Am I a "leading dog expert" or delusional retard?
Jul 3, 2023 14:48:25 GMT
lincoln, grippingwhiteness, and 2 more like this
Post by Hardcastle on Jul 3, 2023 14:48:25 GMT
@ling asked this question on Waw
And I wanted to take some time to explain why you might have seen me make the insane claim that I have the most dog knowledge of anyone on earth.
First...
I have definitely met people who had more dog knowledge than I had when I met them.
Dan Balderson and Katrina Hartwell, I would say are the two most dog knowledgeable people I have met or known of in any capacity. Met both in the early 2000s, I was already a dog nerd with 15 odd years of swallowing countless animal and dog books and a lifetime, ~22-25 years at the time, of being born into a working dog family/culture. Also, on the side, a weird obsession with fighting and athletic performance/competition.
I had been swinging my big balls around as pretty much the most knowledgeable dog guy in most places, certainly on animal vs animal debate forums, but also on dog forums and hunting forums and etc. But those 2 in particular, heavyweights in the global working dog community, which even famous dog trainers and dog breeders kind of bowed to and approached with great humility, made me like "...oh... hehe" and I was very submissive and humble and question-asky around them.
All 3 of us had the necessary combination- a background of working dogs in our hillbilly blood, combined with a certain "animal nerd" insatiable curiosity for understanding things at a deeper level. "Naturalists" following in the footsteps of Attenborough and Darwin and etc, but one foot in the redneck world of using dogs as tools.
That combo is rare, and vital.
There are lots of experienced redneck working dog guys all over the place with who knows how much experience. There are certain things they understand which I STILL can learn about for sure, and I do spend a lot of time listening to them and reading their online discussions (and personally talking to them- I know many many in real life and grew up with them gifting me with their "wisdom") but there is a total absence of animal nerd knowledge in those types . They are the antithesis of "eggheads" and they inherently don't take to "book learnin". They are basically animals themselves, and I kind of actually study them as an animal in the "social unit" of the dog and thus a factor in their evolution. If you wanted to learn as much as possible about "remora", it would pay to also learn a shitload about sharks, so that is how I look at it.
Then on the other side you have all the egghead nerds, many way more gifted and talented for academia than me, but they are detached from the nitty gritty subtleties of real world functionality and performance. By definition they are typically sheltered wusses where everything is kind of abstract and theoretical. Usually haven't even had a fist fight or played a sport, and to some extent that comes into play with ones ability to analyse functionality and performance in animals in general, but yeah definitely a personal familiarity with the world of working dogs makes a big difference in your ability to even interpret what you are reading in the egghead books.
So that is why people who are even in the running for "most knowledgeable dog guy" are rare. There's a limit to how much a nerdy guy can understand, and a limit to how much a redneck can understand. People who are both are rare, but there are some. And IMO those are the contenders.
When I say Dan and Katrina are the most knowledgeable, I am including authors, tv experts, famous dog trainers and historians, scientists/researchers, judges in dog shows, presidents of kennel clubs, internet experts, successful dog breeders, everyone I've ever met in person or online. All known humans in history.
When I met Dan and Katrina they were levels above me. That is despite me already being super obsessed and deep in dog knowledge from reading so many books since I was a small child and growing up in a working dog culture. I ran circles around most people, including authors of best selling dog books and dog scientists, already at that time. But still Dan and Katrina ran circles around me.
The most common knowledge harboured by a dog enthusiast is "kennel club" and "breed encyclopaedia" knowledge. In the internet communities, when you reach that level of geekery to be on a dog forum investigating deeper, you are usually all already in agreement that ALL that knowledge is total bullshit. Everybody on dog forums knows and agrees that the body of knowledge held by the kennel clubs and the info in dog encyclopedias, the official knowledge, is laughably amateurish and inadequate and often just totally nonsense. In this regard the dog world is VERY different from the wild animal world. Yes the basic easy-to-access info about wild animals is often riddled with a lot of BS, but there's also heaps of easy to access very legit information about wild animals which is commonly known by animal geeks. Anyone who watches BBC and Nat Geo is getting pretty solid good information, and then if they want to dig deeper and find scientific research and good articles, GREAT books, even decent youtube videos... it is all pretty easy to find.
The world of dog info is relatively very shit. I'm convinced it might be THE worst most amateurish field of knowledge for any subject. The way kennel clubs kind of took control in the 1800s, and then said "we'll take it from here" and then everyone else kind of shrugged and was like "ok, they're the experts" and let them have a monopoly on the information, while simultaneously being fundamentally totally wrong about how dogs work, at odds with the production of functional dogs, means they kind of just erased dog knowledge and also completely halted its progress.
Imagine if we were "stuck in the 1800s" on other subjects? When they thought cheetahs were female leopards, when they thought people with a head shaped a certain way were more prone to be candlestick makers, when they thought women's uteruses would fall out if they rode trains, when they thought women seeing ugly things when they were pregnant would make their baby ugly, when they thought cigarettes were healthy for you, etc etc ... That is almost what its like. Dog knowledge was stunted horribly by the rise of kennel clubs and dog shows.
So you need to understand that context to understand why "being among the people most knowledgeable about dogs on earth" is actually not such an insanely arrogant and crazy statement. It's attainable for anyone, you can all aspire for that title, because it is a uniquely low bar.
At least in an academic way. The practical knowledge among grunting hillbillies has continued to progress and continues to progress (and there is again lots of wisdom for even me to humbly absorb from those communities- both now and also historic working dog communities from ancient greece and ancient rome to british india or whatever), but it is just a little different to what we do on these forums, or what any experts on other animals do.
So...
The people who were viable to possibly contend for "most knowledgeable dog expert", FIRST had to know that everything the kennel clubs and breed encyclopaedias say is bullshit. That is the first level. And like I said, that was basically everyone on dog forums in the 2000s. But then it became a matter of how much personal experience and background do you have with working dogs, and how shrewd you were at analysing and assessing those observations and experiences, AND THEN ... WHO are you reading? Because JUST the experience and background wasn't enough as I explained earlier. You know certain things from a certain angle through working with dogs, but not a lot of other important things that improve understanding from an intellectual scholarly/academic angle.
The main difference between me and Dan and Katrina, when I met them... well they were older, and Katrina especially had tonnes more hands on experience - lived in the genuine outback, spent decades hunting wild cattle with dogs, and hunting wild boars, and breeding dogs the whole time (I will say still NO ONE knows more about dog breeding- wouldn't know where to start on talking about her knowledge there), and then also was vag-deep in the PP and dog sport world and breeding some of the most respected protection bandogs in the world (praised by the legends of that world like Butch Cappel and Joe Lucero and everyone on PP boards) and then ALSO was a bit of a curious animal nerd to a degree.
My only hope against HER was I was WAY WAY WAY more of a curious animal nerd. She's borderline like all the other super experienced hands on working dog hillbillies, BUT way more thoughtful and insightful than the rest and had a flash of nerd in her. Still there's something you get from couching your dog knowledge in a bed of wild animal knowledge and natural history knowledge. She had some, she knew a lot about OTHER farm animals too, to a crazy level I would never dream to compete with, but wild animals??? Eh not to my geeky level.
Dan Balderson on the other hand was kind of more like myself. Kind of. Just super passionate about dogs and dog history but then also went out of his way to immerse himself in real working dog cultures and travelled and acquired serious dogs and then tested serious dogs in real work and etc. Always hungrily devouring and absorbing knowledge and then, crucially (all important) was a brilliant guy at interpreting the knowledge. He still would beat me insofar as being a living encyclopaedia, not a typical "dog encyclopaedia" full of shit, but a living encyclopaedia of the TRUE history of dogs down to nitty gritty details. He was the kind of guy that would say "oh in 1837 Lord Preston of Somerset acquired a dog as a gift from the Sultan of Oman named Shammar and it was bred with an english mastiff named Rosa which was then infused back into the bloodline". He knew every little step along the way of everything that ever happened, but also deeply understood the functionality of different working dog types and stuff like that.
BUT, the main advantage they had over me when I first met them, was they had read better info than me. I had progressed past the breed encyclopedias and kennel club stuff well and truly, from when I was 11 I had moved past the kennel clubs/breed encyclopedias and was reading books by Carl Semencic and Richard Stratton and some pretty interesting old history books and etc. BUT they had discovered David Hancock, and I hadn't. David Hancock is the GOAT of published dog authors.
His "teachings" can be found here-
www.davidhancockondogs.com/archive_main.html
His books-
www.davidhancockondogs.com/publications.html
BUT... IMO Dan and Katrina surpass even him, because they have his teachings plus more hands on practical understanding of the nitty gritty real-world and he is still evidently confused about some subtle things you only know by a close connection to the working dog world. He's the best "student" of dog research I know about, and Dan would be second, but Dan surpasses him with more of a foot in the working dog world and more familiarity with the intangible subtle things specific to the functional applications of dogs (David Hancock is actually a dog show judge and breeder of kennel club show bullmastiffs)
Still, reading Hancock elevated Dan and Katrina big time, and then also elevated me.
By reading his stuff, I was able to catch up to them. In some ways.
Interestingly a lot of his teachings were things I was independently figuring out. Especially that mastiffs weren't guard dogs, that LGDS weren't mastiffs, and that mastiffs were actually fundamentally hunting dogs - catch dogs. I was starting to push that from my own real-world observations, without knowing he had already wrote books about that. When I read his stuff around 2008 or so, it sort of clicked why Dan and Katrina and some other people were kind of on this new path of advanced dog knowledge. But not EVERYONE who read it was above me, you needed the foundation to interpret his books properly, and they had it.
But then I had it too, and I feel like by the time I lost contact we were really close to one another as dog experts. Each with different strengths. I could never and will never catch up to Katrina's deep understanding of dog breeding, or her hands on rugged experience. I will never catch up on Dan's internal library of facts about dog history and the tiny little details of each and every breed. But in turn they will never catch up with my wild animal geek "cross referencing" where I understand dogs through that David Attenborough lens and really understand natural selection and adaptation and etc.
When I lost contact, I felt like we were pretty close, maybe they were above me, but since then I have learned a lot, and I consider my dog knowledge today frankly higher now than anyone I have known about. Maybe they improved at the same rate and they maintain a position above me? Would make sense, I just don't know.
I know it sounds crazy to say you are the number 1 most knowledgeable human on earth when it comes to a topic, but I just sincerely have not come across evidence to the contrary. I don't know how to say it non arrogantly. I actually want to be proven wrong and then go and learn from this mysterious guru, just point me in their direction. I don't know about them. I haven't read their book, seen their video, read their posts, or whatever.
That said, I've been surprised by some close contenders.
Vita wasn't bad, actually. She had that combo too, where she was a huge animal geek (actually first and foremost a Hyena fan, but also deeply geeky about all animal stuff in general) and then incidentally had grown up in a family of Puerto Rican dog fighters and breeders of game dogs. And she also "cross referenced" animal knowledge with dog knowledge. And she was smart. So she was a genuine "threat" in the rankings of dog knowledgeable people.
But I was probably MORE surprised when I ran into Brogan and Lycaon. Because I had wandered the desolate wastelands for decades, and everyone was either an idiot, or JUST a theoretical nerd, or JUST a hillbilly with practical knowledge, and these very rare combination people (couple more I forgot- a dude named "Chazio" on animal face off, for example, neck and neck with me tbh), but then Lycaon and Brogan both appear and both are "combo" guys and both are way up above the majority of dog nuts I had encountered over the decades. Hundreds and hundreds of people, with honestly only Dan, Katrina, Chazio, Vita, the famous Author David Hancock and maybe Ray Coppinger (the leading dog scientist) ... and that is about it, in the conversation at all. Then very suddenly two other random guys on carnivora effortlessly waltzed into that conversation.
It does make me wonder who else is out there. I'm probably not the most dog knowledgeable guy, but I just sincerely don't have any clear evidence someone is above me.
Not when it comes to my angle of inquiry.
You can choose very specific categories and easily find people above me, like Cesar Milan... not JUST a tv personality, he genuinely is a genius when it comes to dog psychology and dog body language and rehabilitation and etc and I wouldn't dream to say I know more than him about that specific stuff (though I do know a good amount, nothing compared to him), likewise with dog obedience training or the conformation standards on the recognised AKC dog breeds or whatever. I know a dog trainer, one I have met personally who decoyed for my bandog, who also is one of the greatest trainers in the world of search and rescue and cadaver dogs. I don't know fucking 1% of the shit he knows, BUT he also doesn't know 1% (or lets say 10%) of the shit I know.
I mean "dog expert" could mean any number of things I guess, many of which I might not know shit about or care to know. There would be thousands of dog trainers better than me.
But my specific interest in the varieties of working dog types and their functional adaptations and the history of that stuff and breaking down their performance dynamics and etc ... I don't know anyone I can look up to. I just don't. It's nuts, but that just demonstrates how amateurish and unstudied the field is. It's not that I am amazing, it is just a very strangely neglected area of interest. In my specific angle- Dan Balderson, Katrina Hartwell, Chazio, Lycaon, Brogan, Vita, David Hancock... historically maybe Theodore Roosevelt, Samuel White Baker, George P Sanderson and Jack London are kind of in the ballpark relative to their time, but that is really the extent of "peers" stretched out as generously as possible. If any more are out there they are hiding extremely well.
Bolushi is a student on track to naturally surpass me. We all build on eachother's knowledge, like you get the advantage of fast tracking by being a student of someone, which I did with Katrina and Dan, learning off them between about 2004 and 2012, and they did to some extent with David Hancock (and I too piggy backed off hancock in the end).
By the time I die Bolushi will be about 35 and know everything I know and then improve for another 20 years or so at which point he will die of diabetes, so... yeah. Knowledge evolves and improves over time (normally, kennels clubs did their best to sabotage that with dogs).
But right now? I dunno... I think I'm kind of close to maybe being the most knowledgeable dog guy in the world. If I'm wrong I would love to know about it, and immediately go and feed off the knowledge of that person.
Have you ever met someone with more dog knowledge than yourself?
And I wanted to take some time to explain why you might have seen me make the insane claim that I have the most dog knowledge of anyone on earth.
First...
I have definitely met people who had more dog knowledge than I had when I met them.
Dan Balderson and Katrina Hartwell, I would say are the two most dog knowledgeable people I have met or known of in any capacity. Met both in the early 2000s, I was already a dog nerd with 15 odd years of swallowing countless animal and dog books and a lifetime, ~22-25 years at the time, of being born into a working dog family/culture. Also, on the side, a weird obsession with fighting and athletic performance/competition.
I had been swinging my big balls around as pretty much the most knowledgeable dog guy in most places, certainly on animal vs animal debate forums, but also on dog forums and hunting forums and etc. But those 2 in particular, heavyweights in the global working dog community, which even famous dog trainers and dog breeders kind of bowed to and approached with great humility, made me like "...oh... hehe" and I was very submissive and humble and question-asky around them.
All 3 of us had the necessary combination- a background of working dogs in our hillbilly blood, combined with a certain "animal nerd" insatiable curiosity for understanding things at a deeper level. "Naturalists" following in the footsteps of Attenborough and Darwin and etc, but one foot in the redneck world of using dogs as tools.
That combo is rare, and vital.
There are lots of experienced redneck working dog guys all over the place with who knows how much experience. There are certain things they understand which I STILL can learn about for sure, and I do spend a lot of time listening to them and reading their online discussions (and personally talking to them- I know many many in real life and grew up with them gifting me with their "wisdom") but there is a total absence of animal nerd knowledge in those types . They are the antithesis of "eggheads" and they inherently don't take to "book learnin". They are basically animals themselves, and I kind of actually study them as an animal in the "social unit" of the dog and thus a factor in their evolution. If you wanted to learn as much as possible about "remora", it would pay to also learn a shitload about sharks, so that is how I look at it.
Then on the other side you have all the egghead nerds, many way more gifted and talented for academia than me, but they are detached from the nitty gritty subtleties of real world functionality and performance. By definition they are typically sheltered wusses where everything is kind of abstract and theoretical. Usually haven't even had a fist fight or played a sport, and to some extent that comes into play with ones ability to analyse functionality and performance in animals in general, but yeah definitely a personal familiarity with the world of working dogs makes a big difference in your ability to even interpret what you are reading in the egghead books.
So that is why people who are even in the running for "most knowledgeable dog guy" are rare. There's a limit to how much a nerdy guy can understand, and a limit to how much a redneck can understand. People who are both are rare, but there are some. And IMO those are the contenders.
When I say Dan and Katrina are the most knowledgeable, I am including authors, tv experts, famous dog trainers and historians, scientists/researchers, judges in dog shows, presidents of kennel clubs, internet experts, successful dog breeders, everyone I've ever met in person or online. All known humans in history.
When I met Dan and Katrina they were levels above me. That is despite me already being super obsessed and deep in dog knowledge from reading so many books since I was a small child and growing up in a working dog culture. I ran circles around most people, including authors of best selling dog books and dog scientists, already at that time. But still Dan and Katrina ran circles around me.
The most common knowledge harboured by a dog enthusiast is "kennel club" and "breed encyclopaedia" knowledge. In the internet communities, when you reach that level of geekery to be on a dog forum investigating deeper, you are usually all already in agreement that ALL that knowledge is total bullshit. Everybody on dog forums knows and agrees that the body of knowledge held by the kennel clubs and the info in dog encyclopedias, the official knowledge, is laughably amateurish and inadequate and often just totally nonsense. In this regard the dog world is VERY different from the wild animal world. Yes the basic easy-to-access info about wild animals is often riddled with a lot of BS, but there's also heaps of easy to access very legit information about wild animals which is commonly known by animal geeks. Anyone who watches BBC and Nat Geo is getting pretty solid good information, and then if they want to dig deeper and find scientific research and good articles, GREAT books, even decent youtube videos... it is all pretty easy to find.
The world of dog info is relatively very shit. I'm convinced it might be THE worst most amateurish field of knowledge for any subject. The way kennel clubs kind of took control in the 1800s, and then said "we'll take it from here" and then everyone else kind of shrugged and was like "ok, they're the experts" and let them have a monopoly on the information, while simultaneously being fundamentally totally wrong about how dogs work, at odds with the production of functional dogs, means they kind of just erased dog knowledge and also completely halted its progress.
Imagine if we were "stuck in the 1800s" on other subjects? When they thought cheetahs were female leopards, when they thought people with a head shaped a certain way were more prone to be candlestick makers, when they thought women's uteruses would fall out if they rode trains, when they thought women seeing ugly things when they were pregnant would make their baby ugly, when they thought cigarettes were healthy for you, etc etc ... That is almost what its like. Dog knowledge was stunted horribly by the rise of kennel clubs and dog shows.
So you need to understand that context to understand why "being among the people most knowledgeable about dogs on earth" is actually not such an insanely arrogant and crazy statement. It's attainable for anyone, you can all aspire for that title, because it is a uniquely low bar.
At least in an academic way. The practical knowledge among grunting hillbillies has continued to progress and continues to progress (and there is again lots of wisdom for even me to humbly absorb from those communities- both now and also historic working dog communities from ancient greece and ancient rome to british india or whatever), but it is just a little different to what we do on these forums, or what any experts on other animals do.
So...
The people who were viable to possibly contend for "most knowledgeable dog expert", FIRST had to know that everything the kennel clubs and breed encyclopaedias say is bullshit. That is the first level. And like I said, that was basically everyone on dog forums in the 2000s. But then it became a matter of how much personal experience and background do you have with working dogs, and how shrewd you were at analysing and assessing those observations and experiences, AND THEN ... WHO are you reading? Because JUST the experience and background wasn't enough as I explained earlier. You know certain things from a certain angle through working with dogs, but not a lot of other important things that improve understanding from an intellectual scholarly/academic angle.
The main difference between me and Dan and Katrina, when I met them... well they were older, and Katrina especially had tonnes more hands on experience - lived in the genuine outback, spent decades hunting wild cattle with dogs, and hunting wild boars, and breeding dogs the whole time (I will say still NO ONE knows more about dog breeding- wouldn't know where to start on talking about her knowledge there), and then also was vag-deep in the PP and dog sport world and breeding some of the most respected protection bandogs in the world (praised by the legends of that world like Butch Cappel and Joe Lucero and everyone on PP boards) and then ALSO was a bit of a curious animal nerd to a degree.
My only hope against HER was I was WAY WAY WAY more of a curious animal nerd. She's borderline like all the other super experienced hands on working dog hillbillies, BUT way more thoughtful and insightful than the rest and had a flash of nerd in her. Still there's something you get from couching your dog knowledge in a bed of wild animal knowledge and natural history knowledge. She had some, she knew a lot about OTHER farm animals too, to a crazy level I would never dream to compete with, but wild animals??? Eh not to my geeky level.
Dan Balderson on the other hand was kind of more like myself. Kind of. Just super passionate about dogs and dog history but then also went out of his way to immerse himself in real working dog cultures and travelled and acquired serious dogs and then tested serious dogs in real work and etc. Always hungrily devouring and absorbing knowledge and then, crucially (all important) was a brilliant guy at interpreting the knowledge. He still would beat me insofar as being a living encyclopaedia, not a typical "dog encyclopaedia" full of shit, but a living encyclopaedia of the TRUE history of dogs down to nitty gritty details. He was the kind of guy that would say "oh in 1837 Lord Preston of Somerset acquired a dog as a gift from the Sultan of Oman named Shammar and it was bred with an english mastiff named Rosa which was then infused back into the bloodline". He knew every little step along the way of everything that ever happened, but also deeply understood the functionality of different working dog types and stuff like that.
BUT, the main advantage they had over me when I first met them, was they had read better info than me. I had progressed past the breed encyclopedias and kennel club stuff well and truly, from when I was 11 I had moved past the kennel clubs/breed encyclopedias and was reading books by Carl Semencic and Richard Stratton and some pretty interesting old history books and etc. BUT they had discovered David Hancock, and I hadn't. David Hancock is the GOAT of published dog authors.
His "teachings" can be found here-
www.davidhancockondogs.com/archive_main.html
His books-
www.davidhancockondogs.com/publications.html
BUT... IMO Dan and Katrina surpass even him, because they have his teachings plus more hands on practical understanding of the nitty gritty real-world and he is still evidently confused about some subtle things you only know by a close connection to the working dog world. He's the best "student" of dog research I know about, and Dan would be second, but Dan surpasses him with more of a foot in the working dog world and more familiarity with the intangible subtle things specific to the functional applications of dogs (David Hancock is actually a dog show judge and breeder of kennel club show bullmastiffs)
Still, reading Hancock elevated Dan and Katrina big time, and then also elevated me.
By reading his stuff, I was able to catch up to them. In some ways.
Interestingly a lot of his teachings were things I was independently figuring out. Especially that mastiffs weren't guard dogs, that LGDS weren't mastiffs, and that mastiffs were actually fundamentally hunting dogs - catch dogs. I was starting to push that from my own real-world observations, without knowing he had already wrote books about that. When I read his stuff around 2008 or so, it sort of clicked why Dan and Katrina and some other people were kind of on this new path of advanced dog knowledge. But not EVERYONE who read it was above me, you needed the foundation to interpret his books properly, and they had it.
But then I had it too, and I feel like by the time I lost contact we were really close to one another as dog experts. Each with different strengths. I could never and will never catch up to Katrina's deep understanding of dog breeding, or her hands on rugged experience. I will never catch up on Dan's internal library of facts about dog history and the tiny little details of each and every breed. But in turn they will never catch up with my wild animal geek "cross referencing" where I understand dogs through that David Attenborough lens and really understand natural selection and adaptation and etc.
When I lost contact, I felt like we were pretty close, maybe they were above me, but since then I have learned a lot, and I consider my dog knowledge today frankly higher now than anyone I have known about. Maybe they improved at the same rate and they maintain a position above me? Would make sense, I just don't know.
I know it sounds crazy to say you are the number 1 most knowledgeable human on earth when it comes to a topic, but I just sincerely have not come across evidence to the contrary. I don't know how to say it non arrogantly. I actually want to be proven wrong and then go and learn from this mysterious guru, just point me in their direction. I don't know about them. I haven't read their book, seen their video, read their posts, or whatever.
That said, I've been surprised by some close contenders.
Vita wasn't bad, actually. She had that combo too, where she was a huge animal geek (actually first and foremost a Hyena fan, but also deeply geeky about all animal stuff in general) and then incidentally had grown up in a family of Puerto Rican dog fighters and breeders of game dogs. And she also "cross referenced" animal knowledge with dog knowledge. And she was smart. So she was a genuine "threat" in the rankings of dog knowledgeable people.
But I was probably MORE surprised when I ran into Brogan and Lycaon. Because I had wandered the desolate wastelands for decades, and everyone was either an idiot, or JUST a theoretical nerd, or JUST a hillbilly with practical knowledge, and these very rare combination people (couple more I forgot- a dude named "Chazio" on animal face off, for example, neck and neck with me tbh), but then Lycaon and Brogan both appear and both are "combo" guys and both are way up above the majority of dog nuts I had encountered over the decades. Hundreds and hundreds of people, with honestly only Dan, Katrina, Chazio, Vita, the famous Author David Hancock and maybe Ray Coppinger (the leading dog scientist) ... and that is about it, in the conversation at all. Then very suddenly two other random guys on carnivora effortlessly waltzed into that conversation.
It does make me wonder who else is out there. I'm probably not the most dog knowledgeable guy, but I just sincerely don't have any clear evidence someone is above me.
Not when it comes to my angle of inquiry.
You can choose very specific categories and easily find people above me, like Cesar Milan... not JUST a tv personality, he genuinely is a genius when it comes to dog psychology and dog body language and rehabilitation and etc and I wouldn't dream to say I know more than him about that specific stuff (though I do know a good amount, nothing compared to him), likewise with dog obedience training or the conformation standards on the recognised AKC dog breeds or whatever. I know a dog trainer, one I have met personally who decoyed for my bandog, who also is one of the greatest trainers in the world of search and rescue and cadaver dogs. I don't know fucking 1% of the shit he knows, BUT he also doesn't know 1% (or lets say 10%) of the shit I know.
I mean "dog expert" could mean any number of things I guess, many of which I might not know shit about or care to know. There would be thousands of dog trainers better than me.
But my specific interest in the varieties of working dog types and their functional adaptations and the history of that stuff and breaking down their performance dynamics and etc ... I don't know anyone I can look up to. I just don't. It's nuts, but that just demonstrates how amateurish and unstudied the field is. It's not that I am amazing, it is just a very strangely neglected area of interest. In my specific angle- Dan Balderson, Katrina Hartwell, Chazio, Lycaon, Brogan, Vita, David Hancock... historically maybe Theodore Roosevelt, Samuel White Baker, George P Sanderson and Jack London are kind of in the ballpark relative to their time, but that is really the extent of "peers" stretched out as generously as possible. If any more are out there they are hiding extremely well.
Bolushi is a student on track to naturally surpass me. We all build on eachother's knowledge, like you get the advantage of fast tracking by being a student of someone, which I did with Katrina and Dan, learning off them between about 2004 and 2012, and they did to some extent with David Hancock (and I too piggy backed off hancock in the end).
By the time I die Bolushi will be about 35 and know everything I know and then improve for another 20 years or so at which point he will die of diabetes, so... yeah. Knowledge evolves and improves over time (normally, kennels clubs did their best to sabotage that with dogs).
But right now? I dunno... I think I'm kind of close to maybe being the most knowledgeable dog guy in the world. If I'm wrong I would love to know about it, and immediately go and feed off the knowledge of that person.
