please just like get this thru your heads when consuming internet animal content. there is NO other animal that moves its mouth into a smile to indicate happiness in the same way human beings do.
even to chimpanzees, which are our closest living relatives, a standard human smile is an indicator of aggression in their body language. on that note, for MOST animals opening your mouth and showing teeth in a way we would consider a “smile” is an act of fear or aggression.
do not assume that an animal “smiling” means that it is happy or safe. a single photo of an animal “smiling” is not necessarily a red flag but content that wholly relies on the notion of “aww look it’s smiling” is very much suspicious
First principles are boiling a medical problem down to it’s simplest, most basic components. You might not know how to treat every possible condition in every species, because there are a huge amount of different species, but you do have that knowledge in other species and so you can boil things down and extrapolate back.
I’ve discussed using first principles before here, but I don’t think there is a hard and fast list of what they are.
Classic examples would be seeing a condition in a species of bird that you don’t normally treat, but you’ve seen the condition in other species. You can extrapolate because the two species are close enough, but you can’t ever be certain, and with many exotic species there just isn’t huge amounts of drug data to draw from.
So if you want to go back to very basic first principles, you might ask yourself:
Is the patient alive?
What species is it most similar to?
Has it got trauma?
Is it vomiting?
Is it under conditioned?
What does it eat? Is it eating?
And so on for progressively more directed, focused questions.
I’ve been posting weekly photo-fiction to my new tumblr, The Shortest Story, and I thought I’d share some of my favorites so far. If you enjoy this, consider reblogging or following on Tumblr, Facebook, Tapas or Instagram!
look, fandom as a whole certainly has its own built-in biases and problems that need to be addressed
but like
every so often i think about all of the deep, nurturing lifelong friendships that only ever happened because one day two internet strangers were like ‘oh hey, we agree on which fictional characters should kiss!’
people who are right now helping each other survive via connections they initially forged by liking the same sailor moon girl or something
the internet is a goddamn garbage pit but it is also a goddamn miracle
It’s not much, but please allow me to bless your dashboard with a tiny Scarecrow playing in a pile of leaves. Hroo hraa!~ Wishing everyone a good October and a fantastic day. 😉
I always speak along with this animation whenever it crosses my dash, and while I love yelling the “HROO!” and “HRAA!”, my favourite part is making his little grunts and mutterings as he cleans up his leaves before hiding away in his pile again.
In “The Haribo Check,” aired on German public broadcast ARD, a documentary team audits Haribo’s supply chain and finds “modern day slaves” in Brazil working to harvest carnauba wax, a key ingredient in the sweets: the plantations pay $12/day, and workers (including children) sleep out of doors, drink unfiltered river water, and have no access to toilets, under conditions that a Brazilian Labor Ministry official called “modern-day slavery.”
Meanwhile, the gelatin that goes into Haribo sweets comes from suppliers to the agri-giant Westfleisch, whose pigs are pen-raised, with open sores and abscesses, wallowing in excrement, crammed up against animals that had died of mistreatment.
Silvery coho salmon are as much a part of Washington state as its flag. The fish has a sacred place
in the diets and rituals of the state’s indigenous peoples, beckons to
tourists who flock to watch its migration runs, and helps to sustain a
multimillion-dollar Pacific Northwest fishing industry.
So
watching the species die in agony is distressing: Adult coho have been
seen thrashing in shallow fresh waters, males appear disoriented as they
swim, and females are often rolled on their backs, their insides
still plump with tiny red eggs that will never hatch.
“Coho
have not done well where a lot of human activity impacts their
habitat,” said Nat Scholz, a research zoologist for the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration. That’s to say the least.
A recent study traced
a major coho salmon die-off to contaminants from roads and automobiles —
brake dust, oil, fuel, chemical fluids — that hitch a ride on storm
water and flow into watersheds. The contaminants are so deadly, they
kill the salmon within 24 hours…
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 