QPU Misalignment Support Group

dearly departed fung wah bus may she rest in POWER 🫡 obsessed with ayo's go-to bit in her last press cycle being the great molasses flood and this time around it's the fung wah bus. real bostonian representation 🙂‍↕️

"Re"-domestication of cheetahs?

With reference to This Post In ancient Egypt, Cheetahs were sometimes used as hunting animals like greyhounds, and kept as housepets by the royal family and later, many wealthy households.

Now, there's an argument about how "domesticated" these cheetahs were- the majority of them were captured from the wild as adults and tamed/trained to tolerate humans and obey hunting commands, mostly because back then and still today, cheetahs are extremely hard to breed in captivity. Some were bred and raised from cubs, and there was not a shortage of cheetahs living in and around human habitation for them to replace stock with.

Even today, cheetahs are... weirdly comfortable around humans, if those humans know how to mind their manners. Game wardens in Kruger National Park sometimes sleep next to young cheetahs they are re-introducing into the wild, or have had female cheetahs who are familiar with them drop their cubs off on their feet to 'babysit' while she goes hunting.

Here's a pair of San hunters from the Naankuse Wildlife Reserve in Namibia bow-hunting while a wild local male cheetah hangs out with them (the angle makes him look much bigger and closer to the men than he is, but he's still VERY close). The male's name is Aiko, and is well-known to these men- they're not worried about his presence because they know how to respect his space and he knows not to go after game they've downed. Game they miss is free for him to run down, and game he flushes from the bushes are much easier to shoot- a mutually beneficial partnership. It's extremely similar to how the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea hunt with their dogs, some of the most recently domesticated and most similar to ancient 'proto-dogs' alive today.

So, cheetahs aren't domesticated the way dogs and housecats are- they haven't been selectively bred for generations, they're not dependent on humans, and they can and will attack people that bother them.

But like Coyotes, the remaining cheetahs we have are VERY habituated to humans, arguably even moreso than coyotes are, and we've made a lot of progress in getting them to breed in captivity- Ironically by pairing them up with highly domesticated dogs, who teach them domesticated animal behaviors like "not worrying about everything".

With Coyotes, the obstacle to domestication are mostly practical matters like "getting a coyote farm funded, zoned, built and insured.", whereas with cheetahs the problem is "there are almost no cheetahs left to practice domestication on and the ones we do have are already inbred". There IS a lot of commercial interest in domesticated cheetahs, so I think a good way to get the funding for species conservation and genetic re-diversification of cheetahs would be to frame it as a prerequisite to "Re-Domestication" and pet cheetahs.

And they are buying as much as they can right now. Genderweird people, gay men, bi folks in same gender marriages, lesbians, anyone who looks around and realizes that the noose is tightening? They’re buying what they can afford. Sometimes a little more than they can afford.

People are asking about metal purity in our jewelry. This has never happened before, not even during the first trump debacle. People are worried, wondering how they can get out if things go real bad. And I tell them how to sell their stuff for cash if they need to. How to find places that won’t cheat them.

How to get the most out of the jewelry they already have.

They play it off as a joke, most of the time, and I’ll play along to make sure they’re comfortable, but we all know the joke is only funny because it’s true.

I have warned people that they won’t get what they paid back. People who buy jewelry are trying to make money, and they don’t care about the hours put into hand crafting a piece. They care about the metal, the stones, and not much else. Folks I tell this to understand, and sometimes ask if we sell bullion. Or coins. Something that they can use in the emergency they expect is coming.

I wish I didn’t have to do this. I wish more people worried about what it says when people are planning on fleeing their homes with only what they have on their back. I wish I didn’t have a plan for what happens when my genderqueer ass is declared illegal.

Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.