toreblogallthethings

[toreblogallthethings]

the person who helped today when I fell out of my wheelchair actually did a really great job, so I want to share in case other people wonder what to do. [Note: this is not universal, this is merely a suggestion from one person, every wheelchair user's needs are different! I am a person who uses a manual chair usually pushed by someone else who is also disabled.]

Scenario: you see someone in a wheelchair fall out of their chair, and you have the ability to help.

1. Approach and ask "are you okay?"*

2. Next question if they say no, are vague, or open to continuing conversation** is, "is there anything I can do to help?" Or "what can I do?"

If they say no to help, then that's the end, just leave and go do whatever you were doing!

If they ask for help or say they are mildly injured, ask "what would you like me to do?" And wait for an answer before doing anything! If they seem dazed or confused, they might have hit their head or had another medical event*, or they might just be like that due to regular disability. Be patient.

Do not touch the person unless they say to, or they are like, unconcious in the middle of the road, ya know?? Wheelchair users usually have conditions that mean being handled improperly can severely injure us, you could cause much more damage than the fall.

Some things they might need you to do:

Bring their wheelchair closer (mine went about 5 feet away after it dumped me)

engage the brakes of the wheelchair

hold wheelchair steady if it's an unsteady surface (mud, hill, ramp, wet, etc)

offer an arm for them to hold onto to get up (them grabbing you, not you grabbing them) or move another solid item closer for them to use (i.e. a chair) [only do this if you physically have the ability to!]

If the terrain is rough (i.e. a parking lot), they *might* ask you to push their chair to a more stable area once they are back in their chair

nothing

Something else

Do what they ask, NOT what you think would be helpful. If for some reason you have to do something (i.e. you can't stop oncoming traffic and need to get them out) ASAP, tell them what you plan to do

Keep in mind they might also be D/deaf, have a communication disability, be stunned after the fall, have a head injury, not trust other people, etc. Be patient and treat them as a person with autonomy and agency! They might need to just sit on the ground for a few minutes to recover before trying to get back in their chair. They might want everyone to leave them alone. They might ask you to call someone specific. Their chair might have broken and that can be extremely distressing. All of this is like if your legs spontaneously stop working when you're out and about!

A lot of wheelchair users (NOT ALL) have ways to get into their chair on their own once the chair is close enough and brakes engaged (but it's hard from the ground!). Here's what brakes look like on a lot of manual wheelchairs, in case they ask you to lock the brakes. They're levers on each side and pushing the lever pushes a bar against the wheel to hold it still.

ID: A manual wheelchair with the brake levels circled in red and labeled "user brake levers"

*There is also the possibility of course that a person fell out of their chair due to a seizure or other medical event, so that is why it is important to ask if they are okay. If you saw them hit their head, tell them so. If they had a medical event, follow protocol for that, I'm not gonna get into it here (thought I could).

**sometimes a person will be clear after the first question i.e. "I'm all good thanks" clearly means they do not need you to ask another question, you can just leave them alone. Keep walking and don't stare. A lot of the time people will be a bit banged up but be totally fine and able to manage on their own.

TLDR: Ask the wheelchair user if they're okay, then what they need, and then do exactly that, including leaving them alone. Thanks!

[toreblogallthethings]

mercy seems like a long shot here, so my prayer for inauguration day 2025: may they be incompetent. may they just be really bad at implementation. may their egos choke their effectiveness. may they drown themselves week by week with infighting and selfish posturing. may they be easily distracted. may the very governors and senators and agencies and religious leaders that the new administration expects to be friendly force endless stalemates to preserve their own power. may every delay turn into a three ring blame circus so chaotic that no one remembers what they were doing. may the good and necessary parts of government be too boring to draw attention and keep running quietly in the background. may the next four years be full of sound and fury and signify nothing.

[toreblogallthethings]

No matter what a post on tumblr tries to tell you, your moral and ethical stances will never be determined by what you reblog and what you scroll past. Don’t let manipulation tactics force you into doing anything you don’t want to do.

[toreblogallthethings]

do you ever see someone in some quiet intimate moment and suddenly love them so desperately you feel like you’re dying

#like when they pass a mirror and make a face and mess with their hair a little #or when you hear someone singing in their car with the windows rolled up as they drive past you #i don’t know how to express this i just. people are people and it makes me so sad and filled up sometimes

[toreblogallthethings]

Eye of newt and toe of frog: what was really in the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth? (CW: torture, death, historical racism, historical antisemitism, animal and human body parts) Ever since Scott Cunningham first made the following claim in the 1980s, there has been an increasingly widely circulated belief that the ingredients of the Macbeth potion were not grisly animal parts at all but merely herbs and plants, concealed under code names:

“every ingredient (Shakespeare) lists as being in the witches' pot refers to a plant and not the gruesome substance popularly thought”

This proposal had not appeared at all in analyses of Shakespeare prior to Cunningham’s Magical Herbalism: The Secret Craft of the Wise but is now extremely popular, especially the often-cited proposal that ‘eye of newt really meant mustard seed’. Lists of ‘herbal codes’ circulate online, purporting to explain all the different ingredients of the Macbeth potion away as plants. Witches, according to these lists, were grossly misrepresented. Their grisly concoctions were nothing but herbal mixtures.

Code-names and substitutions have certainly played a part in magic in history. Cunningham was familiar with, and makes reference to, the Greek Magical Papyri in which a famous list of secret substitutions is given. For example, ‘the tears of a Hamadryas baboon’ are to be taken to mean ‘dill juice’. The concept of a secret herbal code in which grisly-seeming or mythical ingredients are in fact plants – and only the enlightened few are aware of this - was therefore not a new one.

Was Cunningham correct?

First let’s look at the historical context.

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth under the patronage of James VI of Scotland / I of England. The King was paranoid about witches, was personally present at the interrogation of at least one, and wrote a book called Daemonologie all about them. The depiction of witches in Macbeth would have needed to flatter and support the King’s personal convictions. These fictional witches are therefore evil through and through, and we should be suspicious of any interpretation that seeks to lessen their horror.

Other plays were written around the same time that feature witches in similar roles, such as Jonson’s Masque of Queens and Middleton’s The Witch. We will come to those in due time.

Let’s examine the evidence for Cunningham’s claim, line by line. Round about the cauldron go;

In the poison’d entrails throw.

Right from the start, we have a reference to ‘poison’d entrails’. This immediately tells us that the ingredients are characterised both by being poisonous or venomous in nature and by coming from living creatures. Herbs and plants do not have entrails.

Toad, that under cold stone

Days and nights hast thirty one

Swelter’d venom sleeping got,

Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

The first ingredient is, quite plainly, a living toad. Specifically, it is a toad that has been secreting venom over a period of time.

The choice of a venom-secreting toad as the very first ingredient cannot have been a coincidence, seeing as the King had himself interrogated an accused witch who had been put to torture, and who had ‘confessed’ to collecting toad’s venom in order to use it in a sorcerous attempt against the King’s life.

The alleged witch’s name was Agnis Thompson, and the King interrogated her in 1591. His account of this is written up in his book, Daemonologie. Agnis Thompson 'confessed' to having taken a black toad, hung it up and collected the venom that dripped from it over three days in an oyster shell. This venom was supposedly intended to be used in a spell that would bewitch the King to death, 'and put him to such extraordinary paines, as if he had beene lying vpon sharp thornes and endes of Needles.'

It is worth noting at this point that the King also recorded his belief that the Devil causes witches to "joint dead corpses, & to make powders thereof" which are then used in spells. This belief can also be found in Daemonologie.

So in the very first ingredient that goes into the cauldron, the live toad steeped in its own venom, we have an immediate disproof of Cunningham’s claim that ‘every ingredient refers to a plant’, along with a clear reference to the King’s own personal lived experience and profound beliefs concerning witches.

It ought to go without saying that King James VI/I was a deluded bigot who had innocent women tortured and put to death in service to his twisted agenda, but let’s say it anyway.

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the cauldron boil and bake;

As with ‘entrails’, the use of the term ‘fillet’ leaves in no doubt that we are dealing with a dismembered living creature. A fenny snake is simply a snake from the fens.

Convoluted attempts have been made to identify ‘fillet of a fenny snake’ as a plant of some kind, but given that Cunningham’s claim has already been disproved, there seems no point in not taking Shakespeare at face value.

Eye of newt

Let’s get this out of the way: there is zero historical evidence that ‘eye of newt’ ever meant ‘mustard seed’. There are no herbals that give this as a name – not that were written prior to the 1980s, at any rate. The obvious conclusion is that it is modern lore created in sympathy with Cunningham’s claim. The ‘mustard seed’ interpretation is all over the Internet, of course, because sites typically copy one another without bothering to look for original sources.

(I would like to say, for the record, that if I assert here that ‘no historical source says X was ever used to mean Y’ and anyone later provides a historical source that unambiguously DOES say X was used to mean Y, I will print this article out and eat it. With mustard.)

Assertions that eye of newt meant mustard seed usually also assert that it was a popular component of witches’ spells. In fact, Macbeth is the one and only historical instance of ‘eye of newt’ appearing as a spell component. It is famous because the play is famous, not because it was in widespread use. The idea that it was a codename for some other ingredient thus appears even less credible.

Other attempts to interpret Shakespeare according to the Cunningham agenda include the rival claim, sometimes seen, that ‘eye of newt’ actually meant a type of daisy. Just as with mustard seed, there is no historical evidence at all to support this.

We should perhaps expect to encounter multiple claims as to the ‘real meaning’ of the potion ingredients, because the point of these claims is not to provide a definitive substitution code that was actually used by practitioners of the past, but simply to repeat the insistence that Shakespeare’s words do not mean what they say.

It is, of course, possible to assert that the enlightened ‘mustard seed’ interpretation has simply been handed down secretly through the years from witch to witch, never once appearing in print until the 1980s when such things could at last be shared openly within the hallowed pages of Llewellyn books. Claims of this sort are unanswerable.

Incidentally, the typical construction for plant names is not ‘B of A’, but ‘A’s B’ or simply ‘AB’, as we find with names like day’s eye (daisy), baby’s breath, coltsfoot and foxglove. If Shakespeare’s spell had run ‘breath of babe and eye of ox / foot of colt and glove of fox’ then we would be having a very different conversation.

Tongue of dog

This ingredient is the first one where the Cunningham agenda might seem credible, if it had not already been disproven by the very first of the ingredients. There is a herb called ‘houndstongue’, Cynoglossum officinale, which is also known as houndstooth and dog’s tongue.

Was Shakespeare referring to a herb here, then, rather than the tongue of a literal dog? Given the anatomical specificity of some of the later ingredients, there is no reason to think so. Animal tongues have played a part in magic for centuries. The Epistula Vulteris (800 CE), for example, proposes putting a vulture’s tongue in your shoe to make enemies adore you. The 16th century Tree of Knowledge instructs the reader to take the tongue of a hoopoe and hang it on the right side of the body, close to the heart, in order to defeat anyone in court.

Wool of bat

Despite this ingredient being relatively innocuous – ‘wool’ could theoretically be harvested from a bat without harming it – attempts have been made to identify this as moss, or even as holly leaves, via a convoluted train of association that links the shape of bat’s wings with the shape of holly. No historical sources give ‘wool of bat’ or ‘bat’s wool’ as a term for a plant.

Toe of frog

Some modern sources assert that ‘toe of frog’ refers to the buttercup, possibly because the Latin name Ranunculus means ‘little frog’. One is left to wonder what part of a buttercup the ‘toe’ might refer to.

Unfortunately, no historical sources give ‘toe of frog’ or ‘frog’s toe’ as a term for a plant.

Adder’s fork

At first sight this looks like another possible point for Cunningham. Adders have forked tongues, and there are several plants that bear the name ‘adder’s tongue’. However, there is no evidence of the use of the specific term ‘adder’s fork’ to refer to a plant.

We would also have to explain why, given that these ingredients are demonstrably not being presented in an overall context of plant symbolism, any of the plants known as adder’s tongue would be intended here over the surface meaning.

Blindworm’s sting

The ‘sting’ (fang) of a venomous snake, or possibly a slow-worm, which are ironically not venomous. This ingredient is probably intended to pair with the last one: they are both from the mouths of reptiles.

No historical sources give ‘blindworm’s sting’ as a term for a plant.

Lizard’s leg

The leg of a lizard.

No historical sources give ‘lizard’s leg’ as a term for a plant.

Owlet’s wing

The wing of an owlet, or baby owl.

No historical sources give ‘owlet’s wing’ as a term for a plant. (I am getting as tired of typing this as you probably are of reading it.)

Scale of dragon

An ingredient that at first glance appears to buttress Cunningham’s claim, because unlike the others it cannot possibly mean what it says. Dragons don’t exist. However, ingredients that use the term ‘dragon’ in their naming do exist, such as ‘dragon’s blood’.

Excitingly, there is a plant known as the dragon’s scale fern, Pyrrosia piloselloides. Should we concede a point to Cunningham here?

Unfortunately, I do not think we can. The dragon’s scale fern is native to Singapore and was first catalogued by Carl Linnaeus in 1763. There seems no way that Shakespeare could possibly have heard of it. Moreover, ‘dragon’s scale’ is merely an English translation of the term ‘sisek naga’. I’ve been unable to find any use of the name ‘dragon’s scale fern’ in English prior to the 20th century.

Did Shakespeare mean a literal dragon, then? Considering his plays involve literal ghosts (e.g. Caesar, Banquo, Hamlet’s father), literal monsters (Caliban) and literal witches with the power to ‘hover through the fog’ and summon storms at sea, we needn’t worry about Shakespeare depicting things which we now know to be impossible. So yes, literal dragon’s scale. Tooth of wolf

It is tempting to identify this ingredient as the herb houndstooth, but the problem there is that houndstooth is the same as houndstongue, for which see ‘tongue of dog’ above.

No historical sources give ‘wolf’s tooth’ as a term for a plant. Witches’ mummy

Either ‘the mummified flesh of dead witches’ or ‘mummified human flesh, as used by witches’. Bizarre though it may sound, mummified human flesh was used for medical purposes before and after Shakespeare’s time. See Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, 1658: ‘The Egyptian mummies which Cambyses spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandize, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.’

No historical sources give ‘witches’ mummy’ as a term for a plant.

Maw and gulf

Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark

The mouth and stomach of a shark.

No historical sources give ‘shark’s maw’, ‘shark’s gulf’ or ‘shark’s stomach’ as a term for a plant. There is a succulent called Shark's Mouth Mesemb that is native to South Africa, but given the additional description lavished on the shark – ‘ravin’d, salt-sea’ – it seems pretty obviously a literal shark.

Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark

Here we come to our first actual plant ingredient, which is named as such. Do please note the significance of ‘digg’d i’ the dark’. It’s not just hemlock, it’s hemlock that has been gathered in the ‘proper’ way. Where literal plants are concerned, the time and method of harvesting is magically significant. This suggests that far from everything in the spell being a plant as Cunningham proposed, the actual plants involved are special and treated with particular care.

Liver of blaspheming Jew

Exactly what it appears to be, disgusting historical antisemitism and all.

Gall of goat

The gall (bile) of a goat. (Goat’s gall and honey were used as a treatment for cancer in Saxon times. Who knew?)

No historical sources give ‘goat’s gall’ or ‘goat’s bile’ as a term for a plant.

Slips of yew

Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse

Another actual plant ingredient, named as such. Just as we saw with the hemlock root, when the spell calls for actual plants, the witch is careful to specify the method of gathering. ‘Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse’ means that the yew was peeled off in slivers during an eclipse of the moon.

Nose of Turk

The literal nose of a literal Turkish person. My suspicion is that this mocking of foreign people and their religions was deliberate pandering to the King, almost to the point of pantomime.

Tartar’s lips

See above.

Finger of birth-strangled babe

Ditch-deliver’d by a drab

The severed finger of a baby strangled at birth, having been born in a ditch to a sex worker.

There is a Korean succulent called ‘baby’s finger’ but there is no hope whatsoever that Shakespeare could have meant something so innocent.

Tiger’s chaudron

A tiger’s entrails. Derives from the exact same source as ‘cauldron’, so Shakespeare was frankly cheating a bit to use it as a rhyme here.

No historical sources give ‘tiger’s chaudron’ or ‘tiger’s entrails’ as a term for a plant.

A baboon’s blood

Curiously, ‘the blood of a Hamadryas baboon’ is one of the ingredients in the Greek Magical Papyri which is deemed to be a code name. Unfortunately for Cunningham, the ingredient it is a code name for is the blood of a spotted gecko, bringing us all the way back to lizard’s legs and newts’ eyes.

It’s worth noting in passing that Shakespeare wouldn’t have been familiar with the Papyri Graecae Magicae, given that they weren’t rediscovered and republished until the 19th century.

In any case, no historical sources give ‘baboon’s blood’ as a term for a plant.

In summary, of the twenty-three ingredients that go into the witches’ cauldron:

two – yew and hemlock - are unambiguously plants and named as such, with the method of gathering described

two – tongue of dog and adder’s fork – resemble extant folk names for plants, i.e. houndstongue and adder’s tongue

the remaining nineteen are all animal or human body parts, or in the case of the toad, the entire animal

Cunningham does not seem to have considered that disguising innocent herbs with grisly sounding names would have invited trouble rather than deflecting it. For example, even if ‘wool of bat’ had been a codename for moss, no practitioner with an ounce of sense would have referred to it as such when they could just call it moss. Gathering moss might be eccentric; gathering wool of bat could be seen as diabolic.

Some commentators have taken the view that Shakespeare might have been using ironic humour, by listing ingredients that were grisly sounding but also folk names for ordinary plants, intending the audience to pick up on his clever references. The audience would, so the theory claims, have recognised the wordplay because the folk names would have been in common use at the time. This theory falls apart, however, simply because the vast majority of the ingredients were not folk names for plants, and only two can possibly be considered such. Even in their case it is necessary to use some creative interpretation.

There is an additional problem with the ‘secret herbal code’ hypothesis. Cunningham’s core argument is that ‘witches, magicians and occultists wished to keep secret the most powerful of the old magics’, hence the use of codes. And yet, the arguments advanced for which ingredient represents which plant are based on common folk names, not secret lore unavailable to the masses. One cannot draw a link between ‘tongue of dog’ and the herb houndstongue, insist that the parallel is obvious, and then claim that this was a secret code.

To use the Papyri Graecae Magicae as an example of a genuine secret substitution system, ‘a physician’s bone’ is code for ‘sandstone’. There is no conceivable way a person could have inferred the real ingredient from its code name. And yet, the supposed herbal codenames in Macbeth are all based on inference, such as ‘finger of birth-strangled babe’ being taken to mean ‘bloody finger’ and thus ‘foxglove’.

Media magica in other Jacobean dramas

As mentioned above, it was not only Shakespeare who wrote plays in which witches prepared concoctions that contained human or animal body parts. However, only Shakespeare seems to have been singled out for his alleged use of secret herbal code names (which, as we have seen, does not bear scrutiny).

Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens was written for King James VI/I and was first performed in February 1609 (three years after Macbeth) in honour of the King’s eldest son, Prince Henry. Like Macbeth, it flatters the King’s obsession with witches by featuring a gathering of them. They discuss the ingredients they have gathered, such as:

I have been all day, looking after

A raven, feeding upon a quarter;

And, soon, as she turn'd her beak to the south,

I snatch'd this morsel out of her mouth.

This hag has snatched a morsel of human corpse that had been cut into four pieces (as in ‘hung, drawn and quartered’) out of the beak of a raven.

Just as in ‘Macbeth’, we then hear of a miscellany of gruesome ingredients, such as the bitten-off sinews of a hanged murderer, the fat of an infant, the brains of a cat, frog’s blood and backbone, owl’s eyes, viper’s skin and basilisk’s blood, none of which can possibly be taken to be codenames for plants. Moreover, we are fortunate to have Jonson’s own notes on his work, in which he laboriously details the sources he used and the practices he intends to depict:

But we apply this examination of ours to the particular use; whereby, also, we take occasion, not only to express the things (as vapours, liquors, herbs, bones, flesh, blood, fat, and such like,

which are called Media magica) but the rites of gathering them, and from what places, reconciling as near as we can, the practice of antiquity to the Neoterick and making it familiar with our popular witchcraft.

Jonson’s representation of plants is of particular interest here. He has one hag declare: And I have been plucking, plants among,

Hemlock, henbane, adder's-tongue,

Night-shade, moon-wort, libbard's-bane;

And twice, by the dogs, was like to be ta'en.

And offers the following explanatory text: Cicuta, hyoscyarnus, ophioglosson, solanum, martagon, doronicum, aconitum are the common venefical ingredients remembered by Paracelsus, Porta, Agrippa, and others; which I make her

to have gathered, as about a castle, church, or some vast building (kept by dogs) among ruins and wild heaps.

Just as with Shakespeare’s mention of hemlock and yew, there is no suggestion of code names.

‘The Witch’ by Thomas Middleton was also performed by the King’s Men. It, too, depicts witches in exactly the way the King expected to see them depicted. For example, Hecate says to Stadlin: [Giving her a dead child's body] Here, take this unbaptised brat.

Boil it well, preserve the fat

The subject of herbs comes up in this graphic exchange: STADLIN

Where be the magic herbs?

HECATE

They're down his throat:

His mouth cramm'd full, his ears and nostrils stuff'd.

I thrust in eleoselinum lately

Aconitum, frondes populeas, and soot-

You may see that, he looks so b[l]ack i' th' mouth-

Then sium, acorum vulgare too,

[Pentaphyllon], the blood of a flitter-mouse,

Solanum somnificum et oleum.

Middleton even brings a comic touch to the loathsomeness of the witches’ concoctions. Almachildes (who has brought the witches toads in marzipan as a gift) is invited to dine with them, and responds

How? Sup with thee? Dost think I'll eat fried rats

And pickled spiders?

Conclusions

The witches depicted by Shakespeare, Jonson and Middleton for the entertainment of King James VI/I are shown employing animal and human body parts as well as plants in their spells, in accordance with the King’s personal beliefs and with the playwrights’ understanding of magic as depicted in such texts as Cornelius Agrippa’sDe Occulta Philosophia.

There is no evidence to support the suggestion that any of the ingredients named are meant to be taken other than literally. They are not codenames for plants. Eye of newt in particular is not a folk name for mustard seed and never has been.

Scott Cunningham’s assertion that “every ingredient (Shakespeare) lists as being in the witches' pot refers to a plant and not the gruesome substance popularly thought” is simply wrong.

Although Cunningham was wrong, and may well have known it, his motivation is understandable. Modern witches are revolted by the idea of body parts being used in spells and wish to distance themselves from it. The ‘herbal code’ interpretation provided a means to recast the horrific Jacobean witch (who did not exist outside of the popular and kingly imagination) as an enlightened and humane herbalist.

But if we allow ourselves to misrepresent Shakespeare in this way, we risk erasing the memory of the real victims: Agnis Thompson, the accused witch who was tortured into ‘confessing’ her use of a toad, and her fellows. Squeamishness must not be allowed to prevent us from confronting the uncomfortable facts of history.

[toreblogallthethings]

I know that many of us feel that voting is a wasted effort. But it is the act of engaging with others, that makes a difference at a community level. Connecting and creating intersectionality by talking about our human needs and beliefs of what is good in society. Those connections are real. Both virtual and in person

[toreblogallthethings]

i have an odd animal husbandry question you seem like you might know the answer to, your comment about stan reminded me - ive been thinking about getting into backyard chickens for a couple years and the thing that makes me hesitate most is hard culling. im confident in my ability to put down an animal thats sick, or infirm, or for food, but for like, temperament? or for poor egg layers? just sticks on me for some reason. i think it would feel like telling them theyre not a good enough chicken for me. how to you process this part of animal husbandry?

This will be a little long, so bear with me.

If you want to keep use animals (animals bred for a purpose, to be used for a purpose instead of kept as a companion), you gotta get good with the idea that they are here for you under the agreement that you will only keep them as long as you need to. When you take them on, you are agreeing that you will release them to whatever their next life holds for them as soon as you do not need (or they've completed) their service. Maybe for some people that's just release to the biological cycle of life, for others maybe there's an eternal rest, for others maybe it's reincarnation. For soft culling that's just moving to the next household. Whatever it is, you are allowing them to pass to it in as humane a way as you can, and ultimately it is the single greatest kindness and gratitude you can show to them, to give them proper care while they are here and allow them to end with little to no pain- something animals outside of our care rarely get. You are thanking them for their service, and letting them go. Worth does not even begin to factor into it.

It is not easy to take a life. It is NEVER easy, regardless of reason, regardless of excuse, regardless of anything. It is ALWAYS heavy, and it will always hurt you. And it should. I am grateful for the weight of taking a life, because it reminds me that it is serious, and reminds me to take the production of life seriously, because at some point any life I cause to come into existence via breeding animals will have to end.

On top of that, some things ARE heath related that do not seem health related. Aggression in domestic animals IS A HEALTH ISSUE. A cock is aggressive because he is stressed about intruders, containment, mating threats, resource guarding, etc. Even with the best of care this can be true, and unfortunately for you both, this means the animal is not suited for domestic keeping. The same goes for animals (in any stripe of use, but particularly private care) that display repetitive stress behaviors from normal, proper captive care (for example, mice that are food chewing are stressed and should be culled from lines where possible because they are not having a good time). You are doing them a disservice to keep them in a stressful situation you cannot change because of their biology. It has nothing to do with not being good enough for you, and everything to do with producing/keeping animals that do not experience that stress in captive care and releasing the rest from duty because they will not be okay in any captive care.

For some issues (poor egg laying, for example) you CAN pet-home culls instead of hard culling. It's harder to do, you will spend time finding people who just want pets that don't intend to breed or don't care, but it can be done. However!! Is the bird just slow at producing eggs because her genetics say that's how fast eggs get produced, or is she producing slowly because there's a health problem that isn't immediately evident? Is her ovary damaged, is her reproductive tract infected, does she have a disorder that prevents her from processing food correctly so she can't get what she needs to produce eggs as fast as normal? Are you setting the bird up for failure (and someone else for heartbreak/money troubles) sending them to a pet home? Is it something which could lead to pain/suffering down the road if she's allowed to continue? Hard to say without spending a lot of money. Are you willing to risk your reputation, if someone takes a surprise illness/genetic issue down the road badly ("Oh THAT breeder sold me a sick/unhealthy bird/bird with bad genetics"), and compromise your ability to find homes for healthy birds down the road?

You are okay with culling a bird for food- there's nothing that says you cannot eat the bad temperaments, the poor egg layers, the one with genetic issues, and so on. And if you can tell early enough that you, personally, can't make use of the meat, there are plenty of folks with other animals that would LOVE feed for those animals. Take yourself down to a local reptile expo, grab the business cards for a few people who have big snake babies (retics, burmese, anaconda, redtail boa, even BP) that say they'd be interested in taking culls, OR look up local bird of prey rescues in your area (or reptile rescues or big cat rescues if there are any) and ask if they'd be interested in culls. There is ALWAYS someone that can use what you can't/won't. You may have to jump through some hoops to donate to some kinds of rescues (health testing for example), but it's an option you can look into if you want to combat the feelings you're talking about.

As a last note- and I am saying this gently and holding your face in both hands: do not anthropomorphize animals in reality.

In YOUR eyes, you are culling them an illness or an injury or for food or for temperament or for poor quality or or or---- it does not matter to the animal why you are culling them. A death is a death, to them. They are here, and then a thing happens, and they are no longer. They do not understand life or death or afterlife or reincarnation or that they are here for a purpose or not a purpose or literally anything you as a human might impose upon them in your head. They live while they are alive, and then they are not. They do not "want to live" in the "avoid death" sense because they do not necessarily understand "death" as a future concept. Instincts that have worked well to preserve life have been encoded in their DNA to one degree or another, they can and do respond to avoid pain, but with little exception (like... maybe elephants and dolphins and a crows and a few others), it's unlikely that they understand the connection between doing those things and being alive/avoiding death.

So while TO YOU it may feel like telling the bird they are not good enough, and TO ME it feels like allowing the bird to move on in peace... the bird doesn't know either way, and honestly the reason hardly matters. It is alive in the present, and one way or another it will not be alive someday, and you are responsible for making sure that the one way under your control is so peaceful or quick that the bird hardly knows it is no longer alive. The bird doesn't care about (and cannot understand) the why of their death, any more than they understand their pain/stress and how it relates medical assistance; it's why animals often freak out, refuse meds, etc. They don't hate the vet or the car or the carrier or anything- they just simply don't understand human stuff and react according to instincts/what they do understand. If you treat an animal like the animal it IS rather than the person you imagine it to be, you will find yourself with a lot better relationship with them during life, and be able to frame their passing a bit better later on.

[toreblogallthethings]

*multiplies you by 1*

Ach im the exact same but a process has occurred

[toreblogallthethings]

So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that's what's on my passport. I'm pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.

I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office... and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn't be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?

They're my fucking hero.

[toreblogallthethings]

hmmm

[toreblogallthethings]

6yo ADHD child's father: did Mum give you a tablet [adhd medication] this morning?

Child: *sad head shaking*

Father: Do you want one today?

Child: *nodding so enthusiastically her whole body shakes*

[toreblogallthethings]

The sun is very unlike the other objects that I interact with in my daily life. Larger, for example

Are you ever taking a picture, and you’re like, let’s try a different angle, ‘cause that ancient nuclear explosion a million times the size of the earth is in the background. And it is, naturally, pretty bright

[toreblogallthethings]

you have no idea how much it pains me that I can't watch goncharov. I want to watch this movie so bad it makes me look stupid.

[toreblogallthethings]

I did find another sex shop story in my mind vault! Get ready for the most embarrassed I ever got at work.

When I first started my manager was this really cool guy and he set a matter-of-fact no nonsense tone to working there that I emulated. So as part of my training he brought me to a display case full of glass toys.

These are stunning solid glass pieces that just so happen to be shaped into gentle curves. Honestly several were abstract and beautiful enough to be displayed on a mantelpiece. They can be used with any kind of lube, they’re easy to sterilize and overall they’re excellent sex toys.

But I, like every other person, am the culmination of my lived experience. Glass breaks. I know this to be true, I’ve dropped glasses and plates and the fear of glass breaking was all I could see looking into that display.

My manager was well aware. He calmly informed me that I was looking at triple fired borosilicate and he pulled one out and banged it on the counter with all his might making me jump ten feet in the air. But there was the glass toy, triumphant and unscathed in his hand, after leaving a new dent on the counter. Forget sex, these things were viable murder weapons.

Over the years I worked there I did the exact same demo he did hundreds of times, smacking the solid glass onto the unyielding counter and showing off how sturdy the glass was. “Theres nothing your vagina can do to harm this,” I’d assure people.

So one day I had a group of three ladies looking at them, tittering nervously to each other. I assured them that these were extremely safe and they smiled skeptically.

“Really,” I said, pulling out an example, “our bodies are soft and wet, we have no way of damaging these.” I lifted it and brought it down onto the counter like I had a thousand times before. Like I’d seen countless times from my coworkers.

Except this time. The toy decided it must give up its grip on the mortal coil. It rebelled against its treatment of smacking the counter with a display of explosive protest. It shattered.

The women screamed and flinched back as I stood frozen in absolute perplexity as my mind tried to make sense of what had just happened. The toy had broken in huge safety glass sized chunks, leaving me a nub in my grip while it’s former glory lay in pieces all around me.

I looked back up at the ladies, speechless. They all broke into hysterical laughter. “Your face!” They gasped while clutching each other to stay on their feet.

“I- I’ve done this demo hundreds of times- it’s- it’s never broken!”

They crowed even harder as I sweeped up the mess, still in disbelief and horror at what I’d done. “Well. I at least know your bodies can’t provide that much force to a toy… I can’t believe this, it’s never broken before.” I babbled on in embarrassment to their obvious disbelief.

They looked back at me with the certainty of three women who will never in their life trust a glass toy not to shatter inside their bodies after watching the worlds most explosive demo.

[toreblogallthethings]

I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains

[toreblogallthethings]