#The was a vent on this post

[miloway]

Not my video, from kallimaraki on tiktok

[gayvampyr]

no offense but you guys need to learn the difference between someone implying their experience is universal and a post simply just not being about you

[miitopia-cake]

me looking for ace/aro characters: lets go gambling!

[character's sex repulsion is used for jokes] aw dang it

[character is put in sexual situations despite disliking it] aw dang it

[character's identity is ignored by fandom] aw dang it

[characters creators sexualize them] aw dang it

[aro character gets 'fixed' by true love] aw dang it

[aro/ace character is literally an animal] aw dang it

[creator messes up definition of asexuality] aw dang it

[characters asexuality is never brought up in media] aw dang it

[reikacchan]

don't give up

[echoesoftheinfinite]

Talking to those who understand you is valuable; perhaps that's why I've spent half my life talking to myself.

[kitkinnie]

on colors and being different and not being enough for yourself

(please reblog instead of liking)

[punkitt-is-here]

transgender online

[komodocloud]

do you guys ever feel like an outcast even in a group full of outcasts. like i'm autistic and even in groups full of neurodivergent people i'm still excluded sometimes. i don't understand why

[youmegravity]

Pet peeve: people online will act disgusted by the term "ageplay" because they don't actually care to read what it means and assume the worst and then turn around and call a pretty woman "dommy mommy" when that is literally ageplay

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

[aesrot]

shout out to people who's family isnt entirely bad or entirely good, but something in between and you dont know how to feel about them. you feel angry but you also feel guilty, because you know they genuinely love and care about you, but sometimes they show it in a way you know its not okay. your feelings are valid, your anger and sadness and grief are valid, and you dont have to prove this to no one. bigger shout out to those with memory issues who know something isnt right but can't recall all of the bad events, only the feelings, which only increases the guilt.

[horreurscopes]

i do not have and will never have an iphone but i've been watching hugh jeffrey's videos where he keeps exposing apple's cartoonishly evil anti-repair practices and whatever you think they are doing to keep people purchasing new devices, it is astonishingly worse.

jeffrey's releases videos every time there's a new iphone where he tries to switch parts between two brand new, straight-from-the-store working phones and shows how apple has serialized the internal components so multiple phone functions are disabled when a part with a different serial number is put inside it, effectively killing third party repair, as well as scraping non-functioning phones for parts, while iOS deceptively claims that it is a third party part and it is locking the phone for "safety" purposes.

apple was also exposed recently for not only shredding half a million traded-in phones, but taking the company they were hiring to do so to court for failing to destroy products and instead selling some of them on the side 💀

this video jeffrey posted a month ago puts side to side the claims an apple technician gave at a legislative hearing when speaking against oregon's right to repair bill, and jefferey himself demonstrating that they were, well, lying out of their ass. it doesn't have nearly enough views imo so i'm sharing it here.

in short: stop buying apple products if you care about the right to repair, reducing e-waste and human rights.

the exploitation of cobalt mines in congo is fueling the fire of genocide; people are dying in the thousands in subhuman slavery conditions every day while apple does everything in their power to stop people from repairing and re-selling their products while claiming they are committed to reducing e-waste.

we need to be committing acts of t[redacted]ism against corporate greed but in the meantime withholding your consumer power is the bare minimum

[evilkitten3]

extremely unsexy of adhd to make me both very annoying and very sensitive to the concept of being perceived as annoying

[unknowinglydeceasedlol]

I genuinely mourn the person I could have been.

[strategypillar]

Some randoms from procreate.

[m0nsterm0vie]