#animal death /

[algia-continued]

Lean

Hand in the maw of a wolf skull By: Leonard Lee Rue III From: The Order of Wolves 1976

[bleepzip]

the garden shed

[antiqueanimals]

Philip R. Goodwin (1881 – 1935). Caught in the Den. Oil on canvas.

Coeur d’Alene Art Auction

[snototter]

A short-tailed mamushi (Gloydius brevicauda) preys on a Chinese red-headed centipede (Scolopendra mutilans) in Korea

by Jean-Jacques Strydom

[the-meme-monarch]

me if it's of any fucking concern to you

[strangledplanet]

[aurosoul]

Hello, Gruff, I want to play a game. There is a time-release neurotoxin implanted inside your skull. The antidote resides within the stomach of the hamster to your right. To open its cage, you must find the key - but to do so, something of equal size must be sacrificed. An eye for an eye. Act quickly, or the mechanized arm above the antidote will move to destroy it. Its speed is determined by your heart rate.

Better keep your cool. You have one hour.

[elodieunderglass]

I need to re-research death and paralysis rates, so I’ve removed that image while I do that! but in the meantime, I was up in the night feeling bad that this post feels a little too dismissive about Killie getting concussions, and doesn’t jump up and down on the chair reminding people about repeated concussions being TERRIBLE (in fact I already had to edit it to narratively condemn Ruby Walsh for famously saying he didn’t count concussions as injuries). A companion post specifically about concussion, and jockeys, and jockeys underreporting concussions is here!

I would like to know more about the common injuries that jockeys like Killie would experience, if/when you feel up to more jockey-posting.

Fictional character Killie (x, x) is an Irish-British jockey working in the UK. He’s in his thirties and races over the flat and jumps, which is slightly unusual, but not wildly so.

Most injuries are incurred by falls. Jump racing has more falls, but jockeys are allowed to be heavier; flat racing goes faster with lighter riders, and has generally worse falls.

Killie is quite short (about 4’10”) and muscular. He has an average amount of injuries - nothing spectacular, but he doesn’t get away with anything either.

References below the cut.

Killie’s injury map was inspired by Irish jump jockey Ruby Walsh’s injury maps. As a jump jockey with a long career, Ruby got injured a lot - and in the process had several horses die under him, making him a controversial and sometimes hated figure (the rider is always blamed personally for injuries to the horse, rather than the people who create the working conditions). Ruby is shown below being partially carried off the track with a fractured leg. Unlike in other sports where you might get some sympathy and maybe a penalty shot or a gold star, jockeys with broken limbs are expected to drag themselves off the track and die somewhere else are expected to project a ruthless attitude about injury.

(EDIT: this injury map isn’t counting Ruby’s concussions, which he described elsewhere as not counting. TERRIBLE.)

While researching jockey injuries online, news sites will constantly be refreshing with news of injuries. Yesterday (20 Jan 2025) Irish jockey Gearóid Harney was knocked out by a fall and was hospitalised, but seems to have escaped serious (permanent) injury. This is pretty much continuous.

Although overlooked by most people, jockeys are considered absolutely fascinating to sports medicine researchers, and there are TONS of primary sources to dive into. Here’s some to get started:

https://www.jsams.org/article/S1440-2440(20)30332-7/abstract

Of course, weight management, substance abuse and disordered eating are a constant source of background issues, underpinning everything from bad bone and dental health to the chronic fatigue, mental health problems and stress experienced by jockeys. Jockeys in the UK and Ireland also do not earn salaries, and are paid per ride; financial uncertainty and fear drive many of them to work while injured. The working conditions of jockeys and racehorses are inextricable and poor, and any analysis should have some class-consciousness about this!!

I don’t know exactly what dental injury Killie incurred in the image below, but it was enough to shock his nice American boyfriend (TM), so it was probably something to do with one of his dental bridges getting spectacularly destroyed.

Thank you so much for this ask I love my ghastly little guy

[literalliterature]

Dire wolf time!!!!! Thinking constantly about the wall of these things at the La Brea Tar Pits museum

On red bubble

[ID copied from alt: A monochromatic drawing showing the upper skull of a dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus) in profile in shades of rusty orange. There is no proper lineart, with the shape instead being conveyed entirely through shadows and highlights. End ID.]

[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

[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