#My Pets

[vesen-art]

Can i show you Behemoth

Banjo gives his opinion on the matter!

[kedreeva]

Every time I see him, I am proud to have made him.

[seabeck]

Finally got a receipt for Baby Yellow

[heartseeker]

witness him

[peeetlovers]

Love my kitty hahahaha

[eternalglitch]

I love my little rats so much but they are scheming little critters that take great joy in giving their owner proverbial heart attacks.

(content warning for some medical discussion)

There is a medical term called "degloving" where essentially rats specifically have a lizard's ability to lose their tail at a moment's notice in order to get away from danger. (The term in a more general sense is skin and muscle separating from bone.) This is why you should never pick a rat up by the tail, as unlike a lizard, it does not grow back and the skeleton itself does not get removed like... everything else. For a pet rat, this usually means a minor amputation is required.

Friday night I was playing with my rats and noticed my smallest one, Gimli, looked like she had a few centimeters of bone just exposed and out and about at the very tip of her tail. Shit.

Oddly enough, there was no blood and the rat herself seemed entirely unaware of the crisis I was having as I inspected her while Severance played in the background, not helping my rising heart rate. I confirmed the "bone" I was looking at was hard and not some kind of fur or anything, and separated the rat into my hospital cage until I could get her into my exotic vet Monday.

Well. My vet was also perplexed at the rat, as it was not bone. Gimli has the ability to grow a little keratin horn (essentially a 21st nail) right at the tip of her tail, and only protested a little at its removal. She has been dubbed a "reverse unicorn" by my vet and cost me $95 to learn this information after that roller coaster of a weekend.

Thanks, Gim.

^ Rat tax photo of the creature herself.

[anxiousspacedust]

The girls love hanging out in their couch pouch ❤️🐀

[petcarelovers]

The moment I first saw this cat, I fell in love with her.😍 She seems to be staring straight into your heart, and there's something about it. Everything feels perfect because of that subtle bond something which only a cat can produce. 💞

[raivos-world]

Neli - kits

Ren ja Ariel - kanad

Vari - kass

[nvdesertfox]

His turn!! He's too big to lay in my lap. So he pins me down to cuddle haha. Meet Nightwing Mr Mow. Haha He's a sophistakittie 🐱 .. usually wearing his bow tie ☺️

[acegodzilla]

I sneezed and woke him up and he looked at me like this

[loganyann]

Open Commissions✅ - Turn your pet into art!💙 Message me for more information📩

[kedreeva]

Has anyone on tumblr ever got upset at you for inbreeding birds?

if they have, they either haven't told me, or if someone tried and I blocked them and immediately forgot they existed, which is basically the same thing as not telling me. I have no desire to tolerate nonsense from strangers on the internet.

Because to be honest, morality just flat out isn't the same for inbreeding in animals as it is in humans. Inbreeding itself in animals isn't necessarily harmful- it becomes harmful if the animals being paired have deleterious genes that cause health issues, or if it goes on for too long. EVENTUALLY inbreeding with zero fresh blood may lead to genetic deterioration/stagnation (which is a MUCH bigger danger for wild animals than captive ones, as they will lack the diversity needed to overcome environmental changes), but how much inbreeding that takes ie how many generations, varies between animal species. For example in mice, it takes upwards of 100 generations to even start to see that kind of genetic deterioration (and we know this, because scientific research is done with mice and breeding facilities HAVE lines that extend back that far for some strains). My longest, linebred mouse line was 10 generations before an outcross, and the outcross was not because anything bad was happening, but rather because they'd been bred for use in the siamese line and it was time. Inbreeding in mice (line breeding in mice) is actually the STANDARD for cleaning a line of any bad mutations/health concerns, and it's considered a big risk to outcross once you've established a healthy line. A necessary one eventually, but a risk none the less.

For peafowl, it would probably take less than 100, but once or twice? not even remotely a problem, and is the only way to first-step produce a homozygous animal for a new mutation. If this were a cross of birds that had been line bred 20 times already, maybe it would be a problem but Earl literally is F1 from a father that shares no genes with ANY bird in the USA, and a hen completely unrelated to any of my own birds, and I am using hens unrelated to him or his parents, and unrelated to each other, in order to give the group the widest possible genome to start with.

Anyone of the opinion that this is a cause for upset doesn't know enough about genetics for me to take their opinion seriously, to for me to tolerate them showing me their whole ass in public.

Some people avoid it, some people don't. People that know more about genetics tend to be more okay with it, as they understand that it's not the inbreeding itself that usually causes problems, but pairing bad genes into homozygous form, and that actually pairing related animals can help get rid of those genes through repeated selection against them and hard culling animals that are known to have it. It doesn't surprise me that larger animals like horses have more stigma against inbreeding. Only being able to produce 1 offspring per female per year is a LOT heftier price to pay if it goes wrong than a smaller animal like rabbits or mice that produces far more per year and is more acceptable to hard cull (since mice and rabbits can both be used for feeders, and rabbits for human food).

[animelionessmika]

My dog used to look like some wild animal i snatched from the street the day i brought her home

[bleachgirl]