Too many stressful things have already happened here today, and I still need to get to the store before it closes. Just the one right up the street, but I really don’t want to go out in the cold and deal with humans anytime soon.
Having some low-spoons food is a different matter, though, so guess I’d better get my shoes on soon.
Kind of glad to have the evening to myself, even if Mr. C bouncing off to visit some friends in Sweden this morning was one of the disruptions I could have done without.
(Or he’s possibly decided to start a personal chef gig on the side. The explanation was that he was heading there to cook something specific for this friend he hadn’t seen in a while and his relatively new husband đ¤ đ )
Three cats died after their owners used an anti-inflammatory cream used to treat arthritis. The Food and Drug Administration warns to keep drugs away from pets; a tiny bit can be toxic.
Important for spoonies with cats!
Creams with Flurbiprofen are fatal to cats.
Brands that use this chemical (Not a complete list):
Myoflex Traumeel Capzasin
If you have cats, check your pain relieving cream for this, and keep them from ingesting it, please!
Hereâs a more thorough article about this, which includes info about other types of pain relief cream + tips for keeping pets safe if you use pain relief cremes of any kind! And hereâs another one that talks about other types of topical medications (hydrocortisone, antibiotic ointment, hormone cream, etc.).
I didnât see a mention anywhere, but most NSAIDs are toxic enough to cats that I would also be very careful with topical Voltaren/diclofenac or ibuprofen. Which seem to be more common than flurbiprofen in the UK, that I know of.
I was very glad to hear they finally came up with an NSAID thatâs specifically cat-safe (the alternatives for cats before were steroids or opiates). Â But yeah â the vast majority of NSAIDs arenât, and pretty much any NSAID commonly used by humans is not going to be cat-safe. Â Also, even medications that are not deadly to cats just because of what they are, are probably going to be deadly to cats because of the difference in quantity between cats and humans.
(I have to admit it was weird when my cat and I were both on Prednisone from the same pharmacy. Â I ran out of my own, and the pharmacy told me they couldnât get it right away but that in the meantime I should use my catâs meds â at a higher dose of course. Â Prednisone being a steroid that is not automatically lethal to cats as long as you keep it at cat-friendly doses.)
Also a lot of times meds humans take over-the-counter can have ingredients that are toxic to cats. Â Tylenol (acetaminophen) is in so many things that our local hospital passes out warning pamphlets to keep people from overdosing on it by combining several things that all have it. Â And itâs very toxic to cats. Â
(Fairly toxic to humans, too â hence the danger of liver damage or death if you take too much.  In fact, there are opiates that are deliberately formulated in a way thatâs combined with Tylenol to prevent addicts from trying to get high by taking too much of them.  Or at least â whyever they were originally formulated that way â theyâre prescribed for that reason over pure opiates in some situations. Which seems like a rather extreme and sadistic measure to me, given that some people wonât know itâs toxic, and some people will know but care more about the high than the risk of death.  If the risk of death was enough to keep people from abusing a drug, thereâd be a lot less drug abuse and a lot fewer overdose deaths.)
(in reference to this post I reblogged on âtesting your dashboard osmosisâ skills, where people are invited to submit fandoms I donât know anything about so I can describe them based on what Iâve seen on my dash)
Ok so this one is cheating a bit because I have actually seen one (1) Star War film, and a special holiday episode, but I assure you that I still understood nothing. Also, the Star War on my dash seems to be VASTLY different and more charming/appealing than what I know of the source material!Â
Star Wars is mostly about one family, which is Problematic, and the galaxy, which is ruined, such that the entire story is about a very long trainwreck. There was a trilogy of movies about this family, but it was considered that they had not adequately explored how everything got to this terrible state, so George Lucas made three more movies to explain this, but in doing so he mortally offended everyone who was born in the 80s, and also their ancestors. Now there is a new movie which provides an update on the family, the galaxy, and the trainwreck. Happily, this movie appears to be brightly colored and cheerful, and thus the honor of our ancestors is restored.
Star Wars is ostensibly about a boy named Luke Skywalker but he is actually the character of least concern, with fandom preferring to discuss the exploits of a gentleman who rescued an ice-cream machine from an explosion, or the guy(s) whose last names are Fett. Django? Fargo? Bubba? All of those.Â
Many Muppets are involved, like I think the movies are mostly Muppets and robots, but they arenât talked about at all. Nobody likes Ewoks or Jar Jar Binks. They are anathema, and formally interdicted. People used to dislike Anakin, although I am unsure how much of that is post-teen shame and embarrassment, i.e. how everyone had to elaborately distance themselves from the Backstreet Boys for a while, and now they like them again in a post-ironic way. Â
Luke is the Chosen One with very odd fashion sense (like a golden retriever in a poncho) and he leaves home to get religion and solve his problems, but little does he know that he is from a Problematic family! and even the simplest activities, such as fetching a pail of water, lead to Muppet song and dance routines. There is some kind of war occurring, and Luke etc are Rebellious. There is the brief question of incest, and an evil religious management consultant turns out to be his father. The entire family, everyone agrees, has Problems. In the end Darth Vader dies, and Joseph Campbell does an entire PBS series about it in an attempt to dissect the archetypes, but to be fair there is very little emotional impact to be wrung out of killing a jerk.
The Princess is too good for everybody, but gets little attention. Regardless of anything else that happens, Han Solo is always shipped with one or the other or both siblings of the Problematic family, possibly because he is considered to be a responsible adult? Heâs definitely the oldest one.
The scale of things is very strange, i.e. there is an immensely massive artificial planet filled with Evil, which you learn to defeat by playing with monkeys and ghosts in the forests ??? I think it is either meant to be Metaphorical, or an extended riff on David versus Goliath.
There is no conclusion.Â
Back in the day, fandom was a little simpler. everyone bought lots of sheets and plastic cups with the characters on it, and made âwhoomâ noises with lightsabers. Oh! There are lightsabers. They are⌠colorful and religious. People exchanged printed-out fanfictions, I believe.
Then there is a special holiday episode with bears that live in a tree, but I donât think itâs necessary to understand the plot. It was Christmas for bears, and the baby bear had terrifying lips, like those taxidermy monsters they make from whitetail deer butts.
At this point I had to google these things so you would know. Here they are! Assquatches.
Anyway, the assquatch baby was very sad about the true meaning of Christmas, and Han Solo went to a ⌠disco? Actually I may have made all of this up. Maybe it didnât happen?
Then there are some movies explaining how we got to this terrible state of affairs, but the aesthetic makes me cranky. The idea seems to be making Darth Vader very sympathetic, but as I said earlier, there is very little emotional impact to be wrung out of it, so I believe that it was not successful. Padme Amidala, played by Natalie Portman, wears a succession of hats, and the rest of it is just Twilight.
 Everyone just⌠pretended this body of work doesnât exist?? It might not actually exist. Maybe it didnât happen? It was the early 2000s, and we had just discovered Grimdark. It was a bad time. I think giant fish might have been involved, and Natalie Portman had many handmaidens. Her lipstick was pretty, but otherwise girls were not invited to be involved. In conclusion, the family was always Problematic and I think religion might be illegal. This was a bad time for fandom anyway, and even now, nobody talks about these films. The only cultural artifacts these films have left on my dashâs consciousness appear to be
âlook at all the fucks I give, Anakin. Look at them.â
Jar Jar Binks is a Sith lord
Natalie Portman can wear a star wars shirt because she was IN them
There are also some books about everything, and there were some bad CGI television series things, and I think some movies for younger kids. Itâs possible that none of these actually existed either. Lightsabers would have been involved.
BUT NOW.
Now there is a new movie, a shiny movie, a movie with hopes and dreams and heart. A delightful young trio of beautiful shiny-faced people – Rey, a young white girl who may be a member of the Problematic family; Finn, a young black man who may be a member of the Problematic family; and Poe, a young Latino man who is adopted in the Problematic family – are enacting the plot from the original movie, but this time people are more prepared to be sympathetic. They are shipped in a polyamorous triad, which is adorable. The fanart involves flower crowns and Regency costumes. The bad guy is Leia and Hanâs spoilt grimdark son and that appears to be parodied relentlessly, WHICH NOW THAT I THINK OF IT may be the reason itâs successful, like, have we finally gotten over grimdark? is it recognized as a ripe source of parody now? OH MAN. so like, perhaps this movie is circling around to stab the prequels in the back, rejecting the values that made them sound like a good idea on paper?Â
The family has continued to fuck up, and everything is terrible. Religion might not be illegal? The robots are different colors now. THIS MOVIE DEFINITELY EXISTS. AND IT LOOKS VERY CUTE.Â
Though I suspect thatâs a case of my dash doing all the work, and if I hand over some money to Partake in this Franchise it wonât be half as fun.
This is the other thing I wrote about a Star War. It was around the time when the new one came out. And I think itâs actually extremely good meta ACTUALLY, like it has all of the important stuff, and also assquatches, which I had forgotten about.
Reblogging this again because Chris just made me realize that sheep are so stupid that I canât even think like them:
These sheep? They are actually running away from the car.
They are so stupid that theyâre following each other in a circle around the thing they are running from.
SHEEPNADO
when your group cohesion is set higher than your flee response distance.
Moshpit
This is actually called a sheep cyclone and it happens because sheep donât have a hierarchy. In most herds, whichever animal is the leader will sense danger and take off running. The rest of the herd takes itâs cues from the leader and follows. Sheep, on the other hand, donât have a leader. If the flock runs, they run, and they follow whatever fluffy tail happens to be in front of them. Usually, this works out fine for the sheep. Occasionally, however, the sheep in the front starts following the fluffy tail of the sheep in the back so the whole flock ends up running in circles, going nowhere fast.
This is, to my understanding, excactly WHY we have both herding and livestock guardian dogs. Sheep are⌠really amazingly dumb most of the time. Â
Then, once in a while, you get one sheep thatâs Entirely Too Cunning and thatâs when all hell breaks loose.
âŚthat sounds like a horror story
I have been informed by those who study domestic animal behaviour that itâs not so much that theyâre stupid with the occasional intelligent one, as that their priorities are so different from our priorities – in part because we did things like deliberately breed dominant traits out of them over thousands of years – that you have to change how you think about how they work at all.Â
The one, major, overwhelming priority of sheep: Stay With The Herd. This is why you get sheepnados: every single sheep is doing his or her devoted best to stay with the herd. So the sheep runs out of the way ⌠.to the rest of the herd. At which point the other sheep follow it and ⌠.you get sheepnado.Â
The sheepnado continues in part because thereâs nothing to stop it: the car doesnât actually present a clear and present threat (none of the sheep have been hurt), and thereâs no farmer or dog to take that lead position and give them direction. Itâs ore or less succeeding at what it needs to, which is that no sheep are being run down by the car, but, THE HERD IS STAYING TOGETHER.Â
If you want to see how smart a sheep gets, take it away from the herd.Â
(And if you think about this, it makes perfect sense: âstay with the herdâ has HUGE SELECTION PRESSURE on it for domestic sheep. Domestic sheep who stray, die without reproducing. Domestic sheep that get stroppy with the farmer or interfere with the leadership of farmer and his dogs ⌠die, usually without reproducing. Domestic sheep that Stay With The Herd? Usually live and reproduce. The herd becomes ALL IMPORTANT. Itâs not that they donât know theyâre running in circles, itâs that running in circles achieves The Goal.
Itâs not that sheep have no survival instincts: itâs that we as a species have actually redirected their survival instincts in one overwhelming direction, and evolution is a messy kludge.)Â
And then if you want to give yourself a head-trip, combine this with those Humans Are Weird SF posts and start wondering what kind of behaviours WE have that could look, to an alien with a very different priority set, as stupid as sheepnado. Â
I mean really, AS A SPECIES: full-contact team sports.Â
We expend lifetimes of effort and time and energy to risk catastrophic life-and-quality-of-life-threatening injury (concussion, broken neck, broken collar bone, broken face ⌠), in order to chase a ball around the field. Never mind the sheer level of engineering, money and resources necessary to make a hockey rink.Â
And the spectators are even worse. People spend huge amounts of resources going to strange places in order to sit in the stands and watch people do the above.Â
I donât really think we have that much ground to mock sheepnado.Â
Actual sheep expert here! (Like, my doctoral thesis contains three years of sheep behavioural experiments)
I think the mistake everyone is making here is assuming these sheep are scared. Note the guy by the wall. If they were scared of humans or cars thatâd be sufficient to not only break the tornado but also have them running for the hills. The problem is basically they are not scared enough.
Let me explain!
So you know your personal space bubble, right? You are likely to feel very threatened when that stranger at the party moves in too close and take a step back to keep him at bay. Also, no one likes sitting right next to someone at a cinema or on the train unless the other seats are taken, right? So sheep have that, but it applies to non-sheep that are pinged as possible predators. Cows have it too. Makes sense, right? Anyone who gets in too close who you donât know is likely to be a predator, regardless of your species.
This personal space bubble might be, oh, say, ½ a kilometre in size if they live in the middle of the outback with 2000 of their buddies and see a human once a season for medication, but are otherwise left to their own devices. Most of the time though itâs far smaller, and there isnât really one for members of their flock, although if thereâs no threats around theyâll spread out to graze across an entire paddock, staying close to their bffs.
(Tangent: the CSIRO found out in the 70s or 80s, by use of some guy, binoculars and countless manhours, that yes, sheep tend to hang out with the same sheep again and again when people arenât running around scaring them. They may look alike to you or I but they recognise each others faces, just like we do!)
ANYWAY. Say youâre a person coming in to herd them. Theyâll ignore you until you get close to the boundaries of that personal space bubble then the ones nearest to you will start looking at you nervously in a, âGosh, that guy better not be moving towards me. Sandra, do you think heâs coming towards us?â kind of way, and will be trying to decide whether to go or stay – just like one might when the creeper comes into the party and starts walking towards you.
Now, the leader sheep, that they all follow? Sheâs not the smartest or most independent one, sheâs the one with the smallest personal space bubble and the distance youâve walked to get the others nervous is close enough to get her unhappy. Sheâll run in the direction opposite to you. In which case her supportive buddies flocking instincts kick in and they go, âOh shit, Sandra thinks itâs a threat. Cluster up, girls!â and all zoom off together, away from the threat. Sandra has no idea where sheâs going, sheâs scared, but if another predator turns out to be in the direction theyâre running the flock will split and run on either side of them to merge again, rather crowd at the train station around a pylon kind of way.
(Tangent: In low stress stock handling, the welfare gold star modern method of livestock handling, we take advantage of this by teaching sheep their boundaries will be respected. We move to the edges of their their flight zone – that is, personal space bubble – and let them move away, letting them learn that we will not push too much or hurt them. If they gently keep pace weâll steer them towards the yard with food while respecting their wishes to not be near us. They donât get scared, and no one – us or them – accidentally gets hurt by a panicked stamped)
Returning to the above photo! The problems start if they are so used to you the flight zone is tiny. Youâre an adopted member of the flock, they actually are cool with you being at arms distance. You canât cuddle them, youâre not an actual sheep, but you have to really get close, go, âOI! MOVE IT LADIES!â and wave your arms around to get them moving, because they know youâre not a threat. Same applies to cars actually. And they can tell motors apart by sound. The ute is kinda boring, but the tractor or gator? Holy shit, food delivery time!
And that is how weâve ended up with sheepnados around the gator, which we were using because it was a four wheel drive and the ute would get bogged, but I had experiments to do. And they decided this meant food and bailed me up until I fed them. I didnât even have more than a bucket on me. I had to run ahead, sprinkling it like bird seed to get them to move, so we wouldnât accidentally kill them. Annnnnnd Iâll bet you anything that the sheep in the picture were used to being fed by exactly the same kind of ute, if not by the same one, and the poor driver is trying to inch forward to get to town but the sheep are just FRIEND? FOOD FRIEND? HI FRIEND. FOOD NOW? NOW?
Supporting visual evidence? Look at how thereâs no running away from the car, when ute herding, complete with horn beeping is actually a very common way to herd flocks. Look at how the ute is miserably inching forward, giving them a clear direction to run, but they are so not scared that at the moment flocking instinct has kicked in but not enough panic to actually direct it. I Imagine the driver is honking like crazy, to no avail. Look at the random terrifying predator human by the wall, who is sensibly turning his back to the sheep, because if the predator has his back turned you can run behind him! But no sheep is utilising the supplied alternate route. Yeah, these guys arenât scared, this is an armed robbery of an empty pizza delivery truck.
ALSO! Posters higher up in the thread, please stop saying sheep are stupid? Theyâre not! Just panicky and scared of us! Iâve taught sheep to solve mazes and remember the route days later. You can teach them stuff in a day that takes a month to teach monkeys! If youâve ever frozen up in an exam or while public speaking, surely youâd know how hard it is to be smart when youâre frightened? The first step to intelligence testing a sheep is to either automate everything – or do what I did and more or less raise them from birth so they bail you up for cuddles when they see you, and follow you as leader sheep. Downside? They will learn to open multiple kinds of gates just to follow you, and any sheep you take with you to put in the maze, half a kilometre down the road because GUYS YOU FORGOT US!!! đ đ đ (âSheep, no, stop! I left you there to get shorn! Itâs SUMMER, youâre HOT, please stay here for your haircut! Youâve finished the maze, you know the route too well! I canât give you reward treats when weâve established that youâve memorised it, thatâs cheating!â) Or, you know, become impossible to herd and mill around you, and your car, because they want to hang out and have no sense of urgency.
I do love sheeps! and isnât it amazing how much seemingly bizarre behavior can be explained if you just respect and honor the motivations of the organism? It works for people, children, herd animals, plants, enemies, friends, arguments, advertising⌠and sheeps.
Such good phrase: âisnât it amazing how much seemingly bizarre behavior can be explained
if you just respect and honor the motivations of the organism? It works
for people, children, herd animals, plants, enemies, friends, arguments,
advertising⌠and sheeps.â
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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