Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

@legend-of-laurel

I don’t know if this story has made it from my reptile corners of the internet to the larger public but it’s kind of a classic “fuck around and find out” situation.

Jeffrey Leibowitz is this obnoxious dude who is known in exotic pet circles for free-handling his highly venomous pet snakes. He also has the unfortunate habit of mocking anyone who voices the reasonable perspective that doing this can be dangerous not only for the humans but also the snakes involved. There’s a reason reputable facilities don’t pet and cuddle venomous snakes.

Well old Jeff has left quite a trail of terrible hot takes and unhinged rants. He feels that only people who get bit by snakes are idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. He put out this eloquent stance on the subject…

Well guess who got bit by the most venomous* snake in the world, a fucking inland Taipan he was keeping as a pet.

After he is bit, Jeff’s opinion on anti venom is swiftly reconsidered…

This guy is currently hospitalized in organ failure as his doctors try to save his life with the needed anti venom that a reptile facility was kind enough to send for Jeff. Jeff’s entire collection of venomous snakes was euthanized due to his carelessness (I don’t know what’s happened to his pet serval).

Under normal circumstances I would not make fun of someone being so severely injured by an animal, but I am quite frankly furious with this man. His hubris got innocent animals killed. Absolutely nobody needs to have an inland taipan as a pet and the insistence on free-handling these dangerous animals as some kind of ego exercise is unbelievably reckless.

I hope Jeff Leibowitz survives. I hope he learns from this experience and uses his perspective to advocate for better welfare of venomous snakes going forward. At the very least, I hope he is too embarrassed to continue posting these bizarre stream of consciousness rants against anyone who criticizes him…

So I'm seeing tons of people wondering why all the snakes were euthanized.

These are animals with extremely specialized care needs that were receiving substandard care. Zoos and venom research facilities do not have open housing for highly venomous reptiles on the regular. There were 14 venomous snakes in his "care" and some were in plastic totes (can be appropriate for smaller non-venomous snakes like my own corns, for example, but NOT venomous) and none were in safe containment. So we have a lot of snakes in inappropriate housing and they all need to move now only everywhere is full. PLUS, any snake taken in would require extensive quarantine and health monitoring to make sure it didn't bring in a deadly pathogen like nidovirus or crypto.

It's the same pathogen reason for why the few native snakes couldn't be released.

It sucks the snakes were euthanized, but there was significant risk of escape or further bites due to the poor husbandry and nowhere with the right caging had room. You couldn't leave the baby inland taipan in a plastic bin for months and without training or anymore local antivenin it wouldn't be safe to even try to fill the water bowl.

His cocksure assholeness is the reason these snakes are dead.

Excellent addition. Venomous snakes do not belong in private homes and this is just one of many many reasons why. Nobody is to blame for their deaths but the careless piece of human garbage who brought them into an apartment to feed his ego.

sometimes reddit comments are good actually

did I ever mention that I know someone whose family owned a zombie dog because that’s some real shit that I get to delight with at parties

Tell us that story?

okay here is the story of the zombie dog

this dog’s name was John. they found him half drowned in a bag of puppies that were not so fortunate as he was, and was taken in immediately. he was a runt and not quite right (most likely from the whole half drowned thing), but a very loving dog. the problem with John was that he smelled like death, and no one knew why. vets couldn’t figure it out. it was obviously some kind of skin problem, but they had no idea what kind. all anyone knew was that if you touched him, you would smell like death too, so you couldn’t pet him, and that for some reason, the only thing that made the smell go away was being around other dogs. so they got another dog and the death smell stopped and John lived a very happy life

when he was getting old, maybe about 15 years, part of his skull caved in. just like that! suddenly had a huge dent in his head! and he was totally fine. didn’t notice it, didn’t affect him at all. just this massive dent right there in his head where his skull had collapsed in on his brain, and he was still the happiest and most loving dog. the skull cave in, for whatever reason, caused the ear on that side of his head to just fall off entirely, but again, perfectly happy dog who did not know he was down an ear and a fully formed skull. they took him to the vet, thinking maybe they should put him down. I mean, wouldn’t you think so? but the vet said that the dog was eating, and pooping, and happy, so there was no reason to put him down, so they didn’t

but that’s not even the weird part. the weird part is the area of the brain that got caved in on was apparently the area that registers pain, so this one-eared, collapsed skull dog could no longer feel any pain. he got old, his joints got stiff, his teeth rotted out of his head, his tongue hung out of his mouth and got black and hard, and he felt none of it! in fact, he was happier than he’d ever been feeling no pain, and the fact that he didn’t feel how much he was falling apart somehow made him live until he was 23. that’s right, the collapsed skull, one eared, zero teeth, smells like literal death when alone dog lived to be 23 years old. they used to joke that he’d been dead for years, but was too stupid to realize it yet

and that’s the story about the literal zombie dog my friend’s family owned

In memory

Friend, Scientologists (allegedly) stalk, abuse, and murder people, and if you put this woman in their path, it isn't just her but anyone close to her who ends up in their sights.

Like it should be basic fucking common sense that you don't put people in the path of cults. No one deserves to be sucked into a cult, and no one near her deserves to be subjected to the hell their life will become.

Don't put people in the path of cults no matter what. No one "deserves it", and things like this never just affect one person.

Godland (2022) | dir. Hlynur Pálmason

Hearing them get so excited over the whale fall is so fun I love hearing people who are passionate about their work

Fascinating to see how low energy this ecosystem is. This is the greatest bounty these animals will probably see in their lives, and they’re sleepily shuffling toward it, because their body literally lacks the energy to move any faster than that. To them it probably feels like breakneck speed.

With the recent news of Miami Seaquarium’s intent to “release” their elderly killer whale Lolita (Tokitae), please remember Keiko. Much like him, Tokitae was captured from the wild as a youngster (nearly a decade before Keiko himself was taken) and has lived with only the companionship of humans and smaller dolphins. She has spent over half a century away from the wild and other orcas, and it has been genetically confirmed that none of her wild family is still alive. Like Keiko, the only family she knows are humans.

Don’t let Keiko’s death be in vain. Don’t let the same fate befall Toki.

They are not planning to release Toki as far as I’ve heard, just to move her to a sea pen where she will be monitored and still have interactions with humans. Her tank is undersized and unsafe for her, and has been so for decades.

I had not heard that there was proof that her orca family are all dead, is there a link to that information? I’ve been following Toni’s story for years and had always heard that they think she may still have family active in the oceans.

From everything that I’ve heard of the plans for Toki, they are doing this for her health, and to provide a long term solution to the issue of her tank being so undersized. I’ve not heard any discussion of her being released like Keiko, so hopefully this will not be history repeating itself.

Emmett makes it a goal to drink blood from every animal in the planet. So far the most memorable was the time he put a bunch of ants in a blender and had to strain the result so he didn't drink all the bits

So I'm putting this here as a sort of public service. If you have never seen a rabid animal before, and you think you can handle watching it, I think it's a good idea to watch this. It's pretty upsetting to watch, so big CW on it, because this animal is essentially "dead but still moving." This is end-stage rabies. There is no saving this animal.

Before this stage, animals may be excessively affectionate or oddly tame-looking which is part of the reason why seeing people feeding foxes is upsetting to me. These animals might be, or might become, rabid, and there's no way to know without testing, which involves destroying the animal. Encouraging wild animals to be that close to humans is generally bad.

I grew up in the woods, so unfortunately we saw an uptick in rabid animals every spring -- you'd hear there was a rabid bat in this neighborhood or a rabid fox in this one -- but as wild animals and humans cross over more and more, we will see this more and more.

Opossums and squirrels extremely rarely get rabies, and we don't know why. They think the low body temperature of opossums inhibits the virus. The most common animals which get rabies in the US are raccoons, skunks, bats and foxes. Any animal 'acting unusually' -- not skittish around humans, biting at the air or at nothing ('fly-biting'), walking strangely (they kind of look like they have a string attached to their heads and walk kind of diagonal like they're being pulled along, a lot of the time) -- should be treated as though it's potentially rabid.

If you think you have been exposed to a rabid animal, including 'waking up in a room where a bat has gotten into it and there's a fucking bat in your room', please immediately go to the emergency room. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Post-exposure prophylaxis absolutely fucking sucks, it is a series of shots you'll have to get in two stages, it's done by weight, and it feels fucking nasty, but rabies is 100% fatal. I cannot stress enough how essential this is, having been through it.

Thank you for reading, I love everybody, the end.

To be clear, I have been through post-exposure prophylaxis for rabies. In 2005 or early 2006, I forget which exactly, @urbanprole and I woke up with a bat in our bedroom bc our apartment maintenance hadn't closed up the HVAC system after replacing filters. I shooed the bat out with a broom and it was acting normally for a bat but we didn't take any chances. (Thankfully, MK was at her dad's that weekend.)

I felt absolutely wretched the next day - the worst I've ever felt, excluding surgery and childbirth - after each series of shots. I had to get 2 sets on different days. I got 8 shots the first day, and Emet got like 13 or 15 bc she's very tall, and it's done by mass. The only thing I can think to compare it to is the depths of COVID, but without the coughing. Your immune system is Working Hard to update itself so it can recognize and fight any possible exposure.

I basically laid in bed and ached and sweated and groaned, but after it was over, I was fine.

Fewer than 20 people have ever survived rabies, and none are known to have survived without immediate post-exposure prophylaxis. Do not fuck around with this. Do not approach strange stray or wild mammals, especially without protective clothing.

Several comments on this post talking about 'why can't the US eradicate rabies entirely' and my friends, it can be really hard to understand how fucking big the United States is, and how weird it is to have basically 50 small countries in a trenchcoat. Like, we're fighting each other right now in courts over medicine, for one thing, and for another...

Like, one of the people commenting on this post and wondering this is from Portugal. Portugal is 35,603 square miles, and the United States is 3.97 million square miles. Portugal is 0.0093% the size of the United States, which... yeah. Like. The single state that I grew up in (Pennsylvania) is 46K square miles.

So, like, for one thing, this country is trying not to explode while a small group of people try to make it explode. And for another?

The US? Is. Fucking. Huge.

Australia doesn't have Rabies, because as far as I'm aware it just never got here and we work hard to keep it that way.

But we do have Bat Derived Lyssavirus, which is basically a rabies doppelganger... Don't fuck around with bats. Go to a Dr if you come into contact with a bat because you don't always notice a scratch/bite in the moment.

No need to be afraid of bats, just appreciate them from a distance... They're wild animals. If you find a bat in distress call a ranger.

American here with a firm reminder to cat and dog owners to KEEP YOU PETS' SHOTS UP TO DATE.

If there is one local to you, Tractor Supply has really affordable clinics (shots, some forms of testing, microchipping) on Sundays, and quite a few ASPCA centres will have special vet days. And keep tabs with bulletin boards and local Facebook events- some veterinarians will have low cost clinics through the year, too.

Rabies is INCURABLE and needs to be taken SERIOUSLY.

-a 29-year-old who remembers being 10-years-old and having to ship their kitty to a lab 3 hours away for a 6 month quarantine and possible euthanization (luckily he was cleared and lived another 7 years indoors as a holy terror~)

Frozach Submitted

Source: How Much Do Cats Actually Kill?

I did the math to figure out how many furry forest critters my one hunter cat actually killed. Here are the numbers:

She’s 10 years old, but she’s spent the last year as an inside only cat, so let’s mark her down as 9 years old. As an indoor-outdoor cat, she averaged around 4 kills a week. According to this study, she was probably killing 16 per week. At least.

There are 52 weeks in a year, so my cat was killing around 832 moles, voles, rats, and mice per year.

At 9 years old, her kill count was most likely around 7,488.

I’m lucky that she only went after rodents and not endangered animals. With a kill rate like that, this one cat could’ve wiped out an entire species.

And that’s just one cat.

it's so chilling to walk through an area where the houses are surrounded by blank sterile lawns and see a big lilac bush in full bloom without a single bug on it. No bees, no butterflies, not a stir of activity.

The neighborhood association where I work hires a truck to spray the whole subdivision. It trundles up every driveway and sprays every yard with pesticides. The children excitedly tell me about "the bug man" and know which days he comes on. I know when he's been there, because in the following days I see the beetles, butterflies, bees, and more, all struggling on the pavement, slowly dying. The children do not realize why they are there. They poke at the bugs in fascination. I hate it.

That's. Horrible. I have no words

Like

Those insecticides are toxic to humans as well, many are proven carcinogens, and their residues stick around for years inside homes

But even if that wasn't so, insect populations worldwide are plummeting, and the entire food chain depends on them. Most plants and animals could not exist without insects, period

Keeping the insect ecosystem in balance is important for human health and long term flourishing. Not all species are impacted equally by these toxic chemicals, and the elimination of one species can cause an explosion in another.

For example, some of the major predators of ticks are ants, spiders, and beetles

If you kill all your ants, spiders, and beetles, it'll take a long time for them to re-establish, but ticks can return because of a feral cat walking across your grass

What's more, scientists have found that excluding animals from an area makes the amount of ticks that can be collected in that area to explode. We're talking 2-3 times the amount of ticks actively foraging for things to latch onto. It seems like hungrier ticks seek food sources more and bite people more. This leads to the hypothesis that global defaunation is one of the causes of the explosion in tick borne diseases in recent years

Many birds depend on insects for food, bluebirds specifically eat a ton of mosquitoes

If you wipe out most arthropods, the the small mammals and birds that eat the bugs will visit your yard much less. Guess what that means

Current projections predict that the insect declines will be heavily impactful upon bees, butterflies, and moths, but could increase the populations of...flies and cockroaches.

Not to mention that as all the natural predators of agricultural pest insects suffer, more and more pesticides will be needed to get enough crop yields and it becomes a vicious cycle of poisoning the planet and farm laborers more and more severely to avoid collapse of food systems

Your neighborhood association is creating a bleak, sick, hungry future for those kids and everyone else.

Like, think about it:

If you kill and destroy everything in your surroundings that doesn't benefit you directly, soon the only critters that can live there are the creatures that are parasites on you directly or that compete with you for resources.

And now they don't have any predators to keep them at bay.

reblogging this again because researching ticks changed my brain around

like I thought "Yeah re-wilding will probably increase the risk of ticks but we just need to make tick safety widespread and common knowledge"

but then I RESEARCHED it

and the research was like "Actually tick diseases have increased DRAMATICALLY over the past 40 years, and tick ranges are expanding hugely and it's mostly unrelated to climate change so far. And we did experiments and in areas where there aren't any animals, the number of ticks that catch onto things passing through the area explodes, it's like 2-3 times the number of ticks. Which is like, wait, weird, I thought animals spread ticks. But we think what's happening is that when there's no animals, the ticks engage in more questing behavior to find food."

and I was like "Wait, but if the decline of animals is making the ticks look for food more, wouldn't they...wait. Oh no. OH NO. We're the food!"

and I looked at more research

and the research said "so the main things that kill ticks seems to be spiders, ants, and beetles."

and I was like "spiders, ants, and beetles? the things that people see as pests and try to kill with chemicals that contaminate the whole ecosystem?—OH FUCK"

Story is wild

Little girl was part of a county fair agro-educational program where they raise an animal for a few months and at the end it’s slaughtered. Supposed to teach them about the economics of farming and stuff.

But the little girl loved her goat so much she was crying on the day her goat was supposed to be taken away, so her mom sent the county fair people an email saying “I’ll pay for the goat and any expenses. We’ve had several deaths in the family in the past year, I don’t wanna take away one more thing my little girl loves.” Technically the goat had already been sold at auction, so the mom was on the hook for about $1000, only about $70 of which would have been profit for the county fair.

The county fair people were irate and got law enforcement involved, over this “breach of contract”. They literally got a fucking judge to sign a search warrant, authorizing them to go to this little girl’s house and search every room and every cabinet or box “large enough to contain a small goat”. The sheriff’s deputies seized the goat, and whoever they gave it to immediately slaughtered it, though they were supposed to wait until some kind of agreement had been worked out.

In the county fair’s initial email correspondence with the girl’s mother, they made it clear that they were pissed off because the story of the little girl who loved her goat was circulating on social media making them look bad, and they felt the girl needed to be taught a lesson about keeping your promises or whatever. So they refused the mother’s offer to pay for it, and insisted they get the goat. Even if it meant sending the fucking cops into her house lmao.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair

the congressman who bought the goat didn’t have any objections to the family saving the goat from slaughter either! it’s fucking insane that the cops were so eager to play act their swat commando fantasies that they played stooge to the benefit of no one except some self important local organizers!

Alternate link, LAtimes locks their stuff behind paywalls sometimes

Don’t forget the part where the goat wasn’t where they had a warrant to search, so they drove 500 miles, leaving the area they have legal jurisdiction in, then searched a farm they didn’t have a warrant for ans seized the goat. The fair then had the goat slaughtered, even though a court had ordered them to keep it alive until ownership was resolved and despite the fact that both potential owners of the goat had decided to keep it alive.

They broke multiple laws in order to “teach” a little girl the “lesson” that “everybody has to follow the rules”.

I sure hope all of the complaints sent to Shasta District Fair CEO Melanie Silva, whose decisions these were and continues to defend her actions, are polite and don’t waste too much ink. I’m certain nobody would take advantage of the fact that the Sasha District Fair and Event Center’s contact page lists their phone and fax numbers, not to mention the email form below that.

Would be a shame if that information was to circulate far an wide, and ruin that despicable woman's easter holidays

I found the lawsuit filing. It is a work of art, brief and to the point. If you read nothing else, check out page 2, the section headed Nature of the Action. Magnificent.

And that’s why we give them flowers 🌸🌻🌹 Have a nice and colorful Easter 😊 (But please don’t gift any live animals, thank you) WEBTOON ~ INSTAGRAM 

filling out "does the dog die" entries for obscure westerns is wild bc u have to type out shit like this

so i asked a friend what was up and she replied with this and i feel like i’m in an episode of the twilight zone

Echoing the “What?” and augmenting it with a spray of scone crumbs because -

Well, because of several reasons, not least of which is that little detail of having the funeral…

Later.

When our hamster died in Wisconsin in the bleak midwinter we kept him in the freezer, and then, in early spring, when the snow and ice melted enough that the creek was running, we gave him a Viking Funeral on a small burning boat.