#animal death m/

[letitrainathousandflames]

[tw animal death i guess, bc a cat killed a mouse.]

so I went out on a walk around the block here in Germany and I heard a cat meowing under a tall bush. I must stress the the cat was meowing in German because rather than sounding like "miau" like the cats I know from Brazil he sounded like "mäow" which is. Something else entirely.

Cat was bright orange with yellow eyes, and y'all were right about orange cats looking dumb lol. Also, he had a mouse in his mouth. That is, until I arrived and he looked like he had been caught trying to steal a prized jewel from a museum. After a long moment of consideration during which he stared at me wide-eyed, he went back to his snack, german-meowing the entire time.

so uh. that's was today's weird-ass encounter. Duolingo was right. Die katze frisst die maus.

[letitrainathousandflames]

I normally don't reblog posts with such heavy subjects, but my older brother's cat died about a month ago bc it was allowed to roam freely and it ran into (also outdoors) dogs, and it got injured. It stayed at the vet for two days before it ended up dying.

My brother was devastated, and while my other brother and I were 100% there for him while he grieved, we had to also be real with him and say it: it wouldn't have happened if he was kept inside.

If you don't care about your cat decimating birds and other wildlife, you must at least care that it doesn't get maimed by other animals, killed by cars or ridden with parasites that cause diseases that will kill it as painfully as possible (I say this as someone who lost three dogs to tick-related illnesses).

Keep your cats within your property. The world outside is not safe for them - no, not even your quaint little neighborhood. Really.

i'll tell you what converted me to being all-in on keeping cats indoors only:

living for a year and a half in a rural area with a sudden feral cat colony explosion on the property.

i moved in with my folks for a bit and at that time, one (1) stray cat mama had taken up residence on the property, but was too feral to let my mother anywhere near her. but especially after she brought three kittens around, mom fed her and the kittens in hopes they'd grow trusting enough she could catch for spay and neuter at the minimum. momcat stayed mean and hella wary, but the kittens would hang around a little nearer and play with my mom via long stick, but still wouldn't come close enough to touch or catch.

unfortunately, two of the three kittens were girls and started having kittens of their own before further progress was made, shortly after i moved in. and that was pretty much instant doom.

there were so many kittens. SO MANY. multiple litters. every time we turned around, more kittens.

we fed them. we hunted for and located the kittens every time anywhere on the property and would move them to a repurposed doghouse anytime a mama cat had them somewhere else, so that they could grow up human-socialized and we could spay/neuter them when they were old enough. (also it was a handy tactic to push the issue of the mamas getting more used to/trusting of us themselves. only really worked with one of them, though.)

and we watched them die.

we watched litter after litter of kittens never make it to the age they could be spayed or neutered. the moms stayed, for the longest time, too skittish to more than briefly touch, much less catch and crate for a vet visit.

it sounds like a silly joke to say i have kitten-related ptsd, but i absolutely do.

too many goddamn times i'd walk out of the garage and find the carport and gravel drive strewn with tiny bodies. others simply went missing, never to be found.

one in particular, i wish i hadn't found, and the visual literally haunts me still, almost a decade later.

i saw so many kittens die of snake bite, spider bite, wild dogs, birds of prey, hit by cars, respiratory illness, covered in fleas and eyes crusted with infection.

and we loved them all. scrimped for antibiotics if the vet could be convinced to give it to us despite our being unable to bring them in. bought flea collars and ointments. we cared for them and fed them and petted them and played with them, brushed their fur and cleaned up their little faces, put ice in their water in hot summer, rigged a heating lamp in their house in the winter.

and they died. horribly. that property is pocked with unmarked graves of kittens and cats.

all the best intentions, not enough resources, and it didn't matter anyways because the population went from three to almost twenty (at times, over thirty) in the blink of an eye.

they died and died and died. our hearts broke over and over again. the stress and anxiety wore us down like sandpaper. i think, by the end of it all, we managed to find less than 10 of them all homes, including batman the disabled kitten i found a home across the country through tumblr.

it was carnage and tragedy, frankly. and we were helpless.

it only ended because they started dying faster than they could be born, and because we finally caught the two remaining mom cats in traps and got them spayed.

the points about outdoor cats being invasive predators devastating to local wildlife populations is true and valid and important.

but i know cat people, and cat people who don't know better than to let cats outdoors. what matters to you is the cat itself, generally. the cat being happy and taken care of.

keeping cats outdoors, letting them outdoors, is not taking care of the cats. it's not protecting them. it's not giving them any happiness or invigoration that couldn't be provided to them as indoor-only pets with just a little research and effort.

they die. they get ill. they get hurt. they're at risk of predators, and cars, and disease, and carelessly cruel children and deliberately cruel adults. they're at risk of disappearing on you because someone else saw a cat outdoors and intervened to give it a better, safer life not in conflict with the local environment.

and if that offends and angers you that someone would just take a cat they saw roaming outdoors, even collared, and that it sounds like i'm endorsing that, i am, but not if you intervene and be that person yourself for your own cat.

if what matters to you is doing right by your cat because it's family and a living creature whose happiness and health and safety is important to you,

keep them indoors. not part time. always. exclusively.

[plushyparfait]

Meronia in another universe where nothing bad happened to them :(

i'm back! with a more consistent style after ages !!

[sebfreak]

Grim Reaper

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[kuulpenguin]

oops!

[karmesean]

we’re trying

[t00thpasteface]

thinking about getting sick during dissections, and cleaning fish with my dad when i was little, and animals going extinct

[itsslivernotsilver]

now that there’s more people watching pantheon i wanna say that you guys should read “the hidden girl and other stories” by ken liu cause that’s what it was based on!! it’s not like necessary to understand the show or anything but it’s super fun to see what changed and what other stories the writers drew inspiration from

[letitrainathousandflames]

was thinking abt how i never got around to finishing Life is Strange 2 nor do i want to. **spoilers** I was super hyped to have a story driven by latino characters but they made a title for these choice based game franchise where you always have a billion different outcomes - like the previous titles did.

And for some reason they made it impossible to choose to save a young puppy you adopted from death... just for the sake of shock value? You even get choices to make which are tied to keeping the pup safe but none of them matter, it dies every time, in front of you. Nah man. Immediate quit moment for me.

[crystal-wingeddragon-spikes]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61843309/chapters/158128309

This is, hopefully, the final cut of my experimental Alan Becker comic. Alan's part can be read independently, but The Chosen One's part is to be read after Alan's.

Fixed several panels transition.

Fixed several art details.

Included the text transcription of AOL chat log.

There are my commentaries here and there.

The art style still changes every panel, that one I cannot fix.

If anyone want to recommend anything for me, or want to be my friend on AO3, please tell me here. The first page of My Little Pony and The Powerpuff Girls scared me off years ago. I am not looking through that site again. Archive for archiving only.

[plushyparfait]

Mello's genes didn't even have a chance

meronia yuribecause i can't draw boys for biscuits and they just look too cute! maybe the meronia baby will be spotted more in the future!

[pissbaby-jones]

reading alan alda’s autobiography and having to get up and exercise to fight off the urge to cry

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[fisheito]

love a good yoinkin

[ai-the-broccoli]

honestly it's funny how Light is in-universe conventionally attractive in a way that loops back to being an acquired taste in fandom (in comparison to L, that is)