Love whenever I say maybe we need to get more strict on the exotic pet trade ppl are like “you’re threatening my rights” and it’s like show me where in the Constitution it says you’re entitled to own 3 cobras, Brian
In fact I think it’s my right to not worry about my shitty neighbor not properly containing his multiple cobras but call me old fashioned
I lived near that town where that guy released 55 wild animals in 2011, including an excess of 18 bengal tigers and school was closed for two days while they wrangled them all WHILE also having to deal with yeehaws from every corner of God’s green earth who came to our town to sneak through people’s backyards with guns hoping to bag a fucking lion and I can’t help but feel I’m entitled to live in a place where that’s legally…..a little harder to happen again
I worked for a bit in a wolf rehab center and we had a momma wolf so traumatized by being raised in a fucking duplex that when she heard construction noise miles away and had nowhere to hide, tried to hide her babies by lying on top of them, killing most of her litter in the process.
Yeah this is largely the issue. It’s not Extremely common for another person to get injured by their neighbor’s exotic pet. It is, however, the NORM for that exotic pet to be traumatized, poorly socialized, malnourished, fearful, etc., all at the same time.
It’s especially a problem, in my experience, although I don’t have actual surveys and data to back this up, with snakes and other species that don’t emote in a way we can understand.
People who buy a reptile on a whim without doing much Actual research aren’t going to know what a sick, malnourished or distressed animal looks like.
I handled a lot of rescued pythons with permanently stunted growth because they were underfed from the time they hatched. It was extra sad when the owners were good people, with good intentions, and I could tell it broke their hearts to find out they’d been hurting their own pet. But the fact remains that the pet still suffered because of ignorance, regardless of anyone’s intentions.
The average person cannot feasibly afford to provide the diet, enrichment, and veterinary care an animal like a tiger, alligator, or even native mountain lion or wolf requires.
And the fact is in the United States, most of these animals are living in the backyards of the average person, not in accredited zoos.
Every year, we get owls in our rehab center someone found as chicks and decided to “adopt.” But they got big, and loud, and messy, and suddenly they weren’t great pets.
Now these perfectly healthy owls that were IMPORTANT to their ecosystem can never be released again, and they stay in captivity.
Sure, we can offer them good, enriched lives. No, we can’t now replace these multiple, highly important pieces of the food web back into the ecosystem they were stolen from.
It’s just!!! I know I’m largely preaching to the choir here. I’m just so over the US and international pet trade, especially when the US, like on every other topic, loves to tout our laws as if all of the bad, evil pet trading is taking place in other nations and their “black markets,” which is misleading, because the only REASON they take place in “black markets” in other countries is because those countries have even bothered to make laws about it, whereas in the US, we don’t even have any official registry on our large exotics. That’s right, we don’t even know how many pet tigers exist in the United States.
We estimate at least 10,000, roughly three times more than are even left in the wild, and that’s not including those which exist in accredited zoos, but really, we don’t know.
The local authorities sure didn’t know there were 18 in my neighborhood.
So yeah, we don’t have as bad of a black market pet trading problem as other places, but that’s because you don’t NEED a black market if it’s not illegal.
@why-animals-do-the-thing actually has some fantastic research going on regarding how many tigers are currently living in the US and where (specifically tigers at this time and not others)
I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017.
the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too.
he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it.
he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.
previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.
is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.
it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.
tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.
This is such a fabulous flip side of what I’ve always known about villians. That their biggest weakness is that they always assume their own motivations are the motives of others.
can we, as a society, start to realize that having a phone does NOT mean you HAVE TO BE accsessible to anyone and everyone at ALL times??
My mom threw a fit at me for not answering my phone while i was at my friends place. Kinda hypocritical too, given how much she complains that “youth these days spend to much time on their phones”
My boss was very CLEARLY not satisfied that i only got back to his text hours after he sent it. My friend didnt speak to me for weeks once bc she thought we were having a FIGHT??? bc i didnt reply to her message on facebook? till the day after she sent it??
i HAVE a phone, that doesnt mean i HAVE TO BE availiable whenever ANYONE decides they want me to be???
what the fuck
can people stop assuming they are entiteled to my attention 24/7??
this is so important. people need their alone time & their space. & it doesn’t matter if you see them active on social media, sometimes people just like to scroll through their timeline without talking to anyone for a while. you really can’t expect to have someone’s attention every second of the day, it’s not realistic at all.
