You'll Be Alright, Kid

Sing Along A Little Fucking Louder To A Happy Song| Pink Blog: pinkkittentails| Dark Blog: blackkittentails| NSFW

[sirfrogsworth]

BAT RAVE ACTIVATE

[thefrogman]

ǝʇɐʌᴉʇɔɐ ǝʌɐɹ ʇɐq

[onlytwitterpics]

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Pixel Art Commissions by LeoKatana

This artist on RedBubble

[cutecatzone]

[greatbonkcoppie]

[zaynrand-blog]

IM JUST TRYING TO SPELL POMEGRANATES 

[unlessx]

[mood9088]

[witchyautumns]

[fullpraxisnow]

[whitetrashlucy-blog]

IS NOONE GOING TO MENTION HOW HARD IT IS TO MAKE DIRECT EYE CONTACT? DO YOU STARE IN THE LEFT OR THE RIGHT IDK

[stillhereunfortunately]

mlp roleplay [18+ only]

*rarity smiles mischievously* dont look so surprised to find me here… ive been waiting for you 

[bukkakenojutsu]

what

[stillhereunfortunately]

*rarity is suddenly furious* youve been smoking again, after you told me youd given it up? stoney pony ive told you: either the weed goes or i go!

[bukkakenojutsu]

dude are we talking horses

[hhhrrrggg83687568752386-deactiv]

sometimes art theft is worth the memories you will share with your friends for years to come, after one of them finds this post and then sends it to you while having no idea you drew a weed pony as a joke back in 2012

sincerely, the person who drew the weed pony as a joke in 2012 and now gets to experience whiplash every so often when this post crosses his dash

[argacyan]

This is the only time I’m going to reblog MLP shit lol

[just-shower-thoughts]

In Japan, radiation creates monsters (Godzilla) and in America radiation creates superheroes

[mallemerok]

Shockingly, it’s almost like Japan and America have very different narratives surrounding nuclear fallout. Now, if we all think very very hard, maybe someone could think of why this might be.

[retrolizard]

[drferox]

Talking to Outdoor Cat People

@voidofstars136 said: Hello, I volunteer at a wildlife hospital (in Australia). We get a great deal of cat-attack victims coming in, and I was hoping you knew of any particular methods to get people to keep their cats inside. I have an indoor-only cat, and I’ve successful managed to get an indoor-outdoor cat into a indoor-only before, but I cannot seem to convince anyone to do the same. Question Tax: What is your favourite parrot species?

Ah, that old chestnut.

In all my years of blogging, Outdoor Cat People, those that make excuses to justify letting their cat free roam outside (and bad excuses at that, apparently there are no cars, lilies, hazardous weather, dogs, wild predators, asshole humans, rat poison, etc where they live and Indoor cats are ‘an American thing’ despite my feet being firmly in Australia) have been some of the most obnoxious individuals to deal with online.

They are marginally more rewarding to deal with in person, if only because they maintain their manners and decide to be polite to your face and ignore you later.

The problem is, you can have a million excellent reasons to keep cats indoor only, but Outdoor Cat People will not care. They believe they are entitled to let their cat roam outdoors unsupervised (and many will have difficulty comprehending that sentence. Roaming outdoors unsupervised does not include supervised on a harness or confined to a cat run). They believe either that their cat is so special nothing bad will ever happen, or that it’s just ‘part of life’ and they couldn’t possibly have prevented this.

If they don’t care enough about their cats welfare to keep it inside, they aren’t going to care about the wildlife that they probably don’t believe their cat is hunting anyway.

If you just walk up to them and go ‘you should keep your cat inside’ you will be met with dismissal at best, and hostility at worse.

There is a window of opportunity when they can actually see a consequence of their cat being outside. At the moment our clinic waiting room is plastered with ‘Missing Cat’ posters, and that opens up a conversation with some people about keeping their beloved cats indoors, lest they go missing too.

I have this conversation after every cat fight, every wound, every injured wildlife found in a backyard and maybe 20% of them consider changing their cat’s lifestyle. Some of them will even stick with it.

There is more room to influence first time cat owners, those with new kittens. If they start out indoor only, they are more likely to stay that way.

I don’t have a magic method to talk people into doing the right thing, because letting their cats outside is convenient and easy for them, and they wont see the consequences until the last day.

My favorite parrot is a hard one. Right now it’s probably the cockatiel, for fitting so much b*stard in such a small body.

[kominfyrirkattarnef]

You’re from fucking Australia. Everything can kill you in Australia. It is not a fair comparison to any other country where there aren’t killer chickens.

I’m not entitled to let my cat outside. My cat is entitled to be let outside. It’s an animal and it is in its nature to go outside and run and hunt.

With your logic, the “I can prevent this by never letting my cat go outside alone”, humans shouldn’t leave the house either. Cats know as well as humans to move out of the way of cars and not attack huge animals. Humans get hit by cars too, you know, so I guess we should stay inside too.

[tragasantos]

Some countries don’t have natural predators like coyotes that can harm outdoor cats. In some countries and regions, I would argue they are quite outdoor-cat-friendly, actually. And SOME CATS don’t like being fucking inside. I know cats that get lethargic, get depressed, get unhappy no matter how many cat trees or toys or whatever else you have inside. Who am I to coop my cat up inside all day?

Jumping on the point made above me, dogs get hit by cars too. So do people. It’s a tragedy when it happens, and it’s NOT a discussion of “wow that horrible owner could have prevented this by keeping their cat inside forever,” but rather a discussion of “why did this car not see my cat on the road.”

[drferox]

Me: is asked a question about convincing people to keep their cats indoors to protect wildlife.

States Outdoor Cat People will ignore the list of other hazards to justify letting their cat roam outside (cars, lilies, hazardous weather, dogs, asshole humans, rat poison, etc)

States Outdoor Cat People have trouble understanding the concept of ‘outdoors unsupervised’ and ignore the idea of supervised outside time, on a harness, in a cat run etc.

Outdoor Cat People: demonstrate exactly those points.

And also make an additional fallacy I had forgotten, in his case comparing the wisdom of a cat to an adult human instead of a small child, who also should not roam the neighbourhood unsupervised.

[tiggymalvern]

As with so many debates, cat lifestyles have nuances and are situation-dependent. I was the owner of many indoor-outdoor cats when I lived in England. Now I live in an area of the US with coyotes and bobcats passing through my garden and I have indoor-only cats. On the health side, yes, indoor-outdoor cats are exposed to hazards. As a vet in England, you see cats regularly that have been hit by cars. I acquired three of my own cats that way - brought in as car victims, fixed up and never claimed. Over twenty years of owning indoor-outdoor cats, none of mine were hit by cars after I acquired them, because we deliberately bought houses with our cats in mind. We chose to live in quiet, suburban cul-de-sacs with little traffic that moved at low speeds. That doesn’t make the risk non-existent, but it makes it pretty minimal. Indoor-only cats have a separate set of health hazards, unfortunately. The rates of allergies and other immune-related diseases are higher in indoor-only cats (and unfortunately a catio or intermittent leash walks don’t seem to be enough to change that), and my own personal experiences have borne this out. None of my indoor-outdoor cats had medical issues related to the immune system. Of my two lifelong indoor-only cats, one developed feline asthma, while the other has both inflammatory bowel disease and immune-mediated haemolytic anaemia. These conditions are manageable, but hardly benign, and the $3600 it cost me to get my cat through his initial heamolytic crisis would not be within everyone’s budget (and that was my rate as a veterinarian, with discounts from the specialist emergency centre who performed his transfusion - it would have cost a member of the public more). When I lived in the London suburbs, my indoor-outdoor cats did catch and kill wildlife. They caught rats. On one occasion, memorably resulting in a dining room full of feathers, they killed a feral pigeon. These are pest species, and the number killed by cats doesn’t begin to make a dent. Meanwhile, my indoor-only American cats still kill wildlife, because the wildlife doesn’t stay outdoors. They kill some of the Pacific deer mice who like a warm dry house, and twice they’ve killed little brown bats that came down the chimney. My American indoor-only cats have had a greater impact on a declining, protected species than all my indoor-outdoor cats in England did.

[drferox]

I’d really dispute the ‘Indoor cats are more likely to have allergies and immune mediated diseases’ statement.

Particularly because most of the cats I see for allergic disease, and regular cortisone shots, are outdoors. The most common immune mediated condition is set off by bacteria transmitted in flea bites (Haemobartonella). There might be some evidence to suggest that IBD symptoms are reduced in cats with low levels of intestinal worms but it’s not convincing enough for me to go deliberately infect cats with them.

Indoor cats get more old-age diseases ebcause they are surviving to their old age. They get more unusual conditions because they’re not succumbing to the common ones, and because their owners are observing them. An indoor cat owner can answer significantly more questions about their cat’s habits than kne that’s outdoors often.

And how many outdoor cats just ‘wander off to die’? That is, feel sick, curl up somewhere quiet, and never get found, even if they had something treatable. An indoor cat doing that gets taken to the vet. You at least get answers instead of ‘just didn’t come home’.

And you think your cats wouldn’t hunt more mice if they had access to the outdoors? Keeping cats indoors and supervised is about minimising risk and harm. Being unable to be perfect is not an arguement against it. People still die wearing seatbelts but the statistics would be worse without.

[tiggymalvern]

I’d really dispute the ‘Indoor cats are more likely to have allergies and immune mediated diseases’ statement. Nobody at the World Feline Veterinary Conference in San Francisco in October disputed it when it was stated by a speaker, but I’m currently not managing to google a paper to back it up. Googling cat allergies risk factors just gets me a hundred papers on risk factors in people who are allergic to cats…. The best I’m able to come up with at five minutes’ notice is the position statement by the American Association of Feline Practitioners on the indoor cat lifestyle, which lists increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease alongside cystitis and stress-induced viral disease as indoor-only cat issues. https://catvets.com/public/PDFs/Content/Preview/LifestyleChoicePositionStatement.pdf Of course my cats would hunt more mice if they were outside. But it remains a good illustration of regional variations in cat-wildlife impact.

[drferox]

If a talk was being given at the conference by feline specialists about cases they see in a specialist practice, that’s not necessarily indicative of the whole population at large. Patients at a specialist practice have not only been presented to the vet, but then their owners have agreed to take them to a referral practice. I would expect them to see more indoor cats in general.

The PDF lists numerous things all associated with stress and boredom, most of which could be managed by the human or changing the set up. We can influence those factors. Feline Idiopathic Cystitis (FIC) is associated with stress, sure, but I see plenty of outdoor cats with it too, and generally in worse condition because the owner doesn’t notice that their male cat isn’t urinating for a few days. It’s also associated with being sedentary, so there is more than one factor at play and both of these can be improved with the set up around the house.

Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) being linked with stress is probably a little contentious, since we know that IBD and intestinal lymphoma exist on a spectrum, with IBD often progressing to lymphoma after a number of years. If this is a neoplastic process, then cats just living longer will be more prone to it. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) might look similar without a biopsy, and is potentially linked with stress. But also consider, if cats are toileting outside where the owner doesn’t see it, the owner isn’t going to know there are any symptoms or present them to the vet clinic until the cat has lost a lot of weight, and most of those will fall under the “Oh well she’s old, guess it’s her time, nothing to be done” umbrella.

The PDF you helpfully provided above concludes:

This AAFP Position Statement emphasizes that indoor/outdoor living for cats in an environment that is safe is the best option for pet cats. Safe outdoor living keeps the cat away from most dangers and yet provides a more stimulating environment with potential for more normal feline behavior. Examples include walking the cat on harness and leash, an outdoor enclosure, and a fenced-in or invisible fence around the property. Clients should be educated about these options.  Indoor-only living is an option,but each and every cat’s needs must be addressed so that each has good welfare to include: simulation of hunting and foraging; play; safe territory with vertical space; and appropriate and clean toileting areas as described in the Environmental Needs Guidelines, and the AAFP and ISFM Guidelines for Diagnosing and Solving House-Soiling Behavior in Cats.

It goes on to discuss this in more detail and while it does concede that some cats will not be happy indoors, it still recommends an outdoor enclosure, not roaming freely.

So there’s really not any serious justification for letting cats roam outside, where they can hunt and get into mischief, which is what started this conversation.

[xbaby-kitten-45x]

Just keep your cats inside. They should make “leash laws” for cats like they do dogs.

[passionate-souls]

[comradesaucegay]

get a man who can do both