Things And Stuff

ITS TIME

GIVE IT UP FOR DAY 15

According to researchers, coordinated critics have mounted a “misinformation campaign designed to purposefully fabricate doubt regarding the harmful impacts of outdoor cats and stymie policies that would remove outdoor cats from the landscape.”

The conflict stems from a groundbreaking study published in 2013 by scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That study evaluated the combined impact of the tens of millions of outdoor cats in the United States. The authors found that roaming outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year and are the leading source of direct, human-caused mortality to birds in the country. Similar results have since been confirmed in Canada and Australia.

READ MORE

To those of you still in denial about how bad outdoor cats are to wildlife not just in your own countries but globally here’s the cold hard scientific facts stating that you are apart of a movement of uneducated critics spreading misinformation. 

Here’s the link to the open-source scientific artificial as well:

Nobody does a ruction like a six foot plus dude who is secretly afraid a five foot snake will casually slither by and be all “sup”

You: You know those cats running around your property that won’t let a human touch them if their lives depended on it?  You need to bring them all in the house.

Farmer: haha good one.  You know they’d freak the hell out, right?  Assuming that I could catch them and drag them in in the first place.  And how am I supposed to control the rats if all my cats are inside?

You: Bring in a bunch of snakes and…

Toxoplasmosis causes abortion in sheep and goats. Every ewe or doe who fails to lamb or kid is lost milk, lost meat, a lost replacement animal in the flock, lost cash from the sale of a new herd sire to someone else. When you have rare breed primitive sheep like I do, each lost pregnancy is also the entire breed slipping closer to the brink of disappearing.

You also appear to be unaware that there are live traps for catching the very feral barn cats - I’m SO glad someone who knows my profession, life, and attendant tools so well chimed in - we also use them to eg trap raccoons, foxes, and possums who are predating small livestock like chickens and rabbits. Incidentally, did you know cats can shed salmonella which can go on to infect your chickens? Why are you raising your own chickens for eggs and meat if you’re just going to get the same salmonella roulette you could get at the grocery store without all the goddamned work?

Chickens will also eat mice and young rats, incidentally. If you’ve got an honest to God adult rat infestation in your barn your husbandry practices are fucked up six ways from Sunday and you need to build better feed containers before you do anything else. The country isn’t the city. We do a lot more mice here.

You could of course also get yourself a nice working terrier and while you’re doing chores let the dog go to town on the rodent population.

Because if you actually have barn cats you can’t get near, they’re serving as a potential reservoir for rabies (which will pass to any mammal including you, including cattle), feline distemper, toxo, salmonella, and a host of parasites starting with coccidia and running out to various worms that don’t much care if they infect a barn cat or, yknow, a pregnant cow worth $2000.

the look he gave me was like he’d been slapped in the face, and i realized all at once what a total bitch i was.  turned out my friend did care a lot about [x], actually! and just because he wasn’t terminally online and ruthlessly adept at knock-down ideological spats didn’t make him any less moral than myself.  basically the reverse, in this case.  he’d expressed some curiosity and uncertainty, and instead of meeting his openness with some of my own, i used it as an excuse for some self-righteous dig.  ugh!

Like the other day single use plastics came up at work and it was actually super super fruitful! When I pointed out the huge problem with plastic bans from a disability pov, I got a whole collection of startled wide eyes and “I never thought of that!” and willing listening!

And YES it was super frustrating and tiring to explain the same thing AGAIN, and yes it is an issue of privilege that they could get this far without knowing, but also: where would they learn? How would they know there was something TO learn? These are people who DO make effort and they DO care and yet the state of GENERAL knowledge is such that you can do all that and yet not know you even need to learn more.

So I apologize, but I must take on this task. A new hand must touch the beacon. The knowledge must be passed on. The chain can not be broken.

So.

The Game.

The following are the rules of The Game:

there is no winning The Game

once you know of The Game, you are always playing the game

the point of The Game is to not think about The Game

if you think about The Game, you have lost The Game, and must announce this to those around you - causing them to also lose The Game

A "reset period" of roughly an hour or two before loss announcements is common in colloquial rules to allow yourself and those around you to properly temporarily "forget" about The Game, however that is not an official rule.