these middle schoolers are touring campus and one of them walked by me and said “hey what’s college life like” and i told him “it sucks” and he said “well it can’t be any worse than middle school.” he’s right
Take these words through your darkest hour, for though we maybe tired and hungry, at least we’re not in fucking middle school
last night I heard the strangest muffled snoring sound I’ve ever heard and I looked up to see my cat with his head completely folded underneath his body and I didn’t get a picture but here is my artist’s rendition
I recall at least one of you guys having worked with livestock animals. Why are cows so damn indestructible while horses keel over and die if mercury is in retrograde or a dog barked in Kazakhstan?
gettingvetted here.
Let me tell you a story about how livestock animals work.
In the beginning, God created the horse. God looked at the horse and saw that it was beautiful and strong. “However,” God said, “it breaks too easily.”
Then God created the cow. God looked at the cow and saw that it was more durable than the horse, and tasted good to boot. “However,” God said, “it poops too much.”
Then God created the goat. God looked at the goat and saw that it was perfect.
God looked around and saw that he still had some spare bits of fluff on his work table, but no brains to put into it. So then God created the sheep.
Now let me tell you what my equine surgery professor said on the first day of class.
“Horses are only interested in two things: homicide, and suicide.”
And that’s all you need to know about horses.
Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia
Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.
My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:
Horses don’t got enough toes.
So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:
They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.
But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well. Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides. Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM. So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses:
The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.
When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of... stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync. But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates. It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.
When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that. But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia. Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.
ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier. So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.
ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental. Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die”. The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.
TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.
if you’re sending me a photo of your cat with the caption “we think she’s an X mix, but wanted to hear your thoughts”, I am always going to respond the same way 😥
If you got your cat from anyone other than a breeder, it has no breed. This does not make it any less special. But every breed trait in cats was selected from the general populations very recently. Which means those traits are still present in the general non-breed population. Your pointed cat from the shelter is a domestic colorpoint. Your long haired tabby from craigslist is a domestic longhair. Your short-haired gray cat you found on the street is a domestic shorthair. Your short haired black cat with copper eyes you got from a friend of a friend is a domestic shorthair.
I work in a large shelter. I have, in the last 8 years, encountered exactly 2 cats that I can recall where I was like “yeah, that’s a mixed breed.” Those two were mixed with something brachycephalic (either persian/himy or exotic shorthair mixes). We’ve had a couple purebreds as strays, the vast majority of which were bengals. And one ‘munchkin’ that could just have easily been a case of dwarfism without having ever been part of the ‘breed’.
New Zealanders: Chill as Aussies, but with wildlife that assumes there are no natural predators so everything is friendly and fair game.
Keas on pop.
This cat strikes me as both fascinated by the sensation of the rain - the smell, sound, and feel of it - and completely mortified by the fact that it comes with being wet
This cat is like “I am enjoying approximately 75% of this experience but I’m not sure if it’s worth that other 25%”
i’m delighted to report that this cat is actually enjoying most of the experience. that’s a savannah, likely either an F1 or F2 and a nicely bred one at that; they tend to be pretty comfortable with water.
she’s just having fun <3
Close enough
Unrestrained summer fun
I’m not over this review of a self groomer for a three legged cat. Look at him. He hasn’t been able scratch his left side by himself since he lost his leg but now he can and he is living life the fullest. That is the face of a cat who has finally scratched an itch.
Stinklings.
Ibizan Hounds are believed to be one of the oldest breeds in existence. There are Ibizan-like hunting hounds depicted in Egyptian art dating back to 3100 BCE. After they were brought to the Balearic Islands from Egypt in the 8th and 9th centuries BCE, they remained isolated on the islands and unchanged for 2,000 years. For twenty centuries, Ibizan Hounds had a single task - to hunt rabbits.
It’s only been in the last 60 years or so that they’ve been brought off the islands and out of Spain. It should come as no surprise that these are still very primitive hounds with a near insatiable desire to hunt.
In case anyone is wondering what happened to the dinosaurs, here’s a baby blue heron
I threw a dog on the ground today 😭😭😭
I am embarrassed by how hard this made me laugh.
…..does this mean cat people hurl cats at the ground?
you just kind of… open ur arms and they sort themselves out. if you try and place them down they get mad and wiggle and make everything worse
some friends of mine have the most un-cat-ish cat i have ever met
my quintessential example of this:
i was holding him in my arms petting him while we were picking out what games to play that night. when we’d decided on a few, i needed to put the cat down in order to, you know, carry boxes. so i started letting him down, expecting that he’d eventually do the cat hop thing… but he never did.
i ended up lowering him all the way to the floor. and even then he never got his feet under him. i just sort of… plopped him down on his side as he stared up at me like a betrayed sack of flour.
I saw this so clearly in my mind and I’m never going to stop laughing at betrayed sack of flour.
Parasites are everywhere and these are the kind that crawl in your ears! Found these lovely ear mites in the ears of a ~6 week old kitten.
(pardon my hand, it's hard to shoot through one eyepiece on a microscope)
I'm a fully licensed baby vet now, so legally I can be left on my own, but it still scares the shit out of me. Which I have to face my fear next Thursday and Friday...
