By the power of distribution issues by not ordering more dogs from Texas… We have… Feel good headline!
Seriously. At least 3/4 of the dogs at every shelter I’ve been to in the Midwest have been from Texas shipments. At least you occasionally get stuff that isnt a Pitt mix that way.
Does "reunited with their owners" mean these were lost animals whose owners were identified? How does the SPCA help with that and why were there hundreds?
Or does it maybe mean companions that were taken from homeless people and then held hostage with a fee.
Im assuming it's primarily through microchip tracking and just dogs getting out. Dog runs out the house, gets lost. If they don't have a chip or tags, the shelter has no real way of contacting the owner unless the owner sees a post about it/someone at the shelter sees something about the dog being lost. Lost pets are more frequent during holidays due to traveling, running out the door when letting family in, etc.
sorry ma’am, your child was one of thirty five killed when we reintroduced wolves to kindercare because they were native here in the 1300s, but their comeback is something to behold, and the survivors have quite a story!
I kid, but also, reintroduce them to areas where they’re least likely to bump up against population, all the areas they natively lived in the past are, unfortunately, overrun by humans. I live in Washington state, where we’re seeing grey wolves slowly come back. I’m all for it. And here in Seattle, we’ve always had Coyotes living around the town, on the large greenways. Keep your cats inside if you love them!
But it’s only transmissible via consumption like mad cow disease, is that correct? If so, at the very least it shouldn’t become an epidemic, just very bad for the environment and deer jerky enthusiasts.
Edit: Nope, nvmd, I’m dumb. They said it’s really contagious and these prions can persist a long fucking time on surfaces. I’m gonna just never go outside again, thanks, I ain’t fucking with no prion disease.
It’s tricky. So I was listening to a BSE radio doc recently which had an episode about the deer. They actually don’t know if BSE was transmitted through eating the beef, in fact there’s cases of vegetarians getting it. It’s still being studied. They’re very worried about people eating infected deer, which is quite likely being as they’re easy to kill, but also having anything to do with them because they just don’t know how it moves from animal to animal, deers rarely eat each other so it’s not super likely that’s the only way.
Flintknapping is extremely prone to finger and hand injuries, and nobody understood infection back then. Probably everyone was making and using stone tools constantly. Might explain things.
I am not a fan of the Guardian, but according to the subject of the article (they call him Li), he is a dissident and was under active investigation. I don’t think they would have just let him leave
thats fair, but from an outside perspective (from either country) it looks exactly like how the US treats its dissidents. i doubt someone like julian assange would get better treatment.
also, i dont know how they defined “dissident” in this case but its vague enough that i wont judge too hastily.
Just because one state is also shitty to dissenters does not mean another state isn’t. They don’t cancel each other out.
Dissident is pretty vague, probably on purpose. As much as I dislike the US government, I can say the government here is shit and not get hauled to jail for the most part. The same is not necessarily true in China
how is the us treating communists, smaller trade unionists, palestine supporters, blm people and such over there? those people have sharp criticism and are the true dissenters to varying degrees.
ask one of those what could happen to them if they get singled out as a leader or something. i judge by actions not words.
I did imply the US is better, and I probably should not have. And even in that I did not mean the government doesn’t do horrific things. Probably should not have made the comparison TBH. That doesn’t mean China doesn’t also do horrific shit, even if the way they do it is different
While I personally don’t think Julian Assange did anything ethically or morally wrong, and the US government’s dogged pursuit of him was unjust, he did leak military intel which is much more serious and legally significant than what people often get jailed and harassed for in China. Like, I would not expect to leak info about the military in any country and just walk away as if nothing happened.
People have literally been jailed for making Tweets in China, people have been punished as retaliation against someone in their family being a dissident, we really shouldn’t be comparing the two countries as if they’re the same, regardless of the numerous major issues the US has. And even if they were the same, it doesn’t make anything China does even slightly more justifiable.
The US tortures its dissidents. Just look at how they treated War on Terror whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Even the UN special rapporteur on torture spoke up about her treatment. She was driven to attempt suicide in prison multiple times. Including when she refused to cooperate with the secret Grand Jury investigating WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
Julian Assange is about to be buried in a US prison and get a taste of that same medicine. Where are the Guardian outrage-articles on that? Oh, wait, that’s right. They threw him under the bus as soon as he’d given them access to the best scoops of the century (US diplomatic cables). The Guardian journos divulged the pass phrase to the unredacted cables in their book giving anyone who could locate the files online access. Cryptome published the unredacted cables before WL did while Assange called the State Department trying to warn them of the bad news. The Guardian then tried to make out like WL had acted irresponsibly in publishing the unredacted cables, when in reality the cat was already out of the bag and WL was doing harm-minimization. The Guardian’s blame-shifting makes my blood boil.
The ‘Guardian’ has no ethics and can’t be trusted on anything political imo.
China is pretty egregious about taking away passports/not letting its own nationals leave its borders. Sometimes because they are political dissidents, sometimes because they are being retaliated against in some way, etc.
There is ample evidence that China is suppressing its own people, including prohibiting emigration. One good source among many is the Safeguard Defenders, an NGO focusing on China.
You’ll find many good sources, including here on Lemmy. The situation has even been getting worse in recent years.
<a href="">@Bartsbigbugbag </a>What’s a good source on that issue in your opinion? I know a lot more, but would like to learn new ones if possible. Would be great if you posted a link.
No God damn way is it an intentional body mod. If it were, the pinky would not be the digit chosen.
Grip strength.
If you lose your pinky, you lose almost half your fucking grip strength. And as something like grip strength is pretty fucking important for a hunter-gatherer society, I’d be shocked if they were just lobbing off pinkies for the hell of it.
All the images in the article are showing that the hand with missing fingers is the left hand. Most people are right handed, so missing a left finger for most people wouldn’t hurt the grip strength of a one handed weapon/tool much in the main (right) hand. You could attach something like a shield strapped to your left arm and wouldn’t notice the issue for hunter gathering then. (Shields aren’t just for defense against claws, they can also be a bashing tool.)
Now, I doubt they were cutting off a pinky finger because they were bored on a Saturday night, but there could have been religious/group beliefs involved. Body modification has been around for a very long time, from as simple of scarification, to tattoos and piercings, to removal of body parts (circumcision), so it isn’t out of the realm of possibilities.
I think it is a relatively new phenomena where it isn’t a regular thing to lose a portion of a digit.
Also in a similar level of inquiry these researchers are engaging in: the guy who lost a finger wrestling a coyote is also likely to be the one to tell that story.
“Oh no middle finger guy? Yeah I know that story. It was coming right at him.”
I used to work at a zoo and a lot of the older keepers had a finger or part missing to some animal or another back when health and safety was less, used to be common in factories too, Tony Iommi lost bits in a factory and has spoken about how it wasn't that unusual.
Collard and colleagues first published their finger amputation thesis a few years ago but were criticised by other scientists, who argued that the amputation of fingers would have been catastrophic for the people involved. Men and women without fully functioning hands would be unable to cope with the harsh conditions that prevailed millennia ago.
Sounds pretty fair.
Since then, Collard, working with PhD student Brea McCauley, has gathered more data to back the amputation thesis. In a paper presented at the European Society conference, they said their latest research provided even more convincing evidence that the removal of digits to appease deities explains the hand images in the caves in France and Spain.
Oh really? Sorta interesting, okay, what’s the evidence?
The team looked elsewhere for evidence of finger amputation in other societies and found more than 100 instances where it had been practised. “This practice was clearly invented independently multiple times,” they state. “And it was engaged in by some recent hunter-gatherer societies, so it is entirely possible that the groups at Gargas and the other caves engaged in the practice.”
…
That is not convincing evidence.
Sure, it’s possible. If someone assembled some data that showed that in the modern day, ritual amputation is way more common quantitatively than accidental loss of digits, and showed that they were able to reject some other plausible explanations (e.g. showing that there wasn’t a particularly cold climate in that area that would cause frostbite to be more common than normal), then sure. But that’s not this paper, it sounds like.
Hands are actually pretty easy to injure, and modern medicine is the reason most of us get to keep them all our lives. I've known enough farmers and construction workers who are missing digits to assume a significant number are likely to be from injury in agricultural or hunting contexts. Frostbite would be another easy source of injury depending on climate.
While I could see a possible religious practice coming out of reverence for injured hands contributing too, this seems like the age old archeology practice of assuming anything is intentionally done for religious reasons if they don't have a neat and tidy singular explanation.
theguardian.com
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