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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m about to go on a two week trip to a bunch of places I’ve never been before! I’m super excited! Been watching a lot of the Katmai bear cam of the salmon run while I work on packing and some last minute chores. I’m excited to visit some places that are a bit more accepting of trans people than where I currently live, too.



  • I find this kinda fascinating because if you’ve thought this your entire life, you would have had to have read every intended plural “you” as singular and there would be nothing to inform you otherwise without very explicit context.

    For the record, every 2nd person pronoun in the preceding paragraph can be singular or plural and still be grammatically correct while remaining socially correct for my speaking to an audience of unknown size. “You all” and “you guys” are slang phrases that don’t appear in formal writing.









  • You can’t compare animals and humans, though. I know we love our pets like children but that’s just not how this works. A lot of work has been put into the behavioral science of enriching an indoor cat’s environment but for some reason it gets entirely disregarded when it comes to the idea that your cat doesn’t belong outside.



  • All I look for Is a willingness to speak to others in good faith and for there to be a referee intervention when that isn’t respected. “Safe space” has been so twisted and ridiculed that it’s hard to use it and not feel some of the inflection of entitlement that’s been imparted to it. Safe for me is an end to needless hostility in conversation and being able to talk without someone else launching a curio cabinet of their favorite ad hominems at you. So far I’ve found beehaw to be a bit more in line with this than tildes, but both communities have a lot of room left to establish what they want to be.






  • In the end, it’s a numbers game. Wild populations of cats around the world don’t hold a candle to the amount of domestic cats. That’s what ends up making it so damaging to wildlife. There’s no shortage of people enabling cat populations either. It’s inevitable when the animals in question are so cherished by humanity. Feral pigs would be another case of domesticated animals ruining habitats and killing wildlife. They are routinely destroyed, and for good reason. With cats, you’re far more likely to see someone feeding a feral population than gunning them down the way hogs are. It’s just the reality of our attachment.


  • What’s cruel is having a pet you never interact with or care for. Inflicting your cat on your neighborhood is just a different kind of cruelty altogether - as is dropping your domesticated animal into a dangerous environment unsupervised. It’s not a zero sum game where the cat is either indoors and tortured or outdoors and fulfilled. You can provide more than adequate enrichment with a modest investment of time and money. Insisting on the misery of your cat to persist is ironically the true projection of human emotion here.

    Honest question to anyone who disagrees: many small animals are kept inside their entire lives. Is this torture? Do you look down on those who own small animals?