#animal death ///////

[serioussideblog]

I lost my beloved Blue to anemia, caused by fleas and no-see-ums. I didn’t even know fleas could get to her until they did. I thought that, as an indoor cat who didn’t interact with other animals, she was safe. I was wrong.

Garlic is incredibly toxic to dogs and cats, by the way.

But beyond all of that, anyone who is trying to convince you not to use any real flea treatment is wrong. Vets aren’t just in it for the money.

Don’t you dare tell me that fleas are never a big deal. If you’ve never seen a cat that you love clinging to life by a thread because a bunch of blood-sucking insects ganged up on her, never seen what it looks like for millions of fleas to abandon ship once they’ve sucked just about all the blood out of your beloved pet, never had to dig a grave and use a towel as a burial shroud because of fleas, you don’t get to tell me that fleas are not a big deal. Sure, for lots of animals, it’s not that bad…but for quite a few other animals, particularly small cats and kittens, elderly cats…it can be deadly.

Blue went from itchy, to anemic, to dead very quickly. She was small, and old. We had lots of lavender scented things around the house, but that didn’t save Blue. Blue was an indoor cat, but that didn’t save her, either. You don’t know how bad insect bite anemia can get until you see it, and you don’t know that it’ll be your pet until it is. And olive oil and lavender won’t save your pet.

If your pet has fleas, consult with your vet. The vet will know which flea treatments are best for your pet. The vet can even teach you how they’re used. Don’t wait until your pet is crying under your bed because there’s not enough blood in her body. Don’t wait until your little one is

You can take your 'Natural' Flea Remedies...

… And shove them somewhere dark and anatomical.

You sit comfortably behind your computer screen, far from suffering, possibly never even seeing a flea, either because you never looked or because they were never there in the first place, and proudly tell people that vets are just in it for the money, so you should treat fleas with olive oil / garlic / diatomaceous earth / apple cider vinegar / wishful thinking instead.

You’re not here in the real world trying to comfort an old, desperate woman who took your advice and is paying the price.

Her old cat is being put to sleep because of massive flea burden causing an iron deficiency anaemia, with a PCV of 11% (lost 70% of her blood cells to these parasites). She could have afforded real flea treatments that work, but she certainly can’t afford the blood transfusion, oxygen therapy and intensive care her cat requires.

You’re not here as I put her cat to sleep, resting on her tear soaked chest, coat greasy with olive oil, stinking of garlic and lavender.

You don’t see the consequences of these unchecked parasites, which you probably only ever thought of as a dirty annoyance.

But I am here.

I am here comforting this woman while bad internet advice killed her cat with a completely preventable condition.

So to those promoting ‘natural’ parasite control, whether it’s because you like to feel clever, or always wanted to be a vet but didn’t get to be one, I’d just like you to know one more thing.

Death by parasite is completely ‘natural’ too.

[gin-juice-tonic]

To make a long story still long but shorter than it was originally: I went to a lake with a trail today. You have to take the trail to get to the sandy "beaches", so I set out on it. Once I got to one of the beaches, I walked up to the water and try to take in the all majesty.

The majesty was quickly dispersed by seeing half of a dead fish on the sand. I think: "Oh, something must've been eating this and just left it here." I start to walk away from it only to notice 3 more dead fish, which registers as "definitely weird" this time. I do a scan of the area and realize the entire shoreline is littered with dead fish. They were practically lined up along the entire perimeter. I don't know how I missed them before, but I am extremely aware of them now.

At this point I decide being close to the lake maybe isn't a great idea and I walk back to the trail, passing one more dead fish along the way that was admittedly pretty far from the water. I don't know how it got up there. Despite this dead fish experience, I do not particularly want to leave, so I keep walking along the trail further into the woods.

After regaining my distance from the shore things start to turn majestic again and I'm back to having a good serene forest time. My mom calls on the phone and we talk about my nephews basketball game. I pass by some kind of feathery mass a bit off the trial.

It was a dead gull.

I wonder aloud if maybe it ate one of those dead fish and got sick from it and died. Sometimes there's dead animals in the forest and sometimes we want to keep walking along a trail on a nice day. I will not be deterred. I keep going.

A little bit after that I notice something large up ahead ON the trail.

Twas but a dead goose, blocking the entire way forward with its body.

Lacking confidence in my ability to side-step the goose and figuring that logically the next dead thing I would run into would be a human jogger or perhaps someone who had been walking their dog, I decided to call it quits and go home.

The end.

[flinnirthefruityfiend]

dragonkin!! dragons of tumblr!!! come here!!

there's a movie i just watched called New Gods: Nezha Reborn, and you have to watch it too! Netflix or pirate

it's about a dragon who is reincarnated as a human, discovers his powers, copes with the fact that he was selfish and/or evil in most of his past lifes, and has to fight dragons that oppose him. I've never related harder to a movie than this. this made me realize a lot about my own relationship with my dragonself that I might ramble about tomorrow.

trigger warning: there's a lot of death, human and nonhuman death, in the movie. some darker themes generally. made me tear up some times. but I thought it was a good movie overall.

[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

[doctorguilty]

Dont let anyone believe for a moment, by the way, Elon gives any amount of shits about animal welfare or testing

"Physicians Committee through an ongoing lawsuit reveal that, while three monkeys were used by Neuralink in terminal experiments in which they did not recover from surgery, 12 previously healthy animals were euthanized by Neuralink as a direct result of problems with the company’s implant."

"Documents from the University of California, Davis, where Neuralink conducted monkey experiments from 2017 to 2020, reveal that implantation of the company’s device caused debilitating health effects in monkeys, resulting in euthanasia. Animals experienced chronic infections, paralysis, swelling in the brain, loss of coordination and balance, and depression."

The fucking AUDACITY to single out something as vital to human life as THE POPULATIONS OF OUR NATIVE FISH as an example of some kind of frivolous government waste is fucking sickening. If this was literally the one and only thing Elon and his employees did wrong I'd already be pissed off enough to want to smash and splatter their teeth out with a metal bat. I'd say they're idiot cavemen but I'm sure they know full well that fish sustain the lives of indigenous people in particular. Monitoring fish when they are sensitive larvae is how we know if their population is strong and how we know if a pollutant or a disease is starting to tear through one of the country's only free public food sources.

[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

[claypigeonpottery]

sold

it turned out so beautifully 🥹

and the plum blossoms show which way the lid fits 🌸

[anotherdayforchaosfay]

@blackbackedjackal

[source]

[bunjywunjy]

oh The Fish™️ of tumblr, what is thy wisdom?

did you know that king cobras can growl?

because they can. they growl.

[great-and-small]

Imagine saying your cat kills eels as if that’s just a cute little story when the European eel population has declined by 98% over the past 40 years to the point that they are now critically endangered 😭

Like, how can you care so little for your own remarkable wildlife? Your cat doesn’t know any better; it’s your job not to let them do that kind of thing.

[adulthumanproblem]

People who are calling cats asshole and uncaring bastards are definitely contributing to cruelty towards them as well

Never mind rats. Rats are amazing animals, smart, social, playful, adorable. But people think it's fine or even funny to kill them in cruel ways

Fuck humans, man

Man, it just annoys me when the internet just gets a massive hate-boner for a particular animal, like when Tierzoo called cheetahs lame or when that one FB user ranted about how useless sunfish are or when that meme said that koalas are chlamydia-ridden idiots with smooth brains. I know those are probably just memes but it negatively affects the perception of species that are threatened and play important roles in their ecosystem.

The infamous Taiji dolphin hunt where dolphins are rounded up and killed en masse and survivors sold to marine parks and aquariums is *happening again*, and when videos are surfacing on social media to call out the practice as unsustainable and inhumane the comments are all like "well aren't dolphins assholes tho?" and "they're the rapists of the sea, honestly deserved". because all the memes about dolphins being "psychopaths" have had plenty of people thinking they deserve torture, death or extinction or are somehow morally liable for their instinctive behaviors.

I really hate people sometimes. animals all have their place in the tree of life that they spent millions of years evolving to fit into, they don't need anyone's approval to be allowed to exist!

also that stupid hunt only started in 1969, it's not "cultural" or whatever. it needs to stop