The life and times of a legal adult

the "dire wolves are no longer extinct" stuff is gonna be the most annoyingly persistent science misinformation for the next decade at least

my theory is they went with dire wolves because it's the easiest pop culture-famous extinct animal to evoke. anything people would see as cool or notable enough to care about, like a dinosaur or a woolly mammoth or a dodo, is really hard to genetically edit into existence; the exception being dire wolves, which people both think of as an epic game of thrones fantasy creature that also looks exactly like a normal wolf (as opposed to a large bush dog that isn't that closely related to grey wolves)

here's a good article from New Scientist for anyone who wants it!

pi telling mom about his day

she’s sick of hearing about his day

Like his older brother before him, telling mom about his day

one thing i think about, when people cite the rate of program washouts as a deterrent for owner-training SDs, is that the desired population is very different

i have a friend who helps raise program puppies. the intended goal for these dogs is to need only sporadic retraining with the program--that the owner-handlers never need to provide any additional input to the dogs. this means that the dogs need to be absolutely bombproof and borderline incapable of behavioral variation by the time they go to being placed, because they're about to go 5-8 years with minimal external reinforcement for good behaviors.

whereas all the people i know who successfully (and i do realize this is a major limiting factor) owner-trained a service dog were pretty dog-nuts to begin with. they continually, constantly reinforced their dogs for various behaviors, some task-related, some not, and were able to get some really phenomenal results from dogs who in a program setting would have washed out on day 2.

and i'm not saying that any dog could make an owner-trained SD, and i'm not saying that a service dog is always the right answer. just that "only HALF of program dogs, bred and raised ENTIRELY FOR SERVICE WORK, become service dogs therefore your rando shelter pick will NEVER do it" is. a false equivalency at best.

yeah and -- the program puppies are also going to go to handlers who may or may not be very good at handling, good at timing, good at all manner of things. it is a very, very different audience. and some of that is that you're deliberately aiming for good enough with minimal support and training for anyone to handle, including often people who are literally not capable of getting timing down super well (motor disabilities will do that to you, as will anything that affects coordination or dissociation or any of a number of other things). you are aiming to do this very hard thing by just throwing sheer numbers of dogs at it, too: puppy raisers may or may not know what the hell they are doing (no shade, raising puppies is hard), and then you have a big wrenching stress of transitioning from puppy home to training kennel to placement, and then you have whether or not the dog decides at some point along the way that it isn't worth it, fuck this noise.

lots of working dogs absolutely could not handle this kind of handling. it is frankly quite impressive that so many retrievers pull it off so effectively, and IMO the fact that they do says powerful things about their biddability and drive in the face of a rough environment, partly as a function of their ability to hold up under historically rough handling in gundog kennels.

you do see some similar things in other working dogs, too; some of the trainers I have seen selling finished herding dogs talk about this, about creating dogs that are deliberately less sensitive and less fine-tuned who will do well with an indifferent handler vs keeping more sensitive dogs back for experienced handlers.

but... in a lot of ways, programs are designed around the idea of dogs as essentially fungible components in a huge system that will be doing a lot of work for indifferent reward. it is genuinely really impressive that so many dogs move through service programs and turn out as functional dogs as it is. but there's just straight up not a ton of comparison between program needs and owner-trainer needs, IMO: programs run on volume of dogs, and they often do wash for things an owner-trainer could benefit from taking the time to fix and rehab because programs always have more dogs to choose from.

yeah 100%.

I forget who said it (Turid Rugaas comes to mind?) that dogs learn to live with us not because of our training but in spite of it.

I think this is particularly true for program dogs (of any flavor - service, detection, bitework, etc) where we need them to do their job with unskilled and occasionally uncooperative handlers, under every possible condition, for years, with delayed, missing, or inconsistent reinforcement. It's a situation where we have to mass-produce dogs and then very strongly select for dogs with a genetic tendency to do what we want, because it's simply not viable to train them all to do it to the standards required.

but this post was prompted by people (mostly on Facebook, occasionally on tumblr) saying that people owner-training should look at standards for program dogs, they should be prepared to wash dogs, they shouldn't even consider a rescue, they should generally only look at retrievers and maybe poodles, and like... okay but "a good program service dog" and "a good service dog for me" are NOT the same thing.

I didn’t see this in the notes yet. So. If you crash cars with someone. You stop, you pull over to the side if you can, you don’t leave. If someone is hurt or crying, call 911 or your emergency number. Never hurts to get checked out. You write down the other person’s license plate and car make and model and colour, and get their driver’s license number. You write down what happened and how it happened. If you both can drive and no one is hurt you can go after exchanging information (don’t try to agree on what happened. Don’t make deals with the person.)

When you get home, call your car insurance provider. Describe the damage to your car and any injuries and how it happened. They’ll ask for the info I told you to get above.

You’ll probably have to take your car to a registered provider who can get an insurance approved quote for repairs.

See your doctor if you are still shaky after a couple of hours. Whiplash gets worse for the first few days so you might think you’re fine but when the adrenaline wears off, you’re not. Symptoms include headache dizziness nausea as well as neck and back pain.

If you see an accident happen, don’t leave. Be the one to call the emergency number if people are injured or not getting out of their car and walking around. Give your phone number and name to both people or to the emergency providers and expect a call from the insurance company. They’ll ask you to tell them what you saw. Be honest.

Drive safe out there, and be prepared. You can call your dad later and he’ll be so proud of you for handling it.

hello dealing with this stuff is a big part of my job actually so rather than hide my thoughts in the tags I'm gonna actually post them

all of the above is great advice! here is some more:

a lot of this sounds like very obvious common sense, but a car accident can be very rattling. memorize this NOW so it's routine when the worst happens and panic makes your brain shut off.

I can't tell you how grateful I am to the random mom in the Dodgers gear who literally blocked southbound traffic on the 5 for me an hour before first pitch, a quarter mile before the exit for the stadium, and helped when I got clipped by a motorcyclist out of nowhere. she had places to be and her kids with her and she took a full twenty minutes to make sure someone else called 911 so she could stay with me and say things like "make sure you get a picture of his license, honey" and coach me through every step.

be that person for yourself. be that person for someone else.

The Crushing Weight of Not Knowing If There Is a Task

im starting to think this crushing weight is not about the tasks

heat #3 and it remains hysterical that Hazard's response to "intact female swings her butt in my face and does everything but put out signs saying she's interested" is to curl his lips at K'seil and tell her to find a different hobby

he has literally never humped her. 3 heats, zero separation, he has never humped her.

he will, however, flip her on her back and growl in her face for being too obviously flirty with him.

Reminds me of this:

How Mexicans feel about duendes too.

True. Most Irish people, as Norwegians do with Trolls, will happily let the 'fairies' be a thing to make tours for tourists and idle threats to make children behave. Most Irish people will have a very normal and mature explanation of fairies as a common folk mythology that expresses some dimension of Irish culture but are not, obviously, to be taken literally.

And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with 'absolutely fucking not'.

Construction projects have had to halt and be abandoned for it.

If Jane Bennet was the narrator of Pride and Prejudice, we'd have a new type of unreliable narrator that I can't personally think of any examples of in literature (though they are common in real life) where the person is too nice to describe immoral and/or foolish characters and their motives accurately.

duel

theres a distinct difference between Katniss’s and Haymitch’s narration style that i think a lot of other people are noticing and it is that haymitch seems to know a lot more about District 12 and Panem than Katniss seemed to. and SotR might seem like lore dropping or name dropping but like. i think it says a lot about them as people.

I think the lack of context we get from Katniss isnt just due to propaganda, but largely due to the fact that she’s so deeply rooted in poverty and survival mode that she simply doesn’t have the mental capacity for anything else. When traumatized, our brains automatically retain less information than they ordinarily would and we see that with Katniss. Not for friends, or school, nor propagandized television lore. Notice how we get descriptions of most tributes before she remembers their names, if she ever does, while Haymitch actually remembers a lot of their names right off the bat. When you’re fighting for your life every day, it really doesn’t leave much energy for anything else. She’s used to saving all of her energy for providing for her family.

But Haymitch isn’t providing for his family. He has several friends, a healthy romantic relationship, and retains information about society because hes not neglected.

It’s just so interesting that Katniss is the luckier of the pair because in their childhood parallels, she drew the short stick compared to him. She’s only luckier cuz she had him.

btw I hope y’all Americans know that you weren’t doing charity when you were giving Ukraine weapons to defend itself. You are literally obligated to do so by the treaty signed in 1994 when you made Ukraine turn over its nuclear weapons to fucking Russia!!!!!!

reblog if its friday and you made it