2016/05/19 - Breed to Retrieve?, Playboy Monopoly

So I was playing fetch with Trixie last night, and started to wonder; What makes retrievers retrieve?

As always I went to Google and asked my personal oracle the question. The number one answer was a link to another one of my favorites; Wikipedia.

Turns out, according to Wikipedia, retrievers were BRED to retrieve.

Now most people might stop wondering there, but that puzzled me. How do you breed a dog to retrieve? Is there any documentation of the process?

Google wasn't much help for me on those questions.

I imagined teams of German genetic scientists in the 1940's practicing selective breeding, testing thousands of dogs by throwing a stick and breeding only the ones that brought it back. 

But then I wondered; Why not just TRAIN a dog to retrieve? Wouldn't that be easier than breeding dogs to retrieve?

And ultimately I wondered; if you could BREED a dog to perform a task, why hasn't someone bred a dog to shit in the yard?

I stopped my wondering there.
.....

Have you been following the primary politics?

I've been listening to a lot of NPR One, NPR Politics, Presidential, and Real Time podcasts.

If anything, this is going to be an exciting election year. 

Unfortunately for many, it will be like picking the lesser of two evils.

Everyone's saying that Hillary is a shoe-in, but one thing that scares me is that people in both parties are wanting change, and to many, Hillary represents same old, same old.

Regardless, I'll predict that Trump will not win, but will come out ahead. He'll strengthen his international celebrity without having to get involved with the headaches of governing.

He can continue to play a game he's always been good at; Playboy Monopoly.

Later,
Steve