There are certain stories told around the campfire that transcend
from whispered words to pure legend. There are also tales retold in the
veterinary sphere, obscuring confidential client details of course,
which seem unbelievable at first but certainly happened somewhere, some
time.
This is one of them.
Once upon a time, a young family had a black and white cat named Sox. They had absolutely been planing to desex and microchip Sox, but life unfortunately got busy and Sox went missing before they could get this done.
After a week of searching, they very luckily found Sox at the pound. Sox was desexed and microchipped before being released, and they gladly took their cat home.
Looking like he’d spent the last week inside a rock tumbler, this Rose’s rain frog [Breviceps rosei] was found in a pond in Kommetjie, in the Western Cape province of South Africa, by iSpot user Sally.
Aspartame is one of my worst triggers too. Haven’t touched it in over a decade because the migraines I get are so horrific from it. Glad you figured it out 💖
There are so many people who talk about how aspartame fucks up their bodies, it’s common knowledge it fucks up the stomach after a while… But the doctors here INSIST that all the diabetics are wrong and imagine it bc they haven’t heard of any side-effects, side-effects that weren’t screened for to begin with. The food safety authorities said it was fine when it was launched so nothing new need to be known apparently.
I fucking hate hate HATE aspartame. It ruins what it touches.
I tend to regard it as the current nicotine blunder of the medical world, in that doctors used to prescribe smoking as a treatment for tuberculosis and asthma, and now with hindsight that knowledge makes our hair stand on end at how emphatically wrong and harmful that is.
I saw an article a while ago that showed a link between aspartame in hot beverages being a possible seizure trigger, and about lost my mind cause my brother who has epilepsy puts it in his coffee all the time. He’s had a substantial decrease in headaches, tremors and other seizure related problems since he switched back to sugar and started avoiding it as much as possible in readymade foods.
It’s also off the top of my head, not recommended for people taking medication for schizophrenia for the same reason, because the phenylalanine in the aspartame can worsen some side effects of neuroleptic drugs. But a lot of people don’t seem to realize or have been told this by their doctors, and only find out once they’ve got down the rabbit hole of research on their own. And that is profoundly shit.
Anyway, yes. Hating aspartame being a common ingredient is a hill I’m ready to die on.
You know, asparatame has always just absolutely wrecked my GI tract, even if it’s just a tiny bit. Just, sent me into full on ‘curl up and whimper and drink Pepto Bismol right out of the bottle’ cramps and also, yes, sometimes triggered headaches.
I found out after I was diagnosed with Crohn’s that this is pretty common for people with Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, and it can worsen damage in IBD patients systems. One of the things the doc told me is “No asparatame for you ever.”
Which was fine, because I already avoided it like the plague, but yeah. Asparatame is the Devil.
It all starts in the mid 1960’s with a company called G.D. Searle. One of their chemists accidentally creates aspartame while trying to create a cure for stomach ulcers. Searle decides to put aspartame through a testing process which eventually leads to its approval by the FDA. Not long after, serious health effects begin to arise and G.D. Searle comes under fire for their testing practices. It is revealed that the testing process of Aspartame was among the worst the investigators had ever seen and that in fact the product was unsafe for use. Aspartame triggers the first criminal investigation of a manufacturer put into place by the FDA in 1977. By 1980 the FDA bans aspartame from use after having 3 independent scientists study the sweetener. It was determined that one main health effects was that it had a high chance of inducing brain tumors. At this point it was clear that aspartame was not fit to be used in foods and banned is where it stayed, but not for long.
Early in 1981 Searle Chairman Donald Rumsfeld (who is a former Secretary of Defense.. surprise surprise) vowed to “call in his markers,” to get it approved. January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, Searle took the steps to re-apply aspartame’s approval for use by the FDA. Ronald Reagans’ new FDA commissioner Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the board of inquiry’s decision. It did not take long for the panel to decide 3-2 in favor of maintaining the ban of aspartame. Hull then decided to appoint a 6th member to the board, which created a tie in the voting, 3-3. Hull then decided to personally break the tie and approve aspartame for use. Hull later left the FDA under allegations of impropriety, served briefly as Provost at New York Medical College, and then took a position with Burston-Marsteller. Burstone-Marstella is the chief public relations firm for both Monsanto and GD Searle. Since that time he has never spoken publicly about aspartame.
It is clear to this point that if anything the safety of aspartame is incredibly shaky. It has already been through a process of being banned and without the illegitimate un-banning of the product, it would not be being used today. Makes you wonder how much corruption and money was involved with names like Rumsfeld, Reagan and Hull involved so heavily. In 1985, Monsanto decides to purchase the aspartame patent from G.D. Searle. Remember that Arthur Hull now had the connection to Monsanto. Monsanto did not seem too concerned with the past challenges and ugly image aspartame had based on its past. I personally find this comical as Monsanto’s products are banned in many countries and of all companies to buy the product they seem to fit best as they are champions of producing incredibly unsafe and untested products and making sure they stay in the market place.
Thank you for taking the time to type this up and post a link @heyheyvey I knew some of this but not the how and the why it got out back on the market. And now I’m even angrier haha.
It’s a good question! Since I’ve never worked directly with ambassador animals, I reached out to a couple contacts who work in program animal departments at accredited zoos and the president of the Feline Conservation Federation.
Cheetah are very behaviorally different from all of the other big cats. They’re designed to out-sprint their food, not ambush it. This means two things: they’re less likely to pounce on interesting things (while not outside of their behavioral repertoire, cheetahs generally hunt by swatting the legs out from under their prey), and their survival strategy / response to stress is to flee rather than fight. While they’re still strong wild predators, these behavioral tendencies make them a lot less dangerous to work with in a professional free-contact capacity than tigers and lions.
In addition, a major reason zoos will do public walks with cheetahs over other big cats is that a full grown cheetah can be physically stopped by two able-bodied adults. That’s why you always see cheetahs in public with at least two handlers holding separate leashes, and even then there’s almost always a trained backup present. There’s no similar possibility for using the weight of humans to physically control an emerging situation when working with other big cat species. (As an added note, since cheetah claws don’t retract, they’re naturally dulled by running – they’re still plenty injurious, but not the primary weapon they are on other species of felid).
And lastly, cheetahs are highly tractable. I don’t think we know exactly why they do so well – I’ve seen it attributed to their timid tendencies, but that’s not the whole story – but cheetahs that are hand-raised well frequently become stellar ambassador animals. The addition of companion dogs improves even further upon their calm demeanor, but isn’t necessary for a well-raised and trained cheetah to be calm and confident in new situations and around the public in situations when no other adult felid would be an appropriate choice. (Young clouded leopards are often ambassador animals as well, since the species is most successful in human care when hand-raised, but few zoos continue doing programs with adults).
How zoos and outreach organizations are able to bring cheetahs and clouded leopards in public is basically up to the discretion of the facility’s USDA inspector. The animal welfare act regulates the specs of their permanent home, but what public forays require are decided on a case-by-case by case basis with each facility. Generally, there is at least one physical barrier of some sort between the public and the cats at all times – but sometimes the public is simply kept at a safe difference, such as during presentations that take place on a stage or in an amphitheater. It’s worth noting that even the much more stringent standards for felids proposed in the Big Cat Public Safety Act (which I flatly do not support because it’s a misleading, biased, and badly written piece of legislation) contain exemptions that allow facilities to continue using cheetahs and clouded leopards as ambassador animals.
Compare what cheetahs normally eat to what other large cats normally eat. Cheetahs mostly go after small prey, smaller than humans. When they catch their prey, they swat its legs out and bite its throat, they aren’t designed to rip at prey like lions do. I don’t think a cheetah could accidentally kill a person unless it was trying to playfight and the situation was allowed to go much, much too far. And I have no way to confirm this, but I imagine a cheetah, being a smaller, weaker, more timid animal, would be much easier to fight off if it did actually attack a person and was in a situation with no one else to fend it off.
Basically, they’re smaller, they’re more timid, they’re easily trainable, they mostly hunt smaller food, and they aren’t aggressive.
Are they really interchangeable? I have only heard/used “hyperfocus” as a verb. I wouldn’t consider washing dishes, measuring the accuracy of pipettes, or painting small details to be “special interests”, but in the moment, I can completely fixate upon the actions and can get lost in them for many hours.
They’re definitely not the same thing. People may hyperfocus on a special interest, but you can have one without the other.
Fish will “grow with the size of the tank” in the same way that your feet will grow with the size of your shoes.
Fish in too-small tanks will stunt. Their bones and musculature stop growing, but their internal organs keep growing. You can tell when a fish has been in a too-small tank for too long because its stomach and eyes will be bulging and the eyes will be too large. This will eventually kill them as their organs crush against each other.
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