“This aquarium setup with 24/7 live soccer”
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Mike Driver
tumblr dot com
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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⁂

blake kathryn

JVL

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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
ojovivo
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
KIROKAZE

oozey mess
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
will byers stan first human second

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

seen from Malaysia

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@seen-betta-days
“This aquarium setup with 24/7 live soccer”
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people who conflate “domestic” and “tame” legitimately horrify me
#for some reason people who conflate ‘wild’ and ‘feral’ are usually innocently mistaken #but people who conflate ‘domestic’ and ‘tame’ are about to cause- or are currently causing- serious harm to one or more animals
Forgive me, but I don’t understand - can someone explain the difference and why not knowing it is dangerous?
So “domestic” means an animal that has been selectively bred over generations to have characteristics useful to humans, such as reduced flight distance, increased milk/wool/meat production, trainability, lower prey drive, attractive coloring, etc. These are livestock or pets, most of which have been domesticated by humans for millennia, and while they can still interbreed with their wild ancestors, are genetically altered enough to be distinguished from them by a variety of traits. Dogs, cats, cattle, llamas, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, yaks, ducks, geese, chickens: all domestic! You can also have semi-domesticated animals, where the semi-domesticated population has been more lightly managed by humans over time, still sometimes interbreeding with wild populations, and not intensively selectively bred, such as the semi-domesticated reindeer herded by various Arctic peoples. It’s kind of a continuum!
“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.
(The other, less concerning to confuse terms I mentioned in those tags: wild is a non-domesticated animal and feral is a domesticated animal that was born outside of captivity and lives like a wild animal (eg feral cat colonies, most pigeons, mustang horses).)
what kind of hummingbird is this?
Your vibe is oddly bitter and reeks of insecurity
sounds like someone needs to go in the water
Reblogging again because the art is spectacular. 10/10.
TIL that the Audubon Society has released official statements on the difference between a "bird", a "birb", and a "borb", featuring such gems as:
LISTEN UP, FOLKS, BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT
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!
Together, we can drive this monster off of this continent. By turning it into dinner 🥰
ADDENDUM: Be cautious in which plants you rip out of the ground for food!
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.
Also please spread this addendum around, I don’t want strangers on the internet eating neurotoxins because OP’s post (while completely accurate information!) failed to mention the existence of snakeroot.
keep forgetting i cant digest avocado until its too late
this was a VERY specific image to have on hand for such a specific fact and the speed at which you replied frightens me a bit. thank you for sharing
I rly love them
The wrong Dodo went extinct
Wait, why???? The dodo is so cool.
So this is kind of a complex issue and there are far more qualified people discussing why the Dodo is problematic (see this excellent write up by @why-animals-do-the-thing https://blog.whyanimalsdothething.com/post/148060308477/please-let-trusting-the-dodo-as-a-source-go)
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.
When we look at animal behavior through the lens of our humans experiences only, we do these species a huge disservice. We have to think critically when viewing animal content online, and do our best to try understand what the behavior actually represents. It’s also incredibly important to educate people and arm them with the knowledge to identify and call-out dangerous anthropomorphism in the media! It’s absolutely okay if you thought of the Dodo as sweet wholesome content- they’ve worked hard to cultivate this image for animal lovers. Now that you have some more background you will definitely start to see the troubling content more and you can work to educate others as well! I love videos of stray puppies finding loving homes, but until the dodo stops producing other videos with dangerous wildlife encounters I can’t in good conscience enjoy their channel.
I get mildly stressed when a friend or family member sends me a dodo video with the message “awww watch this video, so cute 😭” because I know that more often than not, it’ll be problematic.
Mind if I just scootch in here?
Another problem is the perpetuation of Exotic Pet culture. Coupled with the anthropomorphism of these creatures they frame the ownership of notably non-domesticated creatures in wildly inappropriate habitation as a positive only fuels the trade of exotic, often endangered and illegal, animals in the pet trade.
80 freshwater species have already been declared extinct — 16 of them in 2020 alone.
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.
About 200 million people across Asia, Africa and South America rely on freshwater fishers for their main source of protein, researchers said in “The World’s Forgotten Fishes” report. About one-third of those people also rely on them for their jobs and livelihoods.
asking out of genuine curiosity: what’s the problem with “adopt don’t shop”? (implied but not explained in a post you reblogged)
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.
Basically, don’t vilify people who buy from responsible, ethical breeders. We have our reasons for doing so.
Ready for Halloween
#sadbuttrue#blackcats#halloween#keepblackcatssafefromharm#keepallanimalssafe#cats#love#endanimalcruelty
Keep your black kitties INSIDE. ;A; There are definitely evil people and they will be very bad to cats on halloween.
Pup interrupts soccer match, gives interview.
The commentator narrating the pup’s moves with the ball is AMAZING and I’m crying
“(…) right, but he decides to kick the ball. He gets close, and who grabs it? The Friend(dog)! Yes! A pup got into the field. He’s tied to it. He puts it under his paws and shows what football was missing in the Gasometro (field’s name). The [team]’s men want to grab him, but they cant! The Friend has his eyes on the ball. He runs to find it again. Yes! He bites! He kneads! He wants it close! He gets lost, he’s so happy! Castro (player) wants to kick his Corner but he can’t. He tells the pup “enough, enough, go over there”… however *commentator laughs*, there’s the pup! When he puts it on the floor, [the dog] goes again for the ball. And of course, as any skilled man, wants it all for himself. A bit of an over-eater, this pup. And he clearly has shown conditions / talent. [The team] found the way to the goal thanks to the Pichicho’s (little dog) essential input…. who, of course, as any protagonist had his place at [the tv show].“
*camera switches to interview where dog barks and mounches on the reporter’s mic (who allows him do it)*
I’ve been watching Argentinean football all my life and I can confirm this is the best to ever happen on a match.
I’VE DONE 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.