On non-kidlessness

I regularly read Female Science Professor, who often has some interesting points to make about being a woman in science. However, her readers sometimes irk me, more than a little. The comments on the post I've linked to above are a prime example.

They aren't the only comments, and I'm not even sure they're the majority of comments, but there are a decent number of people writing there who are saying some variant of "I couldn't have kids and an academic career."

Bullshit.

Maybe you don't want both kids and a career, or maybe you've chosen a place that's bad about supporting both ambition and a family. Those are both legitimate things. If it's the first, fine, that's you're choice, and I have no problem with it. If it's the second, and you do want kids, then that sucks, and I sympathize with your difficulties--sometimes these choices get made before all the chips in the game are on the table, and I will work with you on making it a better world for women and families.

BUT: It is not impossible to have both a kid and an acadmeic career. Please do not say you can't, because that makes it seem like it's a problem with you. It's not. It's either a choice that you make (and that I don't think anyone should judge) or it's a problem with the university/department you're working with. It should always be POSSIBLE for women grad students, post docs, and professors to have kids and a career. I won't claim that it's easy, but I'm also a flawed, crazy, exhausted human being, and I can manage it.

Don't say you can't. Either you could, or your university ought to be doing the things that would make it so you could. If you don't want to balance that much, say that, and leave it at that. The next woman I hear saying "I could never do that" about my life is gonna get an earful. Yes, you could. Don't sell yourself short, because you're selling the rest of us short, too. It's not that we women can't balance career and kids--it's that there's a ton of stuff that's in our way that's not getting fixed because so many of us think that it's just us. Fuck that. It's not you, women. It's them.

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.

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.

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.

Why are we sampling village dogs?

This is a guest post by Ryan.


One of the questions we frequently get is why we are taking blood from mostly unwanted, "village" or "pariah" dogs. These questions come from those who have a real interest in the science and those that just dislike dogs and can't imagine anyone would be interested in them, let alone in unbred street dogs. For the purposes of this post, I'll assume readers fall in the former group. First, let's start with the basic theoretical justification.

For the moment, ignore the 15,000 years ago bit. What we know is that dogs are most related to Eurasian grey wolves and therefore were domesticated from them, presumably somewhere in Eurasia. Sometime in the past, when dogs were intially domesticated, a population of wolves became dogs through either selective breeding by humans or "self-domestication", where some wolves started to hang around human settlements, presumably surviving on their trash. Over time some of these wolves became less afraid of humans and became so specialized in their habits that they essentially stopped interbreeding with wild wolves (though dogs, wolves and coyotes can all still interbreed). Now, we have no idea how large this population of proto-dogs was, but we do know that it was probably much larger than the number of dogs used to start most modern breeds ~200 years ago (most breeds were founded by about a half dozen sires and maybe a dozen females).

After initial domestication, dogs probably lived "breed-less" lives as human commensals (hanging around humans, not really helping or harming them but living off their trash) for many thousands of years. During this time, dog populations quickly expanded and spread across the globe. In the last few hundreds of years, several hundred dog breeds were formed from local dogs in many parts of the world; these breed dogs have entirely replaced the non-breed "indigenous" dogs in some parts of the world, notably in Western Europe and the USA. However, most dogs throughout the world still live their lives as non-breed, indigenous, commensal dogs. We refer to these dogs as "pariah" or "village" dogs. They tend to be smallish (25-40 pounds), often tan, short-haired dogs, though the type varies a bit according to the region you're in. The important point is that these dogs have not undergone the intense genetic bottleneck associated with breed formation. Thus, while breed dogs have only a small subset of the total genetic diversity of all dogs, it is likely that village dogs have a much greater range of the total diversity. Thus, they are very useful for looking at the original domestication event. They are informative of the original genetic bottleneck that led to the formation of domestic dogs many thousands of years ago.

By sampling village dogs from across the world, we get an idea of how diverse these dogs are in different regions of the globe. Then, we can look for patterns in the amount of diversity. Specifically, we look for a region with very high genetic diversity and then look for the surrounding regions to have gradually less and less diversity as it gets further away. This is what is seen in humans, with the highest diversity seen around Ethiopia and diversity decreasing gradually as one moves further and further away from Ethiopia. That's how we know modern humans evolved there. The idea is that the region where a species formed will start out with all the diversity of that species. As some animals move away from that site and colonize other areas, they bring with them only a subset of the total diversity. Then as animals move even further away from the site of origin, they take with them only a subset of a subset of the diversity, and so on. This is why breed dogs are not useful for uncovering the site of origin of domestic dogs: all modern breeds across the world have only a tiny subset of the total diversity seen in all dogs, so it's hard to compare them and know that you're seeing an effect of the origin domestication and colonization events and not some artifact of recent breeding.

In future posts I'll explain more about the controversy over how long ago dogs were domesticated and cover other aspects of the science behind our research, but I have to leave now to collect more samples.

On Sapolsky, and living in interesting times

Went to a talk by Robert Sapolsky yesterday; really fascinating stuff. He studies, among many, many other things, stress in wild populations of Olive Baboons. Kelly has a nice summary of the neuroscience here, so I'll be lazy and focus on the parts that I found most interesting: the primatology. Sapolsky has been studying hormone fluctuations in Kenyan Olive Baboons for decades. He compares hormonal indicators stress levels at baseline to those after certain kinds of stress.

The punchline is that olive baboons, like humans, exhibit maladaptive hormonal responses to social stress. Basically, these hormonal responses (glucocorticoids) release as part of a stereotypical flight or fight response to stress. This response ramps up your ability to flee if a lion is about to eat you, for example. But, as Sapolsky put it yesterday, if you're stressed because need to run away from a predator, your body sends energy to your thighs. Great. But if you're stressed because you're a baboon who's trying to form fragile alliances....your body sends energy to your thighs. If you're stressed because you're on a blind date....your body sends energy to your thighs. Not quite so helpful in these contexts. What's more, your body does this with hormones that can negatively impact your stress levels long term.

If you're a low-ranking olive baboon, your situation is especially bleak: your life is super-stressful, since everyone can beat on you, and your body is constantly throwing stress hormones at your brain over things it doesn't need too. This means you're constantly reinforcing your stress response, creating a "learned helplessness" very like human depression. The happiest (and often highest ranking) baboons are the ones that know what actual stress is, minimize their stress at other times, use coping behaviors (apparently grooming is as good as smacking someone else around), and take control of stressful situations.

It seemed particularly appropriate to me that this talk was being given right now. It's an "ancient chinese curse" kind of year, in a lot of ways: we live in interesting times. When people talk about the Great Depression and WWII, they talk about the way these things affected entire generations, and built a sort of shared identity based on responding to hardship. In some ways, I suppose that respoding was empowering, but to me it still sounds a bit like being a low ranking baboon. I think it's fairly likely that things like the recession, climate change, and maybe swine flu might create a shared identity for my generation, and the notion of solidarity is appealing, but I dislike the lack of control that goes with it.

That sort of thing is a lot of the reason I do the sort of research I do. I like the notion that no matter what generation I belonged to, the things I do in my life are interesting, and that's something I took control over. You don't become a primatologist because of things happeneing to you, which fosters a fascinating work environment. I was talking with a fellow primatology grad student and we realized if we were to catch some fatal disease tomorrow, we wouldn't look back and think we hadn't done anything.

People like that make for a great work environment, even if we all probably sat through that talk thinking about how similar to the life of that low ranking baboon things can be sometimes, and maybe have been lately. Either way, at least some of my times are interesting because I wanted them that way.