Pandemic notes of the moment
La Presse talked to a selection of people whose work continues despite pandemic controls. Urbania describes how Dollarama was declared an essential service.
The city has closed its dog parks till further notice, and Quebec has closed bed & breakfasts and other tourist facilities. Hotels are still open.
Radio-Canada notes the first Cree COVID-19 patient, who’s isolated in a downtown hotel often used to house Cree people who come to Montreal for medical treatment. He hadn’t been home to the Cree territory in awhile.
Four men in the immigration detention centre in Laval are maintaining a hunger strike begun by 30 inmates some days ago. They want to be released, although there’s no specific news saying they’ve been exposed to COVID-19. (Nobody wants to be locked up, but if there’s no virus in that place, wouldn’t it be safer to stay inside for the moment?)
LJ 11:10 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
Closing the dog parks has resulted in some people letting their large dogs run amok without leash in other parks. While I have some sympathy for their plight, it can be annoying or intimidating to others (for example, those with small kids or those who walk their cats through the parks). It is amazing how temporarily blind these dog owners can become when they do not want to be considerate to others.
Alison Cummins 11:14 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
Large dogs really do need to be walked, and young dogs really do need to run whether or not dog parks are closed.
There’s a way to make this work. Time-based rather than space-based restrictions.
Dogs can run around in the park off-leash between 6h and 7h30 (for instance). Otherwise, nope. The rest of us make our decisions.
David100 12:35 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
Release them back to their home countries.
dwgs 13:44 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
Hear hear! Wolfhounds back to Ireland, Bulldogs to old Blighty, Malinois to Belgium…
Michael Black 14:59 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
Wait, dogs have been here since time immemorial. They took over when horses disappeared. I’ve read some doubt, but the claim is that horses came back when they immigrated with the Spanish. But no similar story of dogs coming over with Columbus or the Mayflower. You can’t send them back if they have no ties to the old country.
Besides, dogs wouldn’t do well on their own. They have no sense of wilderness, and are too nice to compete with wild dogs and wolves.
But I think dogs are having their own problems, and not just the closing of dog runs. They gave up the pack a long time ago, so their “pack” becomes people, but they still need dog contact. Suddenly all they can do is glance across the street at other dogs. At the best of times, there are people who will cross the street with their dog, it’s never clear if they worry about their dog or the other dog. Now it’s the norm, are they avoiding people or the dogs? And dogs can be oblivious to some things, they know they afen’t getting that needed dog contact, but don’t know why
Kate 18:00 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
Michael Black, I believe dwgs was doing a masterful détournement of David100’s xenophobic barb and not seriously intending that dogs be sent back.
Is there actually evidence there were horses here before Europeans came? As I understood it, horses were domesticated on the Eurasian steppes a few thousand years ago, but didn’t come to the Americas till the Spanish brought them. Dogs, however, or so I’ve read, accompanied the first humans who came over from Siberia, so they were already here when Europeans showed up from 1492 onwards.
qatzelok 20:39 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
About dogs, Michael Black: “They have no sense of wilderness”
That’s because their instincts were bred out of them through inbreeding to create decorative toys for humans.
I find this sort of parallel to what modern man has done to nature generally.
Mark Côté 21:19 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
There’s a lot of evidence that dogs basically domesticated themselves, that the less fearful wolves hung around human settlements for the scraps and eventually were integrated into human society. That is of course not to say that we haven’t done quite a number on the species through inbreeding (and other terrible things), but a lot of the particularly weird and unhealthy breeds are fairly recent, comparatively.
Mark Côté 21:27 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
And TIL that, yes, in fact, horses actually evolved in North America.
“1-4 million years ago, Equus, the modern horse, debuted in North America. It stood approximately 13 hands tall with the features of a standard horse. Equus had a long neck and legs, with a single toe.
Equus originated in North America and spread throughout the world. Equus fossils have been discovered on every continent except Antarctica and Australia.
Evidence suggests that Equus migrated to Asia a million years ago. They went extinct in North America about 11,000 years ago but survived on other continents and many years later returned to their continent of birth.”
Kate 23:00 on 2020-03-29 Permalink
Very interesting! But they were gone from North America before people arrived.
Alison Cummins 02:14 on 2020-03-30 Permalink
Horses were gone 11kya but people started arriving about 16kya — or possibly even earlier, it’s hard to tell. There was overlap.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas
dwgs 08:42 on 2020-03-30 Permalink
I have two dogs and taking them for one very long walk each day is what is keeping me sane. Most dog walkers are crossing the street to avoid contact but every once in a while we meet someone who will let the dogs say hello. Most leashes are about 1.5 metres long so the owners maintain a 3m distance while the dogs socialize.
qatzelok, it sometimes seems as though there is no joy in your life whatsoever.
Kate 11:46 on 2020-03-30 Permalink
Alison, it seems (after a cursory look around) that the issue of whether people interacted with those archaic horses is not settled archaeologically, but that some folks are making the claim they did, from cultural nonscientific motives. However, it’s a provable fact those horses died off with a lot of the other American megafauna around 10,000 years ago.
My guess is that if people interacted with those horses at all, they ate them, they didn’t ride them. But that may not be provable either way.
Alison Cummins 12:15 on 2020-03-30 Permalink
Kate,
Agreed. Horses weren’t domesticated until 6kya, and they were milked and bled, not ridden.
Michael Black,
Dog contact is one of my reasons for having two dogs.
My little dog is good with dogs and I let her approach as much as she wants and as much as the other dog and dog-boss are comfortable with. Dog contact is good!
My big dog is not good with dogs. Or rather, she is fine with dogs at an appropriate social distance who are ignoring her. I do not allow other dogs to approach her. She sits, I place myself between her and the other dog, and I explain limits to the owner.
But even I, a pro-dog-contact dog-boss, will occasionally cross the street to avoid a dog if I don’t think I’ll be able to give my big dog enough social distance. Sorry, guys.