A Sailor Who Lacks a Boat

The kid truly care about our planet more than adults and politicians

what is “lore”

my friends: haha hey whats up we havent talked in a while

me:

i’m obsessed with this painting called tomato king and i’m even more obsessed with the man who drew it. his name is stuart dunkel and he is a classical oboeist and he also paints tiny little oil paintings of mice living their best lives. he looks like this.

HELL YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YOU TELLING ME THIS IS THE MICE WITH JELLYBEANS ARTISTMAN LOOKING EXACTLY HOW I IMAGINED SOMEONE WHO PAINTS MICE WITH JELLYBEANS WOULD LOOK???

have you guys ever wondered why there aren’t “shirtless cop calendars” the way they do for firemen? i don’t think it’s the dunkin donuts

my best guess is they don’t want you to see all the swastikas

The spiritual successor to Miette

Might I also add

May i add the piece from artist Verbal Vomit

Glad to see we’re all in agreement that cats talk like disparaged victorian children

I am so incredibly glad we finally moved on from "i can has". Cats are clearly smart enough for advanced sentence structure and dumb enough to draw entirely incorrect conclusions about what they're talking about.

My cat, banging the cabnet door over and over and over: bang bang bang

Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.

My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang

Me: ksst!

My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she's been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!

Me: ok

My cat, after waiting about 3 minutes: bang bang bang

Can haz snackytreat

(source)

Source

world heritage post

Here is a book titled “The Pleasing Trees Of St Kew” - St Kew is a civil parish area in Cornwall, in England. It’s a very pleasant book listing all the trees the author particularly likes in that area. There are quite a lot of them.

This was for sale in the National Trust second-hand bookshop in Boscastle, England.

U know what, ur right gatobob

Super detailed painting, truly stunning

you PAINT miette?! you paint miette like the WALL??

i took his chair and he’s been staring at me for more than 10 minutes

for a hot second there I thought “he” was that bearded doll thing perched on the stairs and ngl I nearly pissed myself

i was watching futurama with my friend last night and it glitched out so bad i got the best screenshot ever .

when you remember an important task while going to bed at 3am

The shelter where I volunteer got some new hissy babies and we were making progress with socialization yesterday.

Play video, sound on.

There was this old lady who lived across the street and cats would just appear at her house. They’d never really be seen again, and she had a cat of her own with a collar and all who never really left the house but would spend most of the day by the bay window. But the rest were just a revolving door of random cats. Which naturally meant kittens would pop up too.

So one time when I was doing my high school volunteer hours at this animal shelter, she showed up and said she had some kittens to drop off and some to pick up. I thought it was weird but I figured she fostered them and so I assumed she fostered cats and that explained the amount of random cats I’d see at her place (turns out she’d lure strays in for spaying/neutering and then take them to shelters around the area for socializing and ideally adoption).

So she dropped off three extremely socialized and friendly kittens that I guess she had picked up 2 days prior. And then grabbed a kennel thing with five feral-ass kittens one of the donors found near a dumpster.

I had seen them earlier but the day manager told me they had just gotten them the day before and they had not been socialized because they were waiting for “the expert”. And I guess that was this lady. So she puts on these thick black gloves and goes “Sweetheart can you hold this for me? I gotta prep the babies”, and I held the kennel still while this woman just 100% no fear sticks her hand in there and grabs a kitten that is NOT happy about it. She then grabbed it by the head gently, wrapped a tea towel or some type of cloth thing around it, and then laid it down to do something that was like equal parts origami fold and burrito roll?? Idek. Point is the kitten was PISSED. But it couldn’t move or anything because she wrapped it and secured the wrap with one of them big old timey baby pins. And she did it to the others as well. It didn’t even take her 5 minutes lmaooo. Then she put them back in the kennel and went home.

I asked the manager about it and he said “Oh yeah she’ll be here in 2 days to drop them off. She has a M E T H O D.” And just as he said she showed up two days later, with 5 perfectly friendly kittens in tow!

I didn’t ask because I assumed she was a witch and also I didn’t care, but I had mad respect for her 😂

I wish to meet this woman and also to learn from her so that I can do this magic

Kitty really went like ggggrrrrrr

@mozzy-o shouldn’t you like, NOT pet a kitty that’s doing a hiss and angry noises? Isn’t that a BAD idea? why weren’t these babies biting her?

@landscapers-against-fascism good question!!!!

Sometimes we obvs have to handle kitties/other animals that don’t want us to for things like medical issues/getting them to a safer location/etc. - when that’s done obvs the kindest thing is to minimize their stress however we can (providing hiding areas/touching only as necessary or invited by the animal/using rewards and distracted/etc)

This isn’t that. This is “flooding” for the purpose of “learned helplessness”.

Flooding is basically providing a whole lot of the stimuli the animal finds overwhelming/aversive until they’ve become desensitized to it, essentially stacking triggers in a way that overwhelms the animal’s senses and they become desensitized to them.

Learned helplessness is the process through which an animal (or person) is forced into experiencing a stimulus while the means of reaction or escape are removed from them. They can’t engage with that fight/flight response regardless of how much pressure is applied, their appeasement behaviors or reactions etc. are completely ignored while they are forced to comply with the stimulus until they give up and no longer react since reaction/any appeasement or other behaviors have never gotten them away from or stopped the stimulus

Read more here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dogtrainingnation.com/dog-training/dealing-with-learned-helplessness/amp/

The downsides: it’s a very easy way for someone to get hurt (human or animal).

It also doesn’t teach the animal an APPROPRIATE response or make them less fearful of the trigger- if anything they’re more afraid of it, they just can’t get away.

It also removes a lot of the warning signals we should actually appreciate like appeasement behaviors or hissing/growling/small nips or swats. They’ve learned that those behaviors don’t do anything/don’t help, so they are much more likely to escalate to a much more dangerous or larger behavior they haven’t tried yet with minimal warning - like a full on fight for survival/major bite. This is how you get people saying “they have no warning before they attacked, the dog/cat bit out of nowhere”. It’s just categorically false. They always give some sort of behavior signal, and if not it’s only because it was drilled out repeatedly. Taking the smoke alarms out of the fire detector to stop the beeping isn’t going to put out the fire.

Of course the caveat is that it can be much faster than truly doing the work through more ethical methods with a more solid behavioral base, since you can just go right in and throw everything at the animal directly. That might be a very real factor when dealing with young animals going through socialization periods/adoptions/all sorts of shit in a short period of time. For some things the flooding might be “minor” in that WEEEEEE know it ultimately won’t hurt the animal and they’re not actually at risk and it may actually feel nice for the animal - but the cat doesn’t know the pat isn’t going to hurt/that petting is what the human wants and we’re not a scary monster gonna eat em. This kitten is doing everything possible to say “please don’t eat me and please don’t make me fight u” and be a nice kitty.

An alternative would be to counter-condition the negative stimulus by creating beneficial associations with it. Providing rewards for incompatable behaviors re-enforces what the CORRECT response should be and decreases the cause for stress as the animal associates the stimulus with things it likes and being able to choose to interact

Spot on information here! This type of “socialization” was done under the guidance of the previous director of the rescue.

The new director practices positive reinforcement techniques and retrained all of us so we can socialize kittens without potentially traumatizing them. It sometimes takes longer, but they’re absolutely MUCH happier without the learned helplessness that this method fosters.

This video (and the two following it) shows how Ginger went from attacking people to trusting humans again through the use of positive reinforcement and humans respecting her boundaries.

Thank you again for correcting the outdated “socialization” style of the original post!

Disinfecting Pericles who died from the plague in 429 B.C.

It’s a little late now.

Hey. Things are going to get better.

You cannot prevent it.

Yes I am threatening you with a good time.