live laugh love

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Closest match: Hottonia palustris genome assembly, chromosome: 9 Common name: Water Violet

Best Outfit - Round 2 Match 10

Best Outfit - Round 2 Match 8

Sometimes behavioral euthanasia is your only option.

Maybe someone else could help your dog. Maybe the right trainer could turn everything around. Maybe you haven't found the med that works for your dog yet. Maybe a different or more experienced owner wouldn't have made the same choices. Maybe if there weren't kids involved. Maybe if you weren't married. Maybe if you were married. Maybe if you live out in the country. Maybe if you were more diligent. Maybe if you didn't hover so much. Maybe. Maybe. Maybemaybemaybemaybe.

Maybe.

But none of that happened. And you're here now. And it was the right choice.

It was you. In the home you have. With whoever you had to help you. Or without any support. Handling your dog to the best of your ability at that moment in time.

That includes having limited mental and emotional bandwidth. There may have been more things you were physically capable of doing, but that doesn't mean you had the emotional and mental resources to do them. You would've done them if you could have. If you knew that you should.

But i know for sure that you didn't pay a few hundred dollars so that someone would kill your friend for no reason.

You did it because you were unsafe. Or because someone else was. Or because your dog was so overwhelmed by the world that they couldn't cope.

You certainly didn't walk into a vet appointment where every choice you'd ever made regarding the dog was questioned and you were told about all the local and breed specific rescues because you didn't try.

You made that appointment and walked in and suffered through the interrogation because you loved your dog enough to know that putting them through being rehomed or institutionalized in a shelter would lower their quality of life so significantly that it wouldn't be worth living for them. Or because you knew that no one would ever be safe living with them.

You did it because you cared. Because you loved them. Because you trusted that it was the best option. Because you tried.

And it still hurt. Even if you were angry and relieved. It still hurt.

So, let me encourage you to let go of "maybe". You loved them. You tried. You cared. It was and wasn't enough all at the same time. You made the right choice.