bleh.

If you are in the United States and not employed by a zoo or sanctuary or a veterinarian working with a facility, if anyone for any reason offers to allow you to touch a big cat, please do not do it.

No matter how much you want to, no matter how much it is a dream, understand that it is a violation of federal law that could get the facility the cat lives at in very serious trouble. It does not matter if it is through the fence, or in the context of a trained behavior, or if the cat is on a leash. Even if it feels “safe” or they swear the facility condones it.

It’s starting to appear that lots of zookeepers have not been informed appropriately about the scope of the law - or in cases where they do know it’s inappropriate, they are sometimes being overridden by their management and forced to allow encounters. (Even at accredited facilities!)

We do not know exactly what the penalties could be for that happening within an accredited zoo (yay badly implemented laws) but it typically comes down to being risk to a) the cat’s welfare b) the facility’s ability to have any big cats at all and c) someone, either the facility owner or the person offering, could go to jail or pay serious fines. There are two instances of this happening at AZA zoos that were leaked recently and we may now find out how bad it’s going to get for them.

Lots of facilities will have big cat pelts as educational biofacts that they will allow you to touch. You do not ever need to take the risk associated with touching a live big cat - generally anywhere, and especially in the US.

screenshot of a tweet by @pot8um: “Does anyone have that recent study that determined all 8 billion of us could be easily housed and fed with only 30% of the current global labor output and that our collective suffering is manufactured by capitalism...”

reply by @jasonhickel: “Yes: sciencedirect.com/... [a url that is cut off in the screenshot]” and an attached image of text:

“With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large creases in total global throughput and output. Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to” [text is cut off here].

Second image transcription:

Hey, if you’re disabled (of any kind), Mad/Insane, or “undiagnosed but there’s definitely something happening”, please come read this.

Especially if you’re a disabled transfemme. I know that as of writing, we’ve had a shitty couple days.

And if y’all can share it otherwise, whether that’s reblogging this or sending the link to the disabled/mad/whatever we are people in your life, I’d really appreciate it.

Link

He come to town

come to save

I lived in that for 2 years. It's bad. It's genuinely so fucking bad. I currently only live around 30 minutes away from there. I'm safe, for now. My neighbors are safe. For now. Especially since this is a small poor area that could easily be next.

So it just is a more close to home issue I'm having than what a random performative dork on Tumblr feels about this.