#animal death /

[positivelyqueer]

[ID: digital illustration of the Gävle goat as a real goat. It is bent down as if grazing. most of its spine and ribs are exposed and there is blood on the underside of the wound. Birds with halos rest on it's back. Beneath its hooves is a border of small flames. /end ID]

If not by flame, then by feather

[askdarkermatters]

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: A lonely young girl falls under the spell of a domineering classmate who has aspirations of becoming a witch.

[lovecore-muppet]

[image description: three cartoony illustrations of ants. The illustrations are uncolored but well-shaded.

Image one: an ant sniffs a dead ant, which is labeled “releasing oleic acid”. The living ant says, “no good” and tosses the corpse onto a pile of other dead ants.

Image two: an unseen human drips oleic acid onto a living ant. A second ant sniffs them, says “no good”, and drags the oleic acid ant away as they yell.

Image three: starts with a tumblr post that reads: “you forgot the best part, in some of these experiments the ‘dead’ ant would go to the dead pile willingly on their own and wouldn’t leave until the acid wore off”. The illustration shows an ant sniffing under its arm, saying: “oh. I died”. It climbs up and sits on top of the dead ant pile. End ID]

I thought it would delight you to know that ants do have a sort of funeral mound for their dead

yes there is a name for this! necrophoresis is a process with social insects where the bodies are taken to a specific location on the outside of ( or within ) the nest - ants tend to keep them all in the same place, and the way an ant is signaled to be "dead" by its other members is through the release of a chemical called oliec acid

theres even been a few experiments where live ants were coated in the same chemical and other ants treated the live ants....exactly as though they were dead and tried dragging them into the pile

[chimken-nugget]

Tragedy Sisters: Squilf's Hope

a homage to my favourite sisters in the series

not entirely satisfied with this comic as I don't feel I did the quote justice.. Maybe one day I'll remake this...

Funnily enough, I haven't even read Squirrelflight's Hope yet, so the way I've interpreted the quote into the comic is based almost entirely on my impression of the series up to OOTS

Hope you enjoy.

squilf and leafpool.. they could never make me hate you

[inbabylontheywept]

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

[torajira]

google photos is so funny. three years since fish in da sink

[kyanve]

Fuck pleather. Seriously.

*faux leather no animals were harmed! :)

[ink-the-artist]

Girls when their periods sync

[owainigo]

wolf in sheep's clothing

[foldingfittedsheets]

There was this park near where I grew up. I remember we’d just moved to the area so I was around six and we drove past and saw this waterfront area. My parents decided to check it out so we went for a walk. It was a lovely park, there’s a lazy slough, lots of trees, extremely picturesque. My parents ambled along the trail enjoying the nature while my siblings and I ranged around in their orbit like excitable moons.

Then I saw something odd. Something vibrantly alive down by the water that was entirely the wrong color. I called back my vital scouting info and my family gathered around me. We looked down the steep verge toward the slough, screened by underbrush. We couldn’t quite make out what it was. The only thing we could agree was that it certainly wasn’t a duck. However it was about duck sized and roughly duck shaped. It just wasn’t a duck.

This led to some heated debate amongst my siblings and I but we were forbidden to scramble down the muddy hill to harass the mystery animal. Reluctantly we continued down the trail, speculating wildly when a chicken popped out of a bush in front of us with a train of several chicks.

We froze. The chicken did not. She placidly herded her little puffs across the trail, pecking happily for seeds, unbothered by our proximity. My family had not yet delved into farming and this was the first time any of us kids had seen a chicken up close. It was like a fairytale thing, a creature we had seen over and over in books was suddenly here in the wilderness of the park. We all realized the mystery creature had likewise been a chicken.

Another couple came up the trail and saw us staring.

“Is this your first time at the park?” They asked?

We nodded.

They informed us that this park had become a dumping ground for unwanted chickens. Once the chickens were dumped they were park property and the locals didn’t mind the eccentric additions at all. No one looked after the chickens, but they got on surprisingly well.

As the years went by we visited the park regularly. Signs were added to warn people not to dump off chickens or they’d be fined. They were also excluded from snatching the existing chickens. The hope was that the chickens would eventually run their course and the park would go back to normal.

It did not.

Instead the menagerie grew. Peacocks cropped up occasionally, turkeys; and one visit we saw guinea fowl. But there were always chickens. Eventually feed dispenser were installed so park goers could pay a quarter to enjoy the motley flocks.

Because we’d moved into a house with land my mom started up a chicken coop and we got our very own chickens at the feed store like proper folks. The first rooster we had was a gentleman, politely clucking at us when came into the coop, but the second proved troublesome a year later. He either adored or hated me. Every time I entered the coop he’d dance and flounce and brandish his spurs.

My mom didn’t want to off him frankly she didn’t know how at that point but his fascination ended with him flying at me and the rooster was sentenced to banishment.

We drove to the park.

We saw him there for years afterward, clucking dutifully around a small flock of hens. He did pretty well in exile.

Anyone who’s kept chickens knows that eventually there’s always a tragedy. Ours happened when a neighbors dog broke into our coop and slaughtered the flock. I was absolutely distraught, my lovingly hand reared chicks all decimated in a flurry of senseless bloodlust. I have not loved a chicken since. They are too fragile to bear it.

After a few days of mourning my mom offered that she knew where to find some more chickens. To make up for the massacre she planned a night raid with us. We stayed up past our bedtime and drove to the park with tarp covered kennels in the back of the truck.

We crept down along the gravel parking lot, looking up into the trees, spotting the telltale lumps of shadows that meant chickens. We quickly developed a strategy. We picked a chicken branch, creeping close underneath. Then we reached the end of the branch and gave it a good shake until the roosting chicken glided down to the ground in confusion. It was easy to scoop them up and we went home the proud new owner of a handsome flock of chickens.

The Take a Chicken Leave a Chicken park is still a beloved feature of its neighborhood to this day.

[todaysbird]

as a huge lover of birds, 90% of the concern against wind turbines being used for energy is literally just pro fossil fuel propaganda. birds ARE at a risk however there is a lot of strategies even as simple as painting one of the blades that reduces a lot of accidental deaths. additionally renewable energy sources will do more in favor of the environment that would positively impact birds (and all of us). one study found over one million bird deaths from wind turbines. while that is a shockingly high number and we should work to drastically shrink it, at least 1.3 billion birds die to outdoor cats on a yearly basis. it was never about caring about birds

[joeyclaire]

[askdarkermatters]