#animal death

[darkest-before-dawnclan]

Week 3, in which there's a bit of tension as we near the new moon.

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Week 3 Asks:

TBA

[t00thpasteface]

cheers to 18 years, miffy. you survived hurricanes, poverty, week-long power outages in both heat waves and freezes, and lots and lots of petsitting. you outlived your own sister and two other cats, and outlasted all of my mom's relationships she's had since her divorce. i'm so damn proud of you for making it to tax-paying, home-owning age, even though you were a bitter old mooch ever since you were a kitten. i'll always remember your love of milk, tuna water, and chef boyardee tomato sauce, your withering gaze of pure contempt, and that one time you stole a fresh meatball off the kitchen counter just to bring it upstairs to my bedroom door.

[katy-l-wood]

RIP Rebel

I had to have my little black cat Rebel put down this morning. She'd been going blind for a couple months, but seemingly doing alright otherwise. Then in the last two weeksish she started to lose a lot of weight, not use the litterbox as often, and pee outside the litterbox. Then over the last fiveish days she started to have some swelling in her abdomen. The vet suspected some sort of abdominal cancer, and also found she'd developed a pretty serious heart murmur.

Given that she was 14ish years old, and going blind on top of the other issues, I made the hard decision to let her go. Any treatment would've just stressed her out way to much and would've been for me, not for her.

She was such a cuddly little sweetheart and I'll miss her so much. I adopted her when she was three just after I started college. She moved between so many houses and apartments with me, watched me draw so many things, hung out with me while I wrote and edited so many books. She loved to drape herself across my knees when I had them pulled up to my chest at my desk. She was there through a lot of bad stuff, a lot of depression. I'll miss her so much.

(Please feel free to share, but I'm asking that you don't attach any photos of your own pets. I don't want to see them right now.)

[cipheramnesia]

Just can't stop playing this over and over again at night.

[snototter]

A pack of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) with their warthog kill in South Africa

by Vittorio Ricci

[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.

[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

[ink-the-artist]

Girls when their periods sync

[joeyclaire]

[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.

[dozydawn]

[ysabelmystic]

Doge is gone

[moldwood]

😭😭😭 my phone is begging me to put tumblr down like a sick animal...

[meanbossart]

A helpful little guide

[troutpaws]

the flesh will persist (graphite & digital, 2023)

[bunjywunjy]

Hi I just learnt that grebe the bird existed and I am intrigued do you have any knowledge to drop on the dudes

BOY DO I! grebes are my favorite waterfowl!

they're specialist divers and fish hunters, and they're a pretty wide group with a LOT of species!

and they're all freaks. every single one of them.

they're most closely related to FLAMINGOS, of all things, which is why their feet are so weird! they evolved completely separate from other waterfowl like ducks and geese, so they did the flipper thing totally backwards.

this is going to be a theme, nothing these birds do is normal.

unlike other specialist diving birds (coughcough LOONS coughcough), they aren't totally incompetent on land! just, again. total freaks about it.

aaagh I love them so much I might actually explode

also they swim like frogs, babies can dive pretty much immediately after hatching, and adults can minutely adjust their buoyancy in the water at will like a fucking submarine. you just can't make any of this shit up.

weirdest fucking bird 100/10