CrazyBeautifulLife @puravidadarling - Tumblr Blog

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Just found the best ice cream in the world #inlove #yum #thebest #anditsrightdowntheroad #imintroublenow (at Hazens Blueberry Farm)

#thebest #anditsrightdowntheroad #yum #imintroublenow #inlove

thedeepsigh

bubonickitten

do you ever look at Successful™ people your age and feel like you’re just floating your way thru life like a very bewildered and directionless bumblebee

petwrestling101

Things I really wish I could tell clients

1. Please do not lie when giving the history on your pet. I’m trying to help. But I can’t do that without all the facts. 2. Your hell spawn cat should not be called Precious, or Angel, or Sweetie. 3. There is a combined 90+ years of veterinary knowledge and experience between our four doctors. Your ten years as a breeder doesn’t impress me. 4. I’m trying really hard to not roll my eyes right now. 5. I’m muzzling your dog for safety reasons. My safety, the doctor’s safety, your safety. I’m not doing it just to be mean. 6. Stop adopting/rescuing pets if you have no money. 7. Your cat cannot survive on a vegan diet. 8. Stop googling your pet’s symptoms. It just scares and confuses you and makes our job harder. 9. Be nice to our receptionists. They have a job to do and you yelling at them doesn’t make them want to help you. 10. How much money do you think I make? 11. Stop interrupting me while I’m discharging your pet. Information might not get passed along. Information you probably need. Wait until I’m done to ask questions. 12. Yes they are real doctors. They went to school and everything. 13. I’m doing this because I like animals. Not because I couldn’t get into a “real” nursing school. 14. Your screaming toddler makes it really difficult to have a meaningful exam. I’m also fighting the urge to give them a shot of ketamine. 15. It’s Bordetella. Not bordello. 16. I’m trying very hard to hide my excitement over your cat’s huge abscess. 17. No, you can’t “help” hold. 18. Sorry I smell weird. 19. We all have clients we don’t like. 20. I believe in the benefits of holistic medicine. I do not however think that sprinkling ground tumeric on your pet will cure their cancer. 21. We don’t recommend heartworm prevention just to make money. If we wanted to make money we would tell you that you didn’t need it. 22. An emergency takes priority over your routine exam and vaccines. Sorry for the inconvenience. 23. Saying thank you goes a long way. 24. Yes, I really do need to know the name of the medication. 25. Your pug is sweet. Until we try to trim his nails. Then he turns into a demon possessed monster that we desperately hope doesn’t die from breathing issues while four of us attempt to restrain him. 26. We hate when you come in ten minutes before closing on Friday for an emergency that has been going on for several days. 27. Puppies and kittens make our day. 28. We really do love our clients. 29. But, we love their pets more.

6 & 26

How does it feel to be an adult?

exhausting and everything is expensive

uptional

kieljamespatrick

dendroica

Wildlife biologists are stuck between a rock and a hard place on this, and many other human-wildlife interaction issues. This situation demonstrates why we should always leave wildlife alone. I spend a lot of time as a biologist talking about how wildlife don’t actually need our help. They don’t need to be saved from nature, and even when they do, it’s not our job to save them. That may seem counterintuitive, harsh even, but wildlife conservation is about populations, not individuals. Yellowstone National Park is not a zoo, or a sanctuary, or a wildlife rehabilitation center. The goal of wildlife managers is to maintain ecological processes, and this does not include pulling wildlife out of populations and throwing them into captivity for the sake of keeping them alive. However, this doesn’t mean that wildlife managers are callous about wildlife - just the opposite. I am a wildlife biologist because I am in awe of, in love with, and constantly seek to conserve wildlife and wild places. Natural ecosystems are complex machines where birth and death play key roles in the perseverance of that community, and no amount of emotion or opinion can override these facts. When we assume that experts are wrong simply because we disagree with their actions or their advice, we make it more difficult to accomplish common goals. Our current social environment dictates that experts are not allowed to disagree with emotions. In the case of the bison calf, and many human-wildlife issues, do-gooders are at odds with wildlife experts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if the tourist had good intentions, as it was misguided, against park rules, and resulted in the death of the animal.

A Response To The Yellowstone Bison Incident From An Actual Wildlife Biologist (via dendroica)

why-animals-do-the-thing

21st Century Fox.

Oh, boy. This video. It’s popular, and it’s so completely incorrect. It first showed up on a zoo group I’m part of and the entire thread was people who work with foxes just shaking their heads. Most of the information is wrong, it’s misleading because it totally glosses over what it’s actually like to own a fox, and it encourages unsafe behavior. Let’s break it down, shall we?

0:05 - “Foxes can be domesticated and kept as household pets.” It’s likely that this meant to say that they can be tamed and kept as pets, since domestication is a process that requires multiple generations and is genetic in origin. There’s no correct way to domesticate a single animal, because it’s a process and not a singular event.

0:09 - “The Domesticated Red Fox is the result of a breeding project set up by scientists.” Uh, not really. Silver foxes (a melanistic strain of red foxes originally bred for fur farm production) were selectively bred for a single behavioral characteristic - flight distance - by Belyaev starting in 1959 at the Institute for Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia. Those foxes began to display characteristic behaviors of domesticated dogs after multiple generations - affiliation behavior with humans, floppy ears, piebald coloration, a raised tail, and more frequent heat cycles. The fox shown in the background of this part of the video is obviously not an animal from Belyaev’s SibFox project, because it displays all the physiological characteristics of a while strain red fox and not a specifically-bred silver fox morph.

0:17 “The program was inspired by domesticated wolves.” Technically true. Belyaev wanted to see if he could replicate some of the assumed genetic changes that would have happened as wolves began the domestication process by hanging around human camps - the ones with the shortest flight distance would have had better resource access and likely more reproductive success. But, uh, they could just say ‘the origin of dogs’ or ‘the domestication of wolves’ rather than making it sound like wolves have been domesticated again and imply that’s related to pet ownership.

0:20 “The aim of the project was to create a pet (…)” Nope. Completely incorrect. Belyaev was looking to replicate domestication, never to be part of the pet industry. (Russia 50 years ago did not really have the economy to support much pet ownership, much less for exotic pet industries, and Novosibirsk was a huge industrial and science center that supported a large refugee population). The Institute For Cytology and Genetics did end up selling foxes as pets after Belyaev’s death as an attempt to supplement failing funding fro the program, but it was never the goal. Meanwhile, there are multiple projects where red foxes are being purposefully domesticated - bred for tame traits, not just flight distance - in the American south. Most ‘pet foxes’ in the US come from one of them rather than SibFox (and it’s illegal to keep unreleasable wild rescues in most states).

0:23 “(…) that has the best traits of both cats and dogs.” Oiiiii no, this is one of the worst misrepresentations of foxes that happens with internet videos. Foxes are not ‘catdogs’. They’re the evolutionary result of an environment not having small felidae predators, so canidae filled the gap, but that does not mean they’re going to act like either felines or canines. That would be a massive oversimplification of taxonomy. We don’t expect a chicken to act like a T-Rex because they’re both technically dinosaurs. In the words of @kodathefox: “Everyone asks me “so is she like a cat or a dog?” And I say “she’s neither; she’s a fox, she’s hard work and takes up 100% of my time and attention.””

0:27-0:31 “You can train your fox (…)” You can train any animal to walk on a harness and leash, and many to retrieve. That does not speak to their suitability as pets, just to your skill as a trainer.

0:33 “You can give your fox a bath” Suddenly we’re on to Fennec foxes, which are entirely different from red foxes. There are no projects domesticating Fennec foxes and their husbandry needs and the legality of owning them is entirely different. That’s super misleading.

0:36 “Your fox can besties with your dog.” Yes, they could get along, but again that’s not guaranteed. That depends very specifically on your dog, your fox, their socialization histories, prey drives, and a lot of other factors. This has nothing to do with domestication or suitability as pets, and it’s often irresponsible and stupid to let exotic pets interact with other mammals. It’s also worth noting that foxes cannot be legally vaccinated against rabies in many places, so you’re in deep shit if your fox accidentally breaks your dogs’s skin while playing (even if you’ve actually had them vaccinated, it won’t count). It’s likely your fox would have to be euthanized and your dog would have to undergo a rabies quarantine.

0:41 “Your fox can be a portable heater” Please do not create the expectation that wild animals, even specifically ones bred for tame behavior, will allow all people to manhandle them and do things like wear them on their shoulders. This is how people get bit and pet foxes get put down.

0:44 “Your fox will love you forever if you give it neck rubs” Only if that’s something the fox enjoys, and you have close relationship with it that allows you to touch it in places that make it vulnerable. Again, a stupid and dangerous assumption of that wild animals, even ones bred to be tamer, don’t have boundaries and will be tolerant of what the internet thinks is cute.

0:47 “(…) and heaps of hugs”. We’ve already talked on this blog a lot about how dogs are uncomfortable with human-style hugs because they are restrictive and remove their ability to get away. How do you think a much less domesticated animal - and a smaller one at that - is going to feel about being restrained in human type hugs? This video displays a fox initiating a hug but most people will not get that difference and yet again this sets people up to get hurt and foxes up to get put down for having reasonable responses to rude human behavior.

You’ll notice that throughout this breakdown I haven’t even commented on what’s going on with the fox in the video - either it’s behavior or how it’s being handled. There’s a reason for this: it’s very hard to determine if pet foxes are stressed or not without a lot of context. Many people who work with rescued, rehabbed or captive foxes report that affiliative behavior looks exactly like stress behavior in many cases and it takes a huge amount of familiarity with the animal and each specific situation to be able to accurately weigh in. There’s been some pretty big fights on tumblr before around videos of captive foxes; their behavior looks like stress to people who work with wild foxes and affiliative behavior to people who own foxes and nobody knows enough about the specific situations. So, understandably, we’re not even going to touch that on this breakdown. Some of the people in the videos were interacting with the animals in what I consider personally to be stupid ways - putting their fingers in a young fox’s mouth, or allowing it to romp with a dog, but again that’s so incredibly situational that I won’t speak against it professionally even if I personally don’t approve.

@zooophagous wrote a beautiful breakdown about the behavioral and husbandry aspects of why getting a fox is not simple or easy or generally a good idea. It’s everything this video left out, and you can read it here.

This video is just dumb. It twists a lot of information to make pet foxes seem like a great idea (who paid them for this marketing?) and leaves out everything you actually need to know. It perpetuates the stupid romanticized idea of a pet fox ‘catdog’ and sets up so many people and animals to find themselves in bad situations after making an uninformed choice that was influenced by this video.