Asexual Dancer

i feel so seen!!

rhinoceros beetle

Working with Autism PDA (pathologic demand avoidance) by "strewing" (setting up an activity that u want to do for your later self even thought PDA wont do it right now)

On grief and loss

One big reason people give is that animals cannot consent to be overfed by their owners because they don’t realize eating all those extra treats is what’s making them gain weight. They probably just think that’s normal. A person can decide they’re ok with being fat or eating in excess or just in general not living the healthiest lifestyle because they’ve decided that’s what they want. Our pets can’t reason like that so we have to make decisions for them that will give them the best quality of life.

The thing i want to explain though is the anatomical differences between humans and dogs and cats. Humans naturally carry a lot of subcutaneous fat and we stand plantigrade (using the bottoms of our feet rather than on our toes). Dogs and cats however are lean predators that walk digitigrade (on their toes). This is less surface area to walk on and puts a lot more stress on their joints. Carrying extra weight puts more stress on the joints, which often leads to early and more severe arthritis. Additionally, their cranial cruciate ligament, or CCL, which is a ligament in the knee that joins the femur and tibia (this is the same as the ACL in people), is more prone to injury. The knee in dogs and cats is bent when standing, whereas in people it’s mostly straight, so the CCL is enduring more stress than the ACL in people. This means it ruptures more easily. Even just walking can lead to a rupture if the ligament has been degrading over time through rigorous exercise. Usually an ACL tear happens as the result of a significant injury. If you see where I’m going with this, extra weight means a higher likelihood of a CCL injury. Being overweight also inhibits the natural behaviors of dogs and cats. They often can’t groom themselves so they get matted and caked in their own feces or get urine scalding burns. They have difficulty going up and down stairs, on and off furniture or car seats, and sometimes even just getting themselves up and walking. They can’t run and play like they want to because it hurts and they can’t breathe. And they don’t know why that is.

I’ll clarify here that having a bit of extra chub on their bellies usually isn’t harmful (depends also on age, breed, etc). If they aren’t athletes or working they don’t need to be in peak body condition, as long as the animal isn’t experiencing pain or a hindrance of natural behaviors because of it. Dogs and cats have body condition scores on a scale of 1-9 (or sometimes 1-5 but I always use a 1-9 scale). 5 is ideal but 6 usually isn’t too heavy

If we did the same to animals, our pets? We’d recognise that as animal abuse.

screenshots of the tweet below 'read more'; twitter is going down at some point

anyway like 2 years later evolution comes up in class and one of my classmates goes "is this the we evolved from monkeys thing?"

and I'm on Red Alert. this is what my mom told me about!

the teacher replies, "well, we share a common ancestor, but we didn't evolve directly from apes. if you go back way before apes or people existed, you'll find a different third thing we both came from. we know this because of things like fossils"

and I was like whoo! dodged a bullet there, good thing my 4th grade science class isn't trying to teach us we came from monkeys and instead figured stuff out using fossils and taught us that instead :)

Vultures are holy creatures.

Tending the dead.

Bowing low.

Bared head.

Whispers to cold flesh,

“Your old name is not your king.

Vultures are also responsible for keeping diseases at bay.

Vulture stomach acid is so powerful that it can kill anthrax and many other deadly diseases.

So when they consume the carcass of a creature that has died of disease, they actually destroy the disease within it too!

Apparently if you put a red band on a male red wing blackbird his harem size can double

Previously when the researchers had run these tests, they found a certain amount of infidelity was common for these birds. Somewhere around 10% of eggs were fathered by males who were not the primary mates of females.

After the advent of the Super Sexy Male, however, stuff got crazy in bird world. Infidelity skyrocketed, with upwards of 25% of ALL EGGS in the area being fathered by this specific male. Furthermore, his mate’s eggs were 100% his.