if i told you what rhis sounded ljke i dont think youd believe me so just listen

It feels like having a dog has gotten way complicated and hard in recent years, posts talking about reactive unsocialized and untrained dogs everywhere but the thing is, was anybody intentionally socializing their dogs before the past couple decades? Are humans just way more isolated? Is it the thing about how you should adopt a rescue instead of buying?

my family's dog is 8 years old so she's not a "pandemic puppy" but she's not exempt she's kind of a nightmare. She constantly craves attention and will use her snout to knock your phone out of your hand if you're not petting her or talking to her. If you sit next to her and don't pay attention to her she will grab your arm with her paw and nudge her head underneath your arm to get you to pet her

She's also impossible to walk on a leash and loses her absolute shit at seeing anyone or anything walking around in or near our yard. One time she got so freaked out she shit herself because there was a deer in our yard

yeah the best way to have a social and chill dog is to take them places to hang out in the general vicinity of strangers so they feel like that’s normal. but there are?? so few public spaces where that is really feasible? if you have to drive across town to even get somewhere with sidewalks to walk your dog then taking them on a walk becomes A Whole Thing instead of just hey? i’ll take my dog out for a few minutes every day!

and having a car available with gas in the tank and the free time and physical ability to do this routinely is required. having a dog is already expensive, but having free time from work and other responsibilities and paying for the gas to drive them across town often enough for them to feel like it’s normal and fun and never scary to be in new places? it just kind of adds up.

and if you have like an hour to play with and exercise your dog, it can end up kinda feeling like a waste to make them sit in the car for most of that driving to a park and back instead of playing with them in the backyard for a solid hour until they are worn out and happy (if you have a yard, not everyone does). like, it’s possible. but it’s also just A Whole Thing sometimes, depending on your situation. 

as far as being too rough at home, teaching a redirecting behavior can help. like insisting that a dog sit before you pet/play with them can teach them not to jump on you because they do the sit command automatically to ask for attention. i know kikopup on youtube has some great dog training videos that address teaching dogs to be calmer at home. 

but the Need To Be In A Public Space For Socialization On A Regular Basis thing is unfortunately a bit thornier of a problem in training depending on personal circumstances since you can’t just pull up an accessible park for your dog on youtube lol

Oh god, you're so right actually

There are no sidewalks where we live, and we are close to a highway where it is literally impossible to walk (zero shoulder+the edge of the road is a steep drop into a ditch full of water with no rail+giant trucks constantly roaring past at 60mph) I can think of one dog park and it's literally 1/4 acre of grass with one tree in it and a picnic table, and it would be pretty much impossible for anyone in town to walk to

The extremely well-behaved dogs I've met are mostly dogs in rural areas that are outside most of the time and not really confined in any way. In busier areas this leads to them being hit and killed by cars (I watched my neighbor's dog be hit by a car and break his back it was horrible)

The rural dogs are supposed to bark at people who approach, though, it's how you know when someone is coming up the driveway, and it's good if they chase off wild animals from your garden. They look to their owners for guidance on how to respond to strangers. Those are the dogs that aren't explicitly working dogs like livestock guards or hunting dogs.

I'm a cat person, but I like dogs, I think it's charming how they are determined to perform an Important Job, and I read recently that humans are more cognitively similar to dogs than to our closest relatives because we've co-evolved so closely, and that blew my mind. We made dogs. Dogs made us. SYMBIOSIS. We are literally evolved to be able to communicate and read each others' emotions.

I wonder if it's a big part of the problem that people are negative towards "working" animals and think it's cruel to make an animal work.

But a lot of popular breeds of dog ARE working breeds! Even Golden Retrievers and Labs and other dogs that seem like they popped into existence to be The Family Dog.

We did a ton of research when preparing to get a dog and all the resources seem to agree that the biggest challenge of preventing "bad" behavior in dogs is just keeping the dog from getting so bored it eats the couch or barks until it loses its voice just to have something to do.

We humans are all so overworked and forced to spend our lives doing things that don't support our communities or make life better, that we imagine a good life to be one with no work, but for a dog, a life of no work is pure misery. Most "bad" dog behaviors are just...reasons we domesticated dogs in the first place. Eating trash and poop and other gross stuff? Yeah, they're supposed to do that. Barking when an unfamiliar person approaches? Yeah, they're supposed to do that. [Behavior specific to a breed of dog?] Yeah, [breed] is supposed to do that.

What's more, people buy working breed dogs and expect them to want to lie around and do nothing all day. Getting a Husky or Border Collie and expecting it to be a lap dog is like, a crime.

Basically I think most dogs are for if you want an animal to do a job. There are toy breeds that were basically bred to be lapdogs, but a Beagle or German Shepherd isn't that.

If you want a furry creature that will just kinda hang out with you and be cute, the type of dog you want is called...

...a ✨cat✨

Also: while we’re doing checkpoints, make sure you’re on WiFi and not data

And unclench your jaw

If you need to use the bathroom you have to do that now

Please get that drink of water and remember your meds

If you can’t remember the last time you showered/brushed your teeth here’s your sign to try and do those today

Set an alarm for tomorrow if you need to!

don’t forget the laundry in your drier

This was very helpful, I took my meds and had a shower.

If you haven’t yet slain thine enemies, take a quick break and do that

And have a snack! :D

the catholic old white guy asked me to explain lgbtq+ to him and it was honestly kind of funny

“okay! you have 15 seconds to explain non-binary to me if there are only male and female genders”

me: if you lost your genitals would you still feel like a man?

“no”

would you feel like a woman?

“no?”

so you wouldn’t feel male or female

“yeah what’s your point?”

So, you wouldn’t fit into the gender binary of male or female? :)

him:

“so non-binary just means not feeling male or female?”

Yeah basically

“so why do they use “they” so much”?

if you were a woman would you want to be called a man?

“no…”

And the opposite?

“no…”

Why why would you want someone to call you male or female if you’re not male or female then?”

it’s not a perfect way of thinking but i had 15 seconds and i think it got the point across

if someone challenges you to break through a wall within fifteen seconds, you use a wrecking ball, not precision tools. I think you did marvelously.

I mean, it's great that the "what about emergency vehicle access?" hack is so effective when pointing out the deficiencies of proposals for walkable communities, but it kind of burns my ass that you need to take that approach in the first place. I don't know how many conversations about communities planning I've seen that go like this:

Walkable communities advocate: Here's a plan for a walkable community in which only public transit will be permitted – no personal vehicles of any kind will be allowed.

Disability advocate: What about access for physically disabled people? If your options are public transit or the sidewalk and literally nothing else, any disabled person whose needs aren't fully served 100% of the time by your favoured public transit framework is fucked, and there's no such thing as a perfect public transit framework.

Walkable communities advocate, whose brain shut down the moment they heard the word "disabled" and didn't process anything past that point: Oh, you silly cripple, the term "walkable community" doesn't mean you're only allowed to walk! How quaint.

I guess pointing out "well, if only public transit is accommodated, how are firefighters and paramedics supposed to access emergencies?" works because now they can imagine themselves being affected!

To address a few of the recurring whatabouts in my notes and DMs:

me and who

Always nice when math helps make it all the more clear how ridiculously reasonable the worker demands are.

This is what the studios have brought everything to a grinding halt for.

Because I'm only seeing other Jews posting about this, non-Jews I need you to be aware that for the past month or two there has been a wave of bomb threats and swattings at synagogues all across the US. They usually do it when services are being livestreamed. I haven't seen a single non-Jew talking about this. High holidays are coming up in a few weeks, which is when most attacks happen against our communities. We're worried, and we need people to know what's happening to us.

Wait, beneath the sea floor?

OUGHGH??

OIUOHGHHVOIH!!!!!

im really not trying to be mean here but this one tag from a reblog just so colossally missed the point i cant let it go unacknowledged

the whole message of this post is that the clothes are being made regardless of whether anybody is going to be purchasing them. they’re made in sweatshops, shipped to the other side of the globe, put on racks in thousands of stores, and whatever doesn’t sell is dumped in the fucking desert to make room on those racks for the next shipment.

“buy secondhand only” in response to this is such an egregious misunderstanding and it’s doing the exact fucking thing that is implicitly being criticized by this tweet, which is that individual consumer choices are totally disconnected from the global production of consumer goods and therefore moralizing about making the Correct choices and imploring people to go to fucking goodwill instead of tj maxx is meaningless

Slave labor and borderline slave labor allow cheap junk to be made for so little that some companies can make up for the loss several times over by claiming it on insurance, getting government subsidies, or even selling certain things as scrap or filler to other industries. Companies are so frequently part of some vast network of brands owned by the same entity that they can waste a billion dollars without batting an eye. Just saturating a market with *your* unsellable shit can be seen as advantageous if it helps push out a competitor. Someone buying one new pair of shoes for $20 can mean they just covered the manufacturing cost for 500 pairs. Passive boycotting isn’t going to work ever again at this point. The only ways any of this can change will unfortunately require vastly, vastly more work from more people than just telling Twitter to stop buying pants or switching a fast food chain to paper straws.

Funny how as economic inequality increases capitalist society starts to look more and more like the dysfunctions we associate with the Soviet Union. Like, “socialism is bad because it causes production to become decoupled from demand” is one of the biggest right-wing and libertarian anti-socialist talking points.

i took 3 years of film classes and i still don't fucking understand how the camera obscura works. thats magic to me idc

this? sorcery. they should arrest this guy

people explaining this to me are missing the point. yes i know its a physics thing. i know our eyes work the same way. however. i simply believe light shouldn't work like that

I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.

dude.

$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.

Anyone who is paperwork-smart and looking for a direct action they can do from home: THIS IS IT. Offer your time online to help people with this. Either directly or by creating a website that takes people through the forms for each hospital in super easy mode.

Because when you’re recovering from an illness or when you’re chronically ill or if you’re just not that good with paper work or the english language... this kind of shit can be a wall that’s too high to climb. So help people over.

never have i wanted so desperately to buy a pin, this one is so beautiful!!!

“Statement regarding… [sigh] a barbie doll sighted entering the real world and becoming a human to face the horrors of patriarchy and the epic highs and lows of womanhood. Statement begins.”

[kill bill sirens]

I will eventually draw fanart but for now I must shitpost

I love him he’s just a lil guy

I wasn't going to derail the disability pride month post for people with peanut allergies but in relation to that topic

I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I've seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the "nut free" classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don't follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it's too "tedious" or "time-consuming". Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn't provide an alternative activity.

Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It's happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.

Also other parents in the classroom are guilty too. The "not my child not my problem" brain rot means that those lunchboxes are like bombs for airborne exposure allergies

I've said this before but Why do people position "themes and analysis" and "shipping" as mutually exclusive opposites. maybe I find two characters thematically interesting and want them to analytically fuck about it.

Your daily dose of cat memes