Sometimes, what we percieve as problematic truly is necessary for a better understanding of others.
sometimes it’s better refrain from deep introspection and allow yourself to just be.
and by that I mean: I don’t have to sit with myself and overthink and analyze and rationalize every ounce of my being. I am not a case study I am a person. faults and all. like any other person. sometimes I have to look at my mistakes and avoid self flagellation. sigh and learn what I can and move on. remember that I am living, and this is part of the process. free myself of that inner critic. allow myself to be, and try again.
seriously, tho, shelters and rescues are being slammed HARD by kitten season this year. i mean, we always are, but this year seems extra bad. shelters are in desperate need of:
- Towels
- Kitten Milk Replacer (kmr)
- Baby kitten kibble (like with the teeny tiny kibbles like royal canin’s babycat formula)
- Baby kitten soft food
- Heating pads (kittens need SO MUCH HEAT)
- Pine litter (baby kittens can’t use clumping litter because they try to eat it or it gets stuck to their bottoms and clumps up)
- Unflavored pedialyte
- little kitten pens (like the kind you keep kittens IN, not the kind you write with)
- feeding syringes, bottles, and nipples
- money
- Fosters!!! this is probably the thing we need more than anything else, tbh.
This year IS especially bad. It’s not in your head. It’s a direct result of the pandemic.
(I know you know this, but I want people reading to really understand).
Basically, one year ago private nonprofit spay/neuter clinics, other rescue nonprofits, and TNR trappers were both more or less grounded, as their legal status re:essential services was up for debate.
When bog standard vet clinics were given the green light, regular veterinary capacity diminished because of their need to meet new safety standards. So you had
1. Basically zero nonprofit clinics
2. Basically zero trapping
3. Incredibly reduced capacity for for-profit care
And it got cleared up eventually. It was a confusing time. But remember when the lockdown first hit? In March?
Y’know, the start of kitten season?
The confusing “can we operate? guess we’ll wait and see. gosh you can’t even find a single spay appointment huh” time last year happened to correspond pretty directly to what is usually our busiest trapping season.
The kitten season we are seeing this year, which is SO BAD, and seems to be SO BAD literally across the country, is what happens when volunteers and underpaid animal rescuers take a single kitten season off.
All the kitten that were born last year that would’ve been trapped and homed and their mothers spayed were instead… left to roam and grow up and now it’s their first kitten season as breeding adults and as a result the rescue community, under-supported most of the time, is just completely overwhelmed.
So, hey, if you’re reading this: Go donate to a cat rescue or animal shelter. Do it right now. And you know what’s even better than donating? Volunteering to foster. It’s rewarding, it’s fun, it’s all the benefits of getting a cat or kitten without the long term commitment. And it will literally save lives. Every rescue we know right now would commit crimes for more reliable fosters.
And most rescues will help you cover basic food costs and supplies, so you don’t even need money, just space. (And that’s why, if you can’t foster, donations help! So that rescues can do that for their fosters!)
If you can’t foster and you can’t donate, at least boost this.
Help a local cat rescue. If we’re going to do anything to bring this problem back into even normal levels of bad, we need to be acting as fast as possible. This year more than any, rescues really really need your help.
Y’all in the notes please be mindful when you say stuff like “it’s time to kill the British.” The people suffering the most from British transphobia are....British trans people.
^^^^^ for serious. British trans folks rarely get to transition at all, and when they don't they're often denied any social transition period. TERFs in the UK aren't here to start laws against people in America, they're trying and succeeding to kill off trans people in the UK. This really isn't the situation to cram on the brits to look and feel better about yourself... the trans body count is tremendous over there. Please have some respect for the people actually effected.
Please do keep this in mind. As much as I find the anti-British memes funny, this is a genuine issue in the UK.
I’m a trans man in the UK, I’ve been on the waiting list to be diagnosed for just over 2 years now, and am expected to wait around another 2 years before I get my first appointment (if the wait time doesn’t increase). I will then wait around 2 more years (at the very least) for my second appointment, and if I’m very lucky and am diagnosed in that appointment (which is not guaranteed in the slightest), I’ll enter another waiting list to access healthcare. The service I’m in is considered around average. There are people waiting 6 years for their first appointment in other services, so I am incredibly lucky with my supportive family (in that I haven’t been kicked out or abused, parents still don’t respect pronouns or name) and I have good friends who respect me, as well as only waiting 4 years for a first appointment.
Maybe you could go private if you had the money, right? Go a similar route to trans people in the US? A diagnosis from a private practice can be rejected by your General Practitioner, and any referral you get for hormones or surgery can be completely dismissed, because you weren’t diagnosed by an NHS practice. You would likely have to go entirely private, which is not possible for thousands of trans people who rely on the NHS. This is an issue within the NHS and a completely lack of funding and training for trans healthcare, resulting in horrifically long wait time and difficult to access help, especially given doctors and surgeons have and are having their practices shut down because they aren’t considered proper by the NHS, despite being one of very very few who commit to this kind of work.
The transphobia in the UK runs far deeper than just tweets, and combining the aggressively transphobic attitude of a large portion of the population with the lack of healthcare due to wait times and difficulties with funding, you set up an incredibly difficult and dangerous position for trans people. Maybe this sounds like a bunch of complaints and nothing to people in the US, but people here are dying as a result of this. Please do keep this in mind when making anti-UK memes surrounding specifically transphobia.
also, our wait times for HRT have gone up to 6 years through the NHS.
Anonymous asked
asking out of genuine curiosity: what’s the problem with “adopt don’t shop”? (implied but not explained in a post you reblogged)
When it’s applied to mill breeders and pet shops, I’m in complete agreement with it. If I remember right, that’s what it was originally MEANT to apply to. Then it became co-opted by Animal Rights Activists, who are generally against pet ownership completely. It became a blanket statement against breeders of any sort, vilifying responsible and ethical breeders and those who purchase from them.
So, four years ago, I started looking for a prospective service dog. It was natural for me to start my search within rescues, because most of them were known to me already. I look like a pretty good applicant: I work in rescues, I specialize in handling animals with difficult temperaments, I have vet records stretching back to when I came of age (basically, I’ve been fully responsible for my cats’ vet care since I was 18), and all of my animals have either died of old age or random chance (I’ve never rehomed any of my personal animals for any reason, including health issues).
But it turned out to be borderline impossible.
The fact that I was looking for a service dog prospect was an immediate disqualification for most of them. This is because a lot of dogs (especially rescue dogs) wash out of training and can’t go on to become fully trained service dogs. Since most disabled people can only afford one or two dogs, most of these dogs are returned to the shelter/rescue. That knocked out about 60% of the rescues I was looking at.
Another rescue asked for an ‘application fee’, which smacks of a scam to me. It was around 40 dollars, but still. That’s a shitty fucking thing to do. :/
Another priced their dogs around 800 dollars, which is on the low end range for popular purebred dogs from pet-quality breeders. There was no way I was going to pay 800 dollars for a dog with an unknown genetic background and no health testing if I could pay the same thing and get a dog WITH all that.
Another asked me to take pictures of my fenced in yard, including the gate and ALL the fencing. My land is 22 acres. While it IS fully fenced, many of the fences are inaccessible to me because they’re on cliffs. There was no way I could physically get all the pictures.
Most require that you own a house. I rent.
Another rescue had a sneaky little addendum in their policy, stating that they can visit my home at ANY TIME without permission or knowledge and take the dog back within two weeks of adopting it. This place also had a very high adoption fee (around 500 dollars). I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of, “You’re not ADOPTING this dog. This is a temporary foster for two weeks, and the adoption fee is non-refundable if we take the dog back within those two weeks, which we may do so at any time for any reason without your knowledge or permission.”
I was feeling pretty good about the next rescue, until it came out that my pet reptiles are all intact. Like… they’re non-breeding. But the fact that they weren’t spayed or neutered was enough, apparently, and I was denied. “Come back when they’ve been fixed,” I was told. The fact that they’re reptiles, housed separately, and literally have never made contact with each other was deemed irrelevant, as was the fact that attempting to alter a 50 gram gecko would likely kill her. It was the LOOK of things that was important, rather than the actual animal welfare.
The local poodle rescue had a waiting list of approximately 5 years.
There was no way I was going to wait that long. So I started looking at shelters. There are three in my travel radius (did I mention that, as a disabled person, my travel radius is quite small? Because it is). One was immediately knocked out because it has a long history of transphobia against me in particular. One was knocked out because it was going through a panleuk issue at the moment, so I wasn’t going to risk bringing it home or to work. The third was almost completely bully breed mixes, chihuahuas, or huskies (which are all fine breeds, but not compatible with my lifestyle).
Another issue with ‘adopt don’t shop’ is that it implies ALL rescues/shelters are equal. They aren’t. I’ve also encountered some extremely unethical rescues who outright lie to adopters about an animals’ temperament or health. I’ve seen rescues who actively purchase puppies from mill auctions, because demand for ‘rescue purebreeds’ is so high. This is especially common with cavalier spaniels and other in-demand small breeds.
I recently cut ties with a cat rescue who actively refused to report a bad breeder for animal abuse/neglect—-this breeder was mass-producing cats and not socializing them or treating them for heavy health issues. Every few months, they’d turn over whatever they couldn’t sell to the rescue and these cats were inevitably poorly socialized messes who couldn’t even be touched (and these were cats who required a high amount of grooming). The rescue didn’t want to turn the breeder in because these cats were in high demand; they were 100% sure guaranteed adoptions. People didn’t care that they weren’t healthy animals; they just wanted something pretty with a sob story.
Not every breeder is responsible. Not every rescue is responsible either. The saying SHOULD be ‘adopt responsibly, shop responsibly’. On a purely pedantic note, you SHOULD be shopping responsibly regardless, because adopting is also shopping. You shouldn’t adopt the first cute animal with a sad backstory. You need to look into everything and make sure they’re the right fit for you and your life.
I fully support rescues. But I also support breeding. My goal as a rescue worker is to create a world where every animal is born with a home already waiting for them and the shelters are empty. For that, we need breeders to keep producing healthy animals.
Basically, don’t vilify people who buy from responsible, ethical breeders. We have our reasons for doing so.
What we should talk about: HRT access, queer self-defense, the failure of respectability politics, building up community resources
What we talk about: Is it valid to be bi? Is it valid to be pan? Is it valid to be queer? Is it valid to be kinky? Is it valid to be ace? Is it valid to be trans? Is it valid to be non-binary? Is it valid t
I do want every queer leftist who regularly engages in debates about who’s ‘valid’ or who ‘belongs’ in the queer community to understand how much they really do be coming off like
