Sea dog surf rider makes me smile!

(Image from FB)

Never piss off a seal woman. Ever.

From Hakai, a story of a Seal Woman, aka Selkie.

Let’s start with the moral of this story: never piss off a seal woman. Ever.

Seal people—Selkies—are seal-human hybrids in the folklore of Irish, Scottish, Icelandic, and Faroese cultures. These mythological creatures live in the water as seals and, in some stories, come ashore once a year to human it up for a day. They flop out of the water and slip out of their fur, revealing their white, gleaming skin. And they dance. (Flamenco. Rumba. Disco. No one really knows what they dance, just that they’ve got feet for a day and they want to boogie.)

Read the rest of the story by Jude Isabella here.

And, if you've never seen The Secret of Roan Inish, treat yourself!

Just because...dogs and horses

 Image was taken from FB.

I love horses and I love Border Collies.  I live with one and would love to know more about the other.

Here's who I live with:

Her name is Kylie and she will be 10 years old in December.  She's a very good girl who is also known by other names, Mrs. Good Puppy and Baby Kylie being the most common.

I love horses - I don't know much about them, but I love them.  I have ridden them when I was a young teenager at summer camp in Canada many years ago.  I love the way they smell and the velvety feel of their noses.  I love the unfathomable depth of their eyes and their exquisite bodies.

It amazes me that they allow humans to ride them, what with them being prey animals.  It disturbs me greatly to see how they are treated as commodities in the racing world, as "beasts of burdens" around the world and in this country and how the BLM terrorizes our wild Mustangs on public land at the behest of ranchers who graze their cattle on our land for pennies or nothing.  It deeply bothers me that men have taken them, along with dogs, into their stupid and meaningless wars.  And I am extremely horrified that pregnant mares are used for Premarin, an estrogen and hormone replacement drug for women:

The mares are repeatedly impregnated, and for six months of each 11-month pregnancy most are confined in stalls that prohibit turning around, grooming themselves and comfortably lying down. Their water intake is often regulated to produce maximum estrogen-rich urine. The mares are continually attached to plumbing which is designed to fit over their urethras. It is held in place with movement-restricting body straps. When mares can no longer adequately "produce," most are sold for slaughter. Most of their surviving foals are either pulled and raised as "Pee Line" replacements or slaughtered for food in China.

Dogs and horses have been with humans for so many years...

 

When and why did we get to be so cruel and callous towards them - towards so many animals, the environment and towards each other?  

Will humans ever feel part of Nature again or will they continue to think that they are in control of Nature, not part of Her?

There may be flowing water on Mars. But is there intelligent life on Earth?

Think of what would change if we valued terrestrial water as much as we value the possibility of water on Mars. Only 3% of the water on this planet is fresh; and of that, two-thirds is frozen. Yet we lay waste to the accessible portion. Sixty per cent of the water used in farming is needlessly piddled away by careless irrigation. Rivers, lakes and aquifers are sucked dry, while what remains is often so contaminated that it threatens the lives of those who drink it. In the UK, domestic demand is such that the upper reaches of many rivers disappear during the summer. Yet still we install clunky old toilets and showers that gush like waterfalls.

As for salty water, of the kind that so enthrals us when apparently detected on Mars, on Earth we express our appreciation with a frenzy of destruction. A new report suggests fish numbers have halved since 1970. Pacific bluefin tuna, which once roamed the seas in untold millions, have been reduced to an estimated 40,000, yet still they are pursued. Coral reefs are under such pressure that most could be gone by 2050. And in our own deep space, our desire for exotic fish rips through a world scarcely better known to us than the red planet’s surface. Trawlers are now working at depths of 2,000 metres. We can only guess at what they could be destroying.
...
Let the market decide: this is the way in which governments seek to resolve planetary destruction. Leave it to the conscience of consumers, while that conscience is muted and confused by advertising and corporate lies. In a near-vacuum of information, we are each left to decide what we should take from other species and other people, what we should allocate to ourselves or leave to succeeding generations. Surely there are some resources and some places – such as the Arctic and the deep sea – whose exploitation should simply stop?

All this drilling and digging and trawling and dumping and poisoning – what is it for, anyway? Does it enrich human experience, or stifle it? A couple of weeks ago I launched the hashtag #extremecivilisation, and invited suggestions. They have flooded in. Here are just a few of the products my correspondents have found. All of them, as far as I can tell, are real.

An egg tray for your fridge that syncs with your phone to let you know how many eggs are left. A gadget for scrambling them – inside the shell. Wigs for babies, to allow “baby girls with little or no hair at all the opportunity to have a beautifully realistic hair style”.The iPotty, which permits toddlers to keep playing on their iPads while toilet training. A £2,000 spider-proof shed. A snow sauna, on sale in the United Arab Emirates, in which you can create a winter wonderland with the flick of a switch. A refrigerated watermelon case on wheels: indispensable for picnics – or perhaps not, as it weighs more than the melon. Anal bleaching cream, for… to be honest, I don’t want to know. An “automatic watch rotator” that saves you the bother of winding your luxury wrist-candy. A smartphone for dogs, with which they can take pictures of themselves. Pre-peeled bananas, in polystyrene trays covered in clingfilm; just peel back the packaging.

Every year, clever new ways of wasting stuff are devised, and every year we become more inured to the pointless consumption of the world’s precious resources. With each subtle intensification, the baseline of normality shifts. It should not be surprising to discover that the richer a country becomes, the less its people care about their impacts on the living planet.

 Read the entire Guardian article here.

Trapping = cruelty, pain and torture

Lisa Robertson

Furbearer hunting and trapping season begins on Oct 1 - April 30 (bobcats - Nov 15 - Mar 1). Just when our Wyoming bobcats are the most vulnerable, they will be trapped and killed in legholds, snares, and conibears, suffering immeasurable pain, just for their fur.

We can make the choice to stop the cruelty and let these animals live - it's a simple choice - don't buy or wear fur.

Compassion is the fashion!

Photo by Chris Lorenz

Image and text from FB.

Shades of "No one could have predicted..."

Save The East Bay Hills

In addition to increasing the risk of another devastating fire, the City of Oakland's deforestation/poisoning plan will also expose citizens to large amounts of dangerous chemicals, exacerbate climate change by releasing 17,495 metric tons of greenhouse gases into our environment, poison, displace and kill wildlife (including several protected species), radically alter the appearance and therefore the experience afforded by our public recreation areas, threaten homeowners values by degrading the aesthetics upon which those values depend, eliminate erosion control for hillside homes, result in (according to FEMA) “significant alternation of community character,” as well as cause a variety of other harms that FEMA admits are “unavoidable."

Read a letter to the Oakland City Attorney urging the City to rethink the dangerous policy: http://goo.gl/hfr7U0

This is a subject close to my heart.  I lived in the Bay Area for 30 years and to even THINK that this kind of measure is on the table is beyond my wildest nightmares.  The Bay Area has been the "greenest" places I've lived - people were very concerned about the environment.  It is heartbreaking and horrifying to me that this concern is dying and/or being overridden by political and corporate decisions that do not respect the environment or the people.

I happened to have lived in the area when the Oakland-East Bay Hills Fire occurred.  Eucalyptus trees were NOT the problem - the wind was very strong that day; the fire department thought it had the original fire completely doused - they did not; narrow streets crowded with cars prevented fire trucks from getting to the area; fittings for the hydrants did not work; the fire department ran out of water; there was no "perimeter" set by the fire department; there was no evacuation order.  None of which was the fault of eucalyptus trees.

The letter that Nathan has written (linked above) is lengthy but spells out why clear cutting these trees will not prevent another fire, and, in fact, will exacerbate a fire if one starts.  The grasses are the fuel, not the trees.

In addition to the clear cutting, other problems arise: the use of glyphosate (Monsanto's RoundUp) in very large doses - it is a carcinogen; the welfare of the wildlife who live in the area being clear cut; no trees to sequester carbon; home values decreased.  It is such a bad decision overall and it is beyond comprehension how it can be implemented.

Image is from here - the article is worth reading, too.

What price coconuts?

Nathan Winograd

Did an abused monkey pick your coconut?

Agile and adept climbers, pig-tailed macaques—native to coconut growing regions in Southeast Asia—are capable of harvesting several hundred more coconuts a day than a human can. Chained by the neck and trained to pick only ripe coconuts, they are forced to do so, day in, day out and all day long. They are trained at monkey training facilities one visitor described as such, “The primitive, primate campus, a simple, open sided shed,” contains, “individual, meter high stakes, driven into the dirt floor… Onto each perch is tethered a solitary monkey by collar and chain. There are a dozen such perches, each one just out of reach of its neighbor.”

During training and beyond, the monkeys are tethered or caged 24/7, sometimes with little to no opportunity for socialization. Where do these monkeys come from? According to one monkey handler, “Sometimes the monkeys are offspring of berok (already trained monkeys); sometimes they are caught on the forest with nets or traps. Often though, nursing mothers are shot and their babies are taken.”

Unfortunately, much of the reporting you will find on this issue approaches it from a disturbing “entertainment” angle in which the subjugation and forced labor of primates is treated as a curious, amusing oddity rather what it really is: exploitation of highly intelligent individuals. Instead of living fulfilling, autonomous lives in deference to their natural instincts and will—lives that would include social interaction with others of their kind, mating, raising young, moving about freely and resting whenever they choose—these monkeys spend their lives in endless toil and forced obedience to the will of humans.

And though many articles about these monkeys contain quotes from handlers who state that they care about their animals, it is impossible to square such assurances with the long hours, hard labor, constant shackling and lack of autonomy these animals are forced to endure day in and day out for no personal benefit. It is, in a word, slavery. And as human nature and history demonstrate again and again—where there is a profit to be made on the backs of non-humans, those backs are strained and often broken.

This is an excerpt from a FB post; you can read Nathan's entire article here.  And here is another article which lists some companies that do not use monkeys or small children to harvest the coconuts.