was expecting least of all.

Muzzling dogs

Due to popular demand, and a very helpful collaborator, we've finally got video of us capturing and sampling dogs. Sadly, we only had one video of us muzzling a dog so we didn't have much to choose from. It's a little amateur hour, but it gives a decent idea of the process for muzzling dogs that do not want to be muzzled. This is video from a hospital for mentally disabled people where some of the patients kept dogs, so we had additional concerns in keeping people back which made it a little more difficult, but the patients there were very sweet and helpful generally.



While this guy freaks out a bit, he was not hurt at all, just scared of the leash. We're tapping him on the head because we didn't want him chewing through the lead, as we're down to three leads now, and still have to finish sampling in India. We'll post more videos of actually taking blood and such in a bit.

[Guest post by Ryan, with bits by Cori, heh]

Vietnam: thoughts, landscapes and cute puppies.

Maybe this is because I was a military brat, raised mostly during peacetime, mainly after the cold war was ended, but Vietnam to me has always been at least somewhat about the war Americans fought here. This was the war that I heard songs about, saw movies about, heard people talk about.

I think so many places on earth are like this for Americans--civilizations have existed in the fertile crescent for millennia, but in the emotional lives of Americans, it's still just Iraq, the place we sent American soldiers to die. That's what resonates. Bosnia is just a country that had a bloody civil war a decade ago, Lebanon is where Israel drops bombs, Rwanda is where they commit genocide, and places like Papua New Guinea, that haven't made news since the Japanese invaded in WWII, don't even really register on our radar. The great events that shape nations are what make news, but they don't constitute all or even nearly all of the existence of those nations they occur in. Still, they make up a decent proportion of our conception of places not America.

This of course is not a uniquely American phenomena--the young woman who translated for us in Turkey, while very (unnecessarily) concerned for our safety in Ankara, voiced her concern by saying, "It's like Texas out there!" Meaning, it's not safe. Now, I've only ever been to airports in Texas, and I'm sure that there are places that are not safe, but my general impression of the state is that it's not a particularly dangerous place, even if it's a bit more intimidating to outsiders than other places in America. I'm sure there are a lot of Texans out there that would be very surprised to know that an Albanian woman living in a country that borders Iraq considers Texas so treacherous. But I guess people overseas hear a lot about Texans owning guns, and so assume it can't be safe.

All of which is just to say, you can read a ton about what a place is like, and know it's history backwards and forwards, and you still will have very little actual concept of what the country is like. Knowing its history can help offer post-hoc explanations of why it is what it is, but it can never help you totally predict a place.

So what is Vietnam actually like? Well, in my experience, it's beautiful and challenging and full of stubborn but kind people. I have to say, after slogging around after dogs in the northern hills for a week, it would SUCK BALLS to fight such an ultimately pointless war here. Clearly wars suck all the time anyways (what is it good for, absolutely nothing!), but ultimately pointless wars must suck exponentially more (Good God, yall!). Fighting an ultimately pointless war in a country with this kind of weather, and this incredible feeling of remoteness probably ranks among the top miserable human experiences of all times.

Vietnam is hot and sticky in the summer. I don't mean hot like Qatar, where people at least have the good sense to sleep through the middle of the day. I mean so humid and sticky that you can't tell where the humidity ends and your own sweat begins. The upside (have you noticed that Ryan and I always find the upside?) of this is the incredibly beautiful and lush vegetation. Also, endlessly charming picture-postcard terraced rice paddies being farmed literally by the hands of women and men wearing conical hats. When you see tourist photos of places you think, clearly most of the country can't look like that. But really, much of the northern part of this country actually does look like this:



or this:



or this:



Trust me. I drove through most of it on bad roads in a full 4x4. I had lots of time to figure out what it looks like.

So, it's beautiful here. While there's definitely a somewhat intimidating socialist bureaucracy, it has run pretty smoothly for us thanks to a very capable collaborator. I've gotten quite good at ignoring the response to tense up when I see red epaulets with yellow stars, a reaction I didn't expect in myself given that I'm not exactly a big war movie buff or anything like that. As a westerner, it's quite hard to tell just how much people in such uniforms are actually responsible for getting in the way of everyday goals for people here--it might be nominally socialist, but I don't think I've ever been anywhere quite so eagerly capitalist. People's living rooms double as store fronts and everywhere seems to be selling something.

Still, it's a beautiful and cheap place. I'm sick of Pho for breakfast and miss dairy products, but other than that, Vietnam has been lovely and fascinating.

Also, there are adorable dogs:

A few exemplary pictures from the highlands of PNG

These are betel nuts. Everyone in Papua New Guinea chews them (mixed with lime (like from limestone) and mustard incessantly and spits out the blood red juice.
This is what it looked like when they got Ryan and I to try them. I don't think we'll be taking it up any time soon:
A bit more fun: Me taking blood out of the back of the 4 x 4.
And this deeply charming bit: An old woman who adopted Ryan as her son, and in the tradition of mother-in-laws to their daughters, gave me a bilum (the string bag). SO MANY BILUMS (seriously, I have like eight now.)
Here's the women making the bilums. They are constantly busy with them, which may explain why they feel they can give them away, even in a society full of people with so little.

All in all, it was an amazing trip. We would highly recommend PNG to any bold/independent travelers, especially those looking to meet charming local people while visiting beautiful mountains. Spend as much time as you can in the remote areas and you'll have a wonderful time.

Beaten path? What beaten path?

Greetings from Kuala Lumpur! We're currently in the airport here, wishing the free wifi worked just a bit better. Much of this post was written in Goroka, a town in the highlands which literally cannot be reached overland from the capitol city--there are no roads connecting Port Morseby to the highlands. Papua New Guinea is beautiful and still wonderfully wild, and we really enjoyed traveling around there. We're not much for the beaten path.

That, by the way, is how we found ourselves in that tiny church in Goreme--we drove past the main part of the World Heritage Site there, which looked crowded, was closing, and cost a good bit of money. Instead, we chose a random sign marking the tiny Reflection Church, and wound up exploring the cool empty caves Ryan mentioned in his last post.

Now, Paris and Belgium and Amsterdam were all lovely, but god, soooo many tourists. We managed to have some really nice meals in very local places, but following the Rick Steve's Paris guide's advice for delicious dinner locations, even if the book as excellent as the Amazon.com reviews say it is, doesn't totally let you feel as though you're eating like a local... Especially when half the other tourists are also carting around the same little blue and yellow Paris guidebooks.

Now, mind, all the other tourists here are toting around little Lonely Planet Guidebooks to PNG and the Solomons, but it's hard to feel like too much of a tourist when you spend your time in villages where few white people have ever visited--while we were in Port Morseby we took trips out to Gaba Gaba and Porebada, two coastal towns with very helpful people.

From Goroka, we drove to Upper Bena, home of the Bena Bena people, who were amazingly kind, generous, and engaged in what we were doing. The genuine fascination with a scientific project on dogs caught me off guard a bit--I'm always surprised how much of this project transcends different cultures and educational levels and amounts of biological understanding. I'm so pleased that even in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, people understand that by collecting blood from dogs in many places, you can tell something about the similarities and differences between groups of dogs. It's quite cool as a scientist to arrive somewhere and have the people there find your research not just strange or interesting as a curiosity, but actually engaging and even relevant to their lives.

As I was typing this, an Australian couple came and asked us about the internet--they commented on our clear internet addiction and we pleaded our withdrawal from the web in Papua New Guinea. That led to questions about why we'd gone there and a whole bunch of inquiries about what it was like, and so even here, in the airport, with strangers, we're always finding people interested in what we do, asking questions about dogs and travel and science. Awesome.

Anyways: Back to the Papuan Highlands

In Bena Bena we stayed with a local council president, who put us up in a thatched bamboo hut. Amazing how well you can keep warm in a cold highlands night in one of those. The people were shockingly welcoming. It's truly amazing to me when people who clearly have so little are so generous-hearted--one of the older women adopted Ryan as a son and me as a daughter-in-law and different people in the villages we visited insisted on giving us no less than five traditional string bags (bilums), two highland hats, and a bow and arrow for Ryan. I was quite glad that our being there also gave something to the community, but even despite that the generosity and kindness of the people we met was stunning.

Still alive, and headed for the other side of the world.

Yeah, so that whole science thing got in the way of our actually writing about science. Sorry about the absence—we’re back for the second half of our journey and eager to get you up to speed ASAP. We are still alive, and very much still traveling. Even this post got kind of intercepted by a failed attempt at typing on a French keyboard in the airport, hence the strike-throughs....

Right now we’re sitting in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris Changi Airport in Singapore, waiting for the longest flight that either of us has ever been on, from Paris to Singapore our flight to Melborne. The next part of our travels is taking us to Papua New Guinea. I’ll admit, I absolutely adored traveling through Europe, but I am also absolutely giddy at getting back to some place more remote—no where we’ve gone yet this summer has truly been off the beaten track, and I really miss traveling places where there aren’t Starbucks.

The downside of that, however, is that it might limit our connectivity with the rest of the world. In about fifteen hours, we’ll be Right now we are in Singapore for a quick stop. Then we fly to Melborne, then to Cairns, Australia, arriving about a day and a half from now. (Mom, that will be at about 9 pm your time on July 26, 2009). We’re pretty certain we’ll be able to find internet in Australia, but after that it may be less than convenient. We’re spending just one night in Cairns, and leaving on a 7am fight for Port Morsby, PNG.

I can come up with few places more remote or challenging to travel in than PNG. There’s not totally a government, barely any tourist infrastructure, and river valleys so wild that basically any entomologist or botanist who walks a mile in from the ocean is guaranteed to find something no one’s ever described before. This is the kind of adventure I miss having.

It’s also the kind of adventure that doesn’t do great things for one’s internet connectivity. I’m sure this is far more frustrating for us, particularly because I’m at the point in the journey where I want to snuggle every small child I see because I miss my son. Still, we both do really want to share our stories more with anyone who wants to listen, and hope that there’s a few listeners still out there. Either way, we’re hoping to send out posts about Goreme (a bizarre Cappadocian village carved into rock formations), Croatia’s very cool dog breads and Belgian breweries and beer in the next little bit. Look out for those, and for much increased travel stats in the next couple days

Updated stats, courtesy of my lovely husband:
12 flights
8 time zones
84:15 traveling hours [note this only counts flight-associated travel time]
27,854 travel miles
15 countries (counting all landings and time spent on the ground at all)
12 countries (counting only those countries we left the airport)

So you want to sample a village dog's blood....

Actually, likely you really, really don't. But I do, and so I'm going to explain how you actually do it here. It's one of those grunt work type parts of science (that is, it's data collection) but relatively pleasant and interesting, since it's often pretty challenging. Plus, the perks (international travel to places way, way off the beaten track) are excellent.



So, here's how we actually do it.

First, we put all of the following into a large duffel bag, and throw that into the back of a 4x4:

• butterfly needles (needles with wing shaped handles and tubing attached)
  
• Vacuum sealed test tubes
  
• Tube holders and needles (plastic holders and needles to puncture vacuum sealed tubes)
  
• alcohol swabs
• measuring tape
• data sheets
• sharpies
• pens
• leads (the kind you slip over a dog's neck)
  
• muzzles (in about eight sizes)
  
• camera
• a cooler with ice
• fish scale (suspensory scale)
  
• goat sling (a mesh sling for holding dogs from the scale)
  

Step 1: Find willing helpers. People looking for coauthorships and recommendations tend to be particularly good people to work with, as they're cheap and enthusiastic.

Step 2: Find dogs. If people keep them as pets or guards, this means driving around the countryside with translators (sometimes more than one) to explain your pressing need for blood from rural dogs. After many strange looks, most people are willing to help if only out of curiosity. I've often thought that it's probably particularly helpful that I'm female, as I get some especially strange looks diving onto riled up dogs with thick bite proof gloves. Novelty gets you a lot of interest.

If people don't keep dogs, we usually rely on shelters. Shelters are awesome because they usually have very calm, well-socialized dogs and enthusiastic staff. Also, it's great to be able to compensate people by donating to a dog shelter and helping the animals too.

We've also tried driving around looking for dogs, but this usually doesn't work as well.

Step 3: Restrain the dog. Get the owner or any other foolishly helpful soul (ie, me or Ryan or our collaborators) to put a lead on the dog. If it freaks out, let it do so until it runs low on energy. Then cautiously put a muzzle on the dog from behind:



If the dog is chill, that last bit is less necessary, which saves loads of time.

Step 4: Measure the dog. For breed dogs there are more than 30 of these measurments. We take six: body length, height, chest girth, chest width, face width, and snout length. Usually I call out these measurements to Ryan, who writes them down along with a number of other types of physical descriptions and takes pictures.

Step 5: Get the blood! Get someone strong and confident to hold the dog still and hold a forelimb so that the cephalic vein is obvious after an alcohol swab. Insert butterfly needle attached to tube holder and needle. When there's blood in the butterfly needle's tube, attach the vacuum tube. Wait, trying desperately to instill patience in a figity dog, for the tube to fill with five cc's of blood. Fiddle gently with the needle and pump the dogs paw to increase the speed of the flow.



Step 6: Weigh the dog (if it's under 50 lbs) using a fish scale and goat sling. Ignore the local people's laughter as the dog slips out of the sling for the third time before you can suspend the sling from the scale.

Step 7: Carefully release the dog, making sure no one lets go of the lead or muzzle before everyone's clear and they've really been removed from the dog. Losing one of four leads to a dog running away is not fun in the middle of a busy sampling day.

Apparently, with loads of helpers, tons of chill dogs, and an efficient system, you can take blood using this method (ie, steps 3-7) at a rate of about one dog every three minutes or so. At least, that's what we did today--seventy dogs in less than four hours.

Step 8: Mail blood home. Talk to people repeatedly about the lack of danger from healthy domestic dog blood and attach loads of letters making it clear that there is no value nor any troubling regulations on shipping this stuff.

And then we move onto the next country! That's how I'm spending my summer, and while it's exhausting and not fabulously intellectual, we're having a blast.

Driving in Lebanon

[Guest post by Ryan]

If driving at rush hour in Boston is coach pitch and driving in Southern Illinois (where I learned) is t-ball, then driving in Lebanon is the 9th inning of game 7 of the ALCS between the Red Sox and Yankees. I actually kind of like it---good driving skills are rewarded in a way that doesn't happen in America. You can make lanes wherever you fit, travel in whatever direction you feel like you can safely do so and make any maneuver you can successfully pull off. Traffic laws are either absent or unenforced, which is odd given the number of men with automatic weapons standing around the streets and the number of fortified positions featuring machine guns, tanks and grenade launchers that are sprinkled throughout the roads of the country (but they just politely waved us through all the checkpoints---it wasn't actually scary at all).

There are no limited-access divided highways in Lebanon. Most major highways are two lanes (sometimes expanded to 3 or even 4 lanes if people try to squeeze their cars into available spaces) each way with only a faint yellow line separating traffic that is supposed to be driving one way and traffic that is supposed to be driving the other way (see figure). Of course to pass or position themselves for turns, people enter the oncoming traffic lanes, even if they are on blind curves (it's pretty mountainous here). The furtherst lane on each side of the road is not only for slow traffic going the correct way, it's also nearly equally for slow traffic going the wrong way. Because left turns take a lot of skill and luck, people will avoid them by driving on the wrong side of the road for awhile. Add to that the people walking in the street, the people stopping their cars at random locations to chat to the people walking on the street, the barracades sprinkled along the roads and the double and triple parking, and you start to get the picture. While you frequently have to travel relatively slowly, as soon as there's an opening you're expected to speed up to 130-140 kph (around 80-85 mph). It's hell on the brakes and engine, but hey, it's a rental car.

Driving on the side streets is, if anything, worse. Though the odds of a catastrophic accident are lower due to lower speeds, the odds of a fender bender must be much greater. More than once I've actually had to fold in the mirrors to drive down the streets avoiding parked and slowly traveling cars.

Driving here is certainly not for the faint of heart or the non-aggressive, but the payoff for being a confident, good driver is so much higher than in the States---traffic laws are enforced only by natural selection; you don't have police unnaturally selecting against efficient drivers.

Does your summer job involve searching yourself for fleas?

Hello!
Apologies for the sudden silence--while our hotel in Qatar had very convinient internet, our connection here is both slow and not in the hotel, so we've unfortunately had to blog slightly less obsessively. This is actually a real shame as Lebanon has been an amazing country so far.

We arrived safely Wednesday night and Ryan got to work on his aggressive driving skills. Rules of the road are decidedly optional here, and I say that as someone who just came from Qatar after having their car hit. Otherwise, after Qatar, Lebanon is wonderfully warm personally and cool temperature-wise. You can definitely tell it's on the Mediterranean Sea, in no small part because every part of Beruit and its suburbs seems to be positioned for an ocean view from the top of a hill. But even without the views--the food is wonderful and central in the way it ought to be in a good country on the Med--our collaborator here, Mounir Abi Said, has been trying to expose us to as many different Lebanese foods as possible, and knows what is the most delicious everywhere. We've also had a wonderful home cooked meal with him and his family, and were treated to awesome goat's meat pastries and fresh picked cherries in the Beqqa Valley yesterday.

Mounir has also been incredibly good at helping us find interesting shepherd's dogs in remote locations. He's worked previously with many of the shepherds in the valley and so they've all been super helpful in part as a favor to him. We have insane pictures that we'll upload as soon as the internet situation improves of us in the middle of picturesque meadows in the Lebanese mountains, surrounded by sheep, Lebanese and Bedouin herders, their dogs (many of which look like my dog growing up--a husky-sheltie mix named Romeo), and our collaborators. Not a place I could've ever imagined being, but wonderfully beautiful and enjoyable. The only downside is that most of the goats, sheep, and dogs have fleas and ticks, which doesn't leave one with the cleanest feeling after sampling, but so far, we've not had any bad luck with them, touch wood. A shower after a day of sampling is one of the nicest things ever.

In any case, tomorrow is our day off and so we're hoping to do some touristy things like drive up to Tripoli. I'll tell more about the country after that, but after three days, I'm pretty sure that I'll want to come back and really relax instead of working: the food and scenery alone would make that worth it.

Stats:

7 flights

7 time zones

42 traveling hours

11,599 miles

5 countries (counting all landings and time spent on the ground at all)

3 countries (counting only those countries we left the airport)

FAQs

Hello to any new readers coming by here via Pharyngula! Welcome!

Today is our last day in Qatar, and we'll be spending it packing up and shipping samples home. Lucky for us, this leaves us some time to address some of the issues discussed in the comments here. Therefore, without further ado, Frequently Asked Questions:

1. Have you ever been bitten?
Nope. Neither of us has ever been bitten, nor has any of the assistants or dog owners who help with the project. While Ryan and I both have pre-exposure rabies shots as a precaution, it's never been an issue. Any dogs that aren't well-socialized pets, or any pets showing any signs of aggression, we muzzle. Ryan and I were both trained in how to do this safely and we have dog handling gloves (big thick un-bite-through-able gloves) for extreme cases. Ryan's pretty adept at getting a muzzle on just about any dog so long as no one gets in his way, but we like our 0 bites record more than we like a perfectly unbiased sample. We think first about keeping people safe, and then consider trying to get as interesting as a sample (ie, with both aggressive and calm dogs) as possible. So far, we have far more trouble getting blood from shy or skittish dogs than mean ones. A mean dog you can get behind with a muzzle--a shy dog is off and running before you even get out of the 4x4.

2. What about cats?
Alright, I know that no one was really asking this question over in the comments, but we actually get it a lot, particularly in Muslim countries, where dogs are considered bad luck or dirty. Cat domestication is in general pretty well understood to have occured in the Middle East, and there's a lot fewer questions that we're interested in that can be addressed with them in terms of shared history with human beings. Also, we're just not cat people.

3. What about the really interesting dogs I saw in [insert country here]?
Tell us about them! We're always fascinated by the diversity of pups we see around the world and are also interested in breed formation in general. Not only do we sample village dogs, we're also always on the look out for interesting "local breeds." Some places do have very distinct dogs, like the Armanti dogs from a village outside Luxor in Egypt, built like wire-haired afghan hounds with slightly furnished (ie, mustacioed) muzzles.

4. What about other ways of getting DNA?
Blood is particularly awesome, because it's pretty easy (you try cheek swabbing a pissed off village dog) and also managable to stabilize. We are banking this DNA for future study whenever possible, so stability is important.

5. Have you heard about the domestication experiements with silver foxes?
Yes, we have! This was actually one of the studies that got Ryan and I interested in domestication in the first place. In fact, because of this study, we pay particular attention to pedomorphic traits like floppy ears and indicators of domestication like white patches of hair on the forehead and chest.

6. Have you heard about testing dogs for breeds using DNA?
Yes, and use similar methodology to ensure that we don't wind up looking at dogs whose genes have gone through a breed bottleneck.

7. How do you get the dogs?
It depends on the country. In Uganda and Namibia, we pulled up to random villages, had translators explain what we were trying to do, and people came out of the woodwork with their dogs. It's apparently quite a spectacle to see a dog weighed in a goat sling on a fish scale. In Egypt and Qatar, we worked mainly with local animal welfare organizations. These are great places to work, as they have very enthusiastic staff used to dealing with animals and the animals themselves are often better socialized than most pariah dogs. In Luxor, Egypt, we worked with Animal Care in Egypt (ACE), a charity that provides free veterinary care to animals of all shapes and sizes, but particularly the horses and donkeys that work in Luxor's tourist industry. In Qatar we've been working with Qatar Animal Welfare Society (QAWS), a great organization that houses a really ridiculous number of dogs and cats. Both of these organizations are incredibly supportive of animal welfare under really tough conditions, and have also been really supportive of our science. The people at ACE and QAWS all work their butts off every day of the week, and they took time to help out a couple of random grad student researchers on top of their already very full schedules. They more than deserve any support anyone can throw their way, and we're proud to have been able to donate to them through this project.

Okay. I think that's enough for now. Other questions, such as the ever important "How did you guys wind up doing this?" will be addressed in later posts.

As a final note, while we would be quite jealous of us if we weren't doing this with our summer, really, we're not trying to brag about what we do. We're proud of our ability to do it, but mostly we're just really grateful that our wonderful collaborators have given us this opportunity, and really, really, really excited to be able to travel the world and meet loads of amazing dogs and even more amazing people.

Qatar in four photos

My first stamp in my new passport. Note that Arabic numerals are not actually the numbers they use in Arabic speaking countries. That top row of pen is written in the modern numbering system in Arabic and says 542-9179735

Ryan and I stand in front of the Museum of Islamic Art. I'm not wearing the scarf because it's required (although it does attract less attention than my very blond hair) but because the sun was bearing down on us and a white thing on your head keeps you cool. Also because it makes me feel a bit like a movie star, which is never a bad thing.

One of the things I found most interesting is that very little in the collections is just art for the sake of art--there aren't loads of paintings or even tapestries or sculpture. A few, but it's maybe 15% of the extensive collections on display. There is, however, a ton incredibly intricate and and gorgeous functional art--carpets, lanterns, doors, ceilings, tiles bowls, helmets, Qur'ans, and a whole room full of scientific instruments. All of these were both recognizable as art and absolutely amazing in the level of intricacy displayed, even in the earliest pieces. It's fitting then that the museum itself is a work of art. This is a picture of the main atrium--the star motif is used throughout--even in the shape of the building itself, if you look at google earth.

And, of course, as always, dogs:

That's our assistant Yehia on the left, and this is Ryan with Pipette, a very friendly stray puppy found some distance away, who was quite happy to donate a bit of her blood.

In Doha

This is a guest post by Ryan.
Apologies for the delay in posting; jet lag, sampling and exploring have taken all our time lately. I've finally found some time to write this post---at 3AM!
First things first, we've now collected nearly two dozen dog samples in Qatar, with more sampling arranged for Monday and Tuesday. Sampling your first few dogs is a very nice feeling; at least we know the trip will be at least a partial success! The street dogs here generally look and act much like salukis, an ancient desert-dwelling breed whose spindly body fits the climate here (humid, 115 degrees F and sunny every day with lows somewhere in the 90s during the summer). It will be interesting to compare these dogs to other Middle Eastern street dogs and to American salukis. We will write much more about the dog project and the science behind it as time goes on, but for the moment I think I'll use my time to talk a bit more about the travel.

The trip over here was a gruelling 24-hour (32 with the time differnece) affair during which we saw the sun set twice from plane seats high above two different continents. To make a long story short, a clerical error forced us to fly this leg on less-convenient and much less comfortable American carriers (Gulf carriers know how to treat their passengers). The lack of free alcohol, the poor entertainment system and the uncomfortable seats limited my sleep, though it arguably increased my productivity. I started out trying to watch Coraline but for some reason it was not working on that flight so I tried the next-best Bride Wars next (sad but true). After twenty minutes I couldn't take it anymore and got to completing a review for a journal that was due within a couple days. It was one of those papers that clearly involved a lot of long-term data but was plagued by problems in its theoretical development and data interpretation. It's the kind of paper that is all too often written, and all too often published, in primatology. Hopefully my review can help produce a stronger, more meaningful contribution.

On the flight from Frankfurt to Doha via Riyadh we were on Lufthansa which meant free drinks and more entertainment options---Meerkat Manor and Discovery Channel specials all the way!
Instead of giving a play-by-play for our trip to Doha, I think I'll just list some of the highlights so I can get to bed soon.

• The first morning we walked at 7am for an hour and wound up drenched in sweat even at that hour.
• Doha is nice in a bustling-but-not-overly-so, rapidly-expanding-but-with-some-forethought way. The city is clearly alive (but not overwhelmingly so, like Cairo) and is incredibly multicultural: more than half of the people in Qatar are not local Qataris (this results in some amazing ethnic food being available). People dressed in traditional robes freely mingle with Westerners, Indians and other Muslims from around the world. While conservative dress is expected and the sexes are frequently segregated (e.g. many restaurants will not serve women, or will only serve them in special “Family” rooms), it usually doesn't feel oppressive. Women can and do hold jobs, drive (since 1995) and there is a vibrant free press (it is, for example, the headquarters of Al Jazeera). It's also a fully welfare state with very high per capita income and decent income distribution parity.
• Our first rental car's air conditioning died, so we had to use windows and frequent rehydration for one day before we could trade the car for a new one.
• Shortly after getting our second rental car, on our way to sample dogs, we were involved in an accident. Another car left its lane in the middle of traffic circle and hit directly into us (we were in its blind spot and the driver never looked). On the bright side it was a fairly minor accident; we both drove away to the traffic police, spent an hour filling out paperwork, swiped our credit card to pay a processing fee and we were back on our way, albeit having lost half of our sampling time because the shelter is only open from 4-6pm.
• We drove all the way to the tip of the Qatari peninsula---nearly an hour's drive! One can cross the whole country north-south in about 1.5-2 hours and east-west in about 45 minutes. The scenery doesn't change much though; a lot of beige with the scattered small tree every now and then. It did give us a chance to take our 4x4 off-road on the beach and see our first Qatari wildlife, a recently deceased large lizard.
• All the bulidings here are the same shade of sand beige (except one very pink house we saw).
• If you should ever want to adopt a dog (or cat, donkey, chicken, guinea fowl or just about any kind of animal imaginable) in Qatar, QAWS is the place to do it. They have a very nice volunteer staff and do wonders to help unwanted and maltreated animals here. In general, Qatar has very few dogs as most Muslims do not like to keep dogs.
• The Islamic Art Museum in Doha is awesome and free. They even give you a golf cart ride from your car to the entrance and back. The architecture (like many buildings in Doha, including Cornell's medical school) is interesting and, in this case, gorgeous. The museum is very under-utilized resulting in a very pleasant, unrushed experience. The art is amazing; intricately designed vessels, rugs, Qarans and other artifacts from across the Muslim world, stretching from Spain and Morocco to India and spanning 1400 years.

Well, there's much I could say, but I think I should go to sleep now. Just one more thing: go USA! We've miraculously made it to the semi-finals of the Confederations Cup---we watched the last game versus Egypt in a sheesha restaurant here.

Cumulative stats:

6 flights

6 time zones

36 traveling hours

10,469 miles

4 countries (counting all landings and time spent on the ground at all)

2 countries (counting only those countries we left the airport)