Glub Glub

“This aquarium setup with 24/7 live soccer”

“Tame,” however means an individual animal that has been accustomed to human presence and tolerates contact with people, generally by being in close proximity to humans from birth. Most domestic animals are also tame, because ‘can deal with being near humans’ is a pretty important feature to build in when you’re designing your livestock, but it’s not automatic- even many domestic animals need human interaction from an early age to be able to be calm around humans later. On the positive side of things, tame wild animals can be ambassador animals at zoos and wildlife centers that can interact with handlers and help educate visitors without getting stressed, because they don’t fear humans. On the negative side of things, wild animals can become accidentally tamed (“habituated”) by being rewarded with food for approaching humans and our dwellings, and unlike domestic animals, wild animals haven’t had thousands of years of being bred to be easy for us to get along with, so when this happens you get human-animal conflicts, and that’s always bad news for the animal.

If it’s not already obvious from the above, the reason getting these things confused is dangerous is that people see “tame” wild animals interacting with humans in viral internet videos and go “oh, so cute! I want one!” and then they either go purchase an exotic pet they are entirely unprepared to care for or go out and try to interact with (BAD) or kidnap (WORSE) animals they find in the wild. The animals are always the losers in this situation, and it starts with thinking a tame fox is basically the same as a domestic dog, and can be treated the same way. Tame wild animals might be okay with taking food from your hand on a good day, but that doesn’t mean they’re suitable pets- cuddly-looking animals will wreck your home, smell like musk, be difficult or impossible to housebreak, become aggressive when frightened, and, once tamed, be unable to survive in the wild. A lot of wildlife centers have permanent collections of surrendered pets living out their lives there, because some asshat who decided they were too cool for house cats and what they really wanted was a pet bobcat was met with reality. Even if the animal doesn’t end up in someone’s house, it’s still bad news. If you’ve ever been to a park that gets a lot of tourist traffic, you might find wildlife that has lost its fear of people thanks to all the free handouts, which leads to more people trying to feeding the “tame” “friendly” animals, which leads to pushier animals, and that leads to attacks and wildlife being put down for the sake of public safety.

And people just kidnapping their own local wildlife is the less globally harmful side of things- international wildlife trafficking for the pet trade is a huge problem; it’s is too big an issue to get into here (I’d recommend the book Poached by journalist Rachel Love Nuwer), but it all comes back to not knowing- or caring about- the difference between domestic and tame.

sounds like someone needs to go in the water

If you live in North America, and you see this plant?

KILL IT. Rip it up. Dig up the roots and leave not one in the ground.

And then eat it.

This is garlic mustard, a delicious and tasty plant whose leaves smell like, well, garlic.

It’s also one of the WORST invasive species in North America. It provides virtually NO benefit and disrupts the habitats of all kinds of other plant and animal species. It has spread widely across North America and is a SERIOUS problem.

That’s where YOU come in! You can learn to recognize this yummy fucker and rip it up whenever you see it. In addition to helping out your ecosystem, you also get FOOD! You can use it in salads, stir fries, soups, or even make a dang good pesto with it!

This is snakeroot.

The leaves look strikingly similar to garlic mustard, no?

Snakeroot is toxic.

Enough so that milk from cows that have eaten it can cause neurological damage in humans who drink it.

If you see something with the rounder, more heart-shaped leaves that are just above the ground (not raised up on stems like a nettle or like snakeroot) then that’s probably safe! That’s the first-year growth of garlic mustard, which is biennial (it grows for a year, dies back over winter, comes up in the spring, blooms, then dies for good.) It looks distinct enough from snakeroot that you’re not likely to poison yourself accidentally.

Also, the flowers on garlic mustard are less like true umbels (the flower form you see above.)

Here’s an image (thanks Wikipedia and Gardening Know-How!) of flowering garlic mustard. Notice how the flowers are less frilly-looking and more like tiny little normal flowers.

Be careful. Be safe.

If you’re going to forage, make sure you have correctly identified the plant you’re foraging!

I highly recommend the iNaturalist app, which is a wildlife identification app that uses an AI to figure out what it’s looking at. It’s simple–you snap a picture, you submit it in the app, or you can even use older images from your camera roll. It’s accurate enough to offer you a measure of safety, but again, when you’re foraging, if you don’t know what you are looking at, DO NOT EAT IT OR I WILL COME INTO YOUR HOUSE AND TAKE BITES OUT OF ALL OF YOUR UMBRELLAS.

This is also true about foraging mushrooms.

Anyway, download the iNaturalist app and give it more fodder for its AI to chew on, it is probably the least malicious use of machine learning ever. You can identify plants. We identified a moth in the larval stage which none of us knew what it was. I’m sure it has options for animals and birds (though getting good photos of them is harder.)

More about garlic mustard: it’s invasive, was brought to the Americas from Europe as a garden herb and then escaped into the wild, much like rabbits in Australia. (Yes, Rabbits are in fact a garden herb /joke)

Also, another fun fact about garlic mustard: DO NOT TRY TO COMPOST IT. As it breaks down, it releases a chemical that’s toxic to just about every other plant that isn’t more garlic mustard, which is why it is such a noxious weed–it’s out here violating the Geneva Conventions with biological warfare. Its entire life cycle, being a biennial instead of a perennial, is to seed like crazy and poison its competition. Garlic mustard is a war criminal.

Yes, absolutely rip it out of the ground, but think twice before eating it please and thank you.

One of the main problems with the Dodo is something that is sometimes hard for people without a background in zoology to pick up on, and that is the extreme anthropomorphism of wild animals in their content. Anthropomorphism happens when we erroneously apply human behavior and morals to animal interactions, which might not sound like a big deal at first but is actually incredibly dangerous for both humans and animals. I have seen an article from the dodo claiming that a pet alligator “loves hugs” from his owner. Reptiles do not experience or exhibit emotions the way humans do, and to posit that any alligator loves hugging humans is an absolute recipe for disaster. This is far from an isolated incident in their content. They infamously posted a “heartwarming” video of a polar bear “petting” a sled dog with its paw and suggested that even polar bears can’t resist patting an adorable dog. They later had to pull the content because it turned out that the bear had killed and eaten the dog later that night. Polar bears do not see dogs as cute companions; this was an example of a predator/ prey interaction. If a viewer doesn’t have much background in the behavior of alligators or polar bears, they might accept the Dodos captions as fact, and walk away with a dangerously false perception of how these animals behave.

Thousands of fish species are facing “catastrophic” decline — threatening the health, food security and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people around the world. New research shows that one-third of all freshwater fish now face extinction.

According to a report published Tuesday by 16 global conservation groups, 18,075 species of freshwater fish inhabit our oceans, accounting for over half of the world’s total fish species and a quarter of all vertebrates on Earth. This biodiversity is critical to maintaining not only the health of the planet, but the economic prosperity of communities worldwide.

When it’s applied to mill breeders and pet shops, I’m in complete agreement with it. If I remember right, that’s what it was originally MEANT to apply to. Then it became co-opted by Animal Rights Activists, who are generally against pet ownership completely. It became a blanket statement against breeders of any sort, vilifying responsible and ethical breeders and those who purchase from them.

So, four years ago, I started looking for a prospective service dog. It was natural for me to start my search within rescues, because most of them were known to me already. I look like a pretty good applicant: I work in rescues, I specialize in handling animals with difficult temperaments, I have vet records stretching back to when I came of age (basically, I’ve been fully responsible for my cats’ vet care since I was 18), and all of my animals have either died of old age or random chance (I’ve never rehomed any of my personal animals for any reason, including health issues).

But it turned out to be borderline impossible.

The fact that I was looking for a service dog prospect was an immediate disqualification for most of them. This is because a lot of dogs (especially rescue dogs) wash out of training and can’t go on to become fully trained service dogs. Since most disabled people can only afford one or two dogs, most of these dogs are returned to the shelter/rescue. That knocked out about 60% of the rescues I was looking at.

Another rescue asked for an ‘application fee’, which smacks of a scam to me. It was around 40 dollars, but still. That’s a shitty fucking thing to do. :/

Another priced their dogs around 800 dollars, which is on the low end range for popular purebred dogs from pet-quality breeders. There was no way I was going to pay 800 dollars for a dog with an unknown genetic background and no health testing if I could pay the same thing and get a dog WITH all that.

Another asked me to take pictures of my fenced in yard, including the gate and ALL the fencing. My land is 22 acres. While it IS fully fenced, many of the fences are inaccessible to me because they’re on cliffs. There was no way I could physically get all the pictures.

Most require that you own a house. I rent.

Another rescue had a sneaky little addendum in their policy, stating that they can visit my home at ANY TIME without permission or knowledge and take the dog back within two weeks of adopting it. This place also had a very high adoption fee (around 500 dollars). I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of, “You’re not ADOPTING this dog. This is a temporary foster for two weeks, and the adoption fee is non-refundable if we take the dog back within those two weeks, which we may do so at any time for any reason without your knowledge or permission.”

I was feeling pretty good about the next rescue, until it came out that my pet reptiles are all intact. Like… they’re non-breeding. But the fact that they weren’t spayed or neutered was enough, apparently, and I was denied. “Come back when they’ve been fixed,” I was told. The fact that they’re reptiles, housed separately, and literally have never made contact with each other was deemed irrelevant, as was the fact that attempting to alter a 50 gram gecko would likely kill her. It was the LOOK of things that was important, rather than the actual animal welfare.

The local poodle rescue had a waiting list of approximately 5 years.

There was no way I was going to wait that long. So I started looking at shelters. There are three in my travel radius (did I mention that, as a disabled person, my travel radius is quite small? Because it is). One was immediately knocked out because it has a long history of transphobia against me in particular. One was knocked out because it was going through a panleuk issue at the moment, so I wasn’t going to risk bringing it home or to work. The third was almost completely bully breed mixes, chihuahuas, or huskies (which are all fine breeds, but not compatible with my lifestyle).

Another issue with ‘adopt don’t shop’ is that it implies ALL rescues/shelters are equal. They aren’t. I’ve also encountered some extremely unethical rescues who outright lie to adopters about an animals’ temperament or health. I’ve seen rescues who actively purchase puppies from mill auctions, because demand for ‘rescue purebreeds’ is so high. This is especially common with cavalier spaniels and other in-demand small breeds.

I recently cut ties with a cat rescue who actively refused to report a bad breeder for animal abuse/neglect—-this breeder was mass-producing cats and not socializing them or treating them for heavy health issues. Every few months, they’d turn over whatever they couldn’t sell to the rescue and these cats were inevitably poorly socialized messes who couldn’t even be touched (and these were cats who required a high amount of grooming). The rescue didn’t want to turn the breeder in because these cats were in high demand; they were 100% sure guaranteed adoptions. People didn’t care that they weren’t healthy animals; they just wanted something pretty with a sob story.

Not every breeder is responsible. Not every rescue is responsible either. The saying SHOULD be ‘adopt responsibly, shop responsibly’. On a purely pedantic note, you SHOULD be shopping responsibly regardless, because adopting is also shopping. You shouldn’t adopt the first cute animal with a sad backstory. You need to look into everything and make sure they’re the right fit for you and your life.

I fully support rescues. But I also support breeding. My goal as a rescue worker is to create a world where every animal is born with a home already waiting for them and the shelters are empty. For that, we need breeders to keep producing healthy animals.

*camera switches to interview where dog barks and mounches on the reporter’s mic (who allows him do it)*

I managed to breed a color morph of the freshwater ramshorn snail!!

[bred between a pink ramshorn snail and a blue leopard ramshorn snail]

Say hi, to what I uncreatively call, the golden leopard ramshorn snail!

Him next to the blue leopard and pink ramshorn snails

He’s the only one I’ve managed to breed so he stays in a separate tank from the other snails until I make a decision on how I’ll bred more of him.

The world deserves more pretty snails.

What has quarantine done to me lol

Now, animals that thought the camera had food When there is clearly food already right next to them.