All my random stuff

I can’t stop imagining Elias sitting in front of his computer, head in hand, SERIOUSLY considering “should I enlist Jon in the army…?” just super stressed out, trying to weigh the pros and cons of sending his pathetic little archivist straight out onto the front lines.

Coming into Jon’s office one day and just being like “Jonathan, hey, so like, I need you to go to war for me real quick, it’ll just be a sec” ???

hmm. @vampiricbisexuality @a-chance-of-raine @northwxrds @motherdoesntloveuanymore @neil-perrys-glasses

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

There is a direct correlation between feathering and CPL. As the name suggests, the disorder is a progressive swelling of the legs due to an accumulation of lymph, and you cannot keep track of its progression without shaving the legs.

The swelling also causes hyperkeratosis (a thickening of the skin) and deep skin folds where feather mites thrive. And when horses get feather mites, they scratch their legs until they bleed. And since legs that are swollen with lymph have a lowered immune response, those sores can get infected very easily, leaving the horse in constant pain and putting its immune system on overtime.

And if it's rainy, those feathers wick up water, causing mold and dermatitis, the latter of which can lead to extremely painful mallenders/sallenders. When owners finally give in an remove the feathering, they often find things like this:

I'm currently helping out with a Jutland horse who had no symptoms other than a bit of swelling and stomping (when they can't properly scratch their legs, they stomp them instead). When I removed her feathers, this is what I found:

The pic on the left is before I started treating her skin issues and mites. On the right is 2 weeks later. It's slow going. She's only 5 years old. Imagine if her owners, out of ignorance, had let this fester until she was 15. Imagine living your entire life with skin like that and no ability to take care of it yourself, and no one bothering to help you.

They're sold often by breeders but buyers are pretty much never warned of the complications. Not only are they more prone to tumors because of the extreme scale growth genes, but they are pretty much guaranteed to get what's called diamond eye.

The fish's eye is overtaken by the scales and they're unable to see.

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%