#human death

The H5N1 virus has affected mainly farmworkers in that came into close contact with poultry flocks and cattle herds. However, the WHO has stated that the risk to the general population remains low. The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday that the risk of avian flu to the general population remains “low”. Their assessment comes after the United States reported its first human death from the disease, caused by the H5N1 virus. WHO spokesperson Dr. Margaret Harris told reporters in Geneva that the H5N1 virus is “not circulating in humans, but jumping into humans who are exposed” to poultry or dairy cattle. “We’re not seeing sustained circulation,” she explained. The patient who died of the disease in Louisiana was over 65 and reportedly had underlying medical conditions, she added. According to the health authorities, he had been exposed to chickens and wild birds.

cw: real death; animal and human death mentions

Undertale's philosophy of pacifism is very hypocritical. It's always Frisk who has to put in the effort & is made the ass if they kill a monster in order to protect themself.

Yet, monsters kill them many, many times & they get to have a happy ending.

Not to mention the fact that monsters have canonically killed 6 other humans specifically to steal their souls, then Alphys experimented on them & stole their Determination in order to create horrible abominations of nature.

Not to mention how often fanfic writers just skip over the fact that 6 humans are dead & try to make it seem deserved. The thing is, even if they were horrible people, by Undertale's own logic, killing isn't right even if it's to defend yourself &, therefore, it's wrong that the monsters killed them regardless of their actions.

Unless the game is saying that this philosophy only applies to humans & that monsters can do whatever the fuck they want because they suffered Underground. Newsflash: life sucks & everyone suffers to some degree so why should some people get free passes & others don't?

The monsters really, honestly do not face any sort of consequences to their actions at all & it pisses me the eff off!!

By-the-way, we never learn why the humans attack, just that they did & I can't help but wonder why that is. We never get the human's side of the story & that leaves room for a lot of historical inaccuracies.

The closest thing we get to an unbiased opinion is the introduction where we’re told, specifically, that humans & monsters went to war. Not that the humans attacked the monsters; that the 2 sides went to war. This indicates that there was more going on than the monsters were telling.

Photo by Gail Hampshire, of Wikipedia. This one is inspecting a hole in Santa Clara, Cuba.

When it comes to human deaths caused by a single animal - not species, a single individual - then the record probably goes to the Champawat Tiger that killed some 436 people in Nepal and India before she was finally shot. But she had a career spanning at least a decade - whatever wasp caused the crash of Birgenair Flight 301 killed 186 people in one go. 

The 757-200 crashed shortly after take-off from Puerto Plata's Gregorio Luperón International Airport, and the crash investigation blamed pilot error after receiving incorrect airspeed information from one of the pitot tubes, which investigators believe was blocked by a wasp nest built inside it. The aircraft had been sitting unused for 20 days, and without pitot tube covers in place for the 2 days before the crash. It’s not known exactly which species of wasp was responsible, but there’s a number of possible Sphecid and Vespid wasps that would happily build a mud nest inside any suitable hole. 

So it’s rather distressing that the wasps have caused multiple aircraft emergencies at Brisbane airport, including one in 2018 where somebody forgot to take the anti-wasp covers off. Brisbane airport has a major ongoing problem with the Keyhole Wasp  Pachodynerus nasidens, which as the name suggests just LOOOOVES building her cells inside manmade cavities. 

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.

Black bears, it should be stressed, are generally a pretty chill bunch. The woods of North America are home to some three-quarters of a million of them; on average, there is at most one human fatality from a black bear attack per year, even as bears and humans increasingly come into contact in expanding suburbs and on hiking trails. But tracking headlines on human-bear encounters in New England in his capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed something distressing: The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears. Singularly “bold,” they started hanging out in yards and on patios in broad daylight. Most bears avoid loud noises; these casually ignored the efforts of Graftonites to run them off. Chickens and sheep began to disappear at alarming rates. Household pets went missing, too. One Graftonite was playing with her kittens on her lawn when a bear bounded out of the woods, grabbed two of them, and scarfed them down. Soon enough, the bears were hanging out on porches and trying to enter homes.

Combining wry description with evocative bits of scientific fact, Hongoltz-Hetling’s portrayal of the bears moves from comical if foreboding to downright terrifying. These are animals that can scent food seven times farther than a trained bloodhound, that can flip 300-pound stones with ease, and that can, when necessary, run in bursts of speed rivaling a deer’s. When the bears finally start mauling humans—attacking two women in their homes—Hongoltz-Hetling’s relation of the scenes is nightmarish. “If you look at their eyes, you understand,” one survivor tells him, “that they are completely alien to us.”

What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

And my brain is autistic, so whenever people make noise in the room or make loud exclamations like "oh, shit!" I, obviously, turn my head to look. and it's always in those bad moments in the videos.