Why Hasn’t This Been Done Before?

When I was in vet school I went to this one lecture that I will never forget. Various clubs would have different guest lecturers come in to talk about relevant topics and since I was in the Wildlife Disease Association club I naturally attended all the wildlife and conservation discussions. Well on this particular occasion, the speakers started off telling us they had been working on a project involving the conservation of lemurs in Madagascar. Lemurs exist only in Madagascar, and they are in real trouble; they’re considered the most endangered group of mammals on Earth. This team of veterinarians was initially assembled to address threats to lemur health and work on conservation solutions to try and save as many lemur species from extinction as possible. As they explored the most present dangers to lemurs they found that although habitat loss was the primary problem for these vulnerable animals, predation by humans was a significant cause of losses as well. The vets realized it was crucial for the hunting of lemurs by native people to stop, but of course this is not so simple a problem.

The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.

Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.

So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.

This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.

(Source 1)

(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)

(Source 3)

Help Me Get A Laptop for Art School

Hi my name is Anne, im 17. The college im attending this fall, School of the Art Intitute of Chicago, requires all their students to have an macbook pro (1200$). Neither me or my family can afford that on top of all the other fees and funds going to this school has brought on. I start school on Sept. 2nd which is about a month away. So I have a month to get this computer that is required by the college.

please share!!

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i love all these posts about blizzard and hong kong but,,, no one talks about tik tok?? and how it’s owned by one of the richest people in china?? how it records your face, your voice, the inside of your home, your location, and quite possibly bugs your phone??

boycotting blizzard is great. do that. but also:

- delete your tik tok account

- uninstall the app

- stop supporting it by sharing tik tok videos and the like

The new fabricated piece of Israeli atrocity propaganda, that Hamas baked a baby in an oven, is lifted directly from Palestinian survivor testimonies about what Zionist militants did during the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948.

[Warning, explicit descriptions of torture and violence.]

“I saw the Zionist terrorist soldiers ordering the bakery man of the village to throw his son in the oven and burn him alive. The son is holding the clothes of his father tightly and crying from fear and pleading to his father not to do it. The father refuses and then the soldiers hit him in his gut so hard it caused him to fall on the floor. Other soldiers held his son, Abdel Rauf, and threw him in the oven and told his father to toast him well-done meat. Other soldiers took the baker himself , Hussain al-Shareef, and threw him, too, in the oven, telling him, “follow your son, he needs you there”. - Testimonial from Othman Akel, recorded in Palestine Rising: How I survived the 1948 Deir Yasin Massacre (2010).

Like the saying goes, "every Zionist accusation is a confession."

It almost makes me wonder if it's part of a deliberate tactic to obfuscate search engine results. Because if you now search for something like say, 'Israeli solider put child in oven,' all the top results will be about Hamas, not Deir Yassin.

This was something I drew for one of my lovers a few days ago

People are trying to bring back 1880s-era anti-ASL sentiment. Worst timeline.

one of the worst myths perpetuated in fiction i think is the idea that teenagers get angry and hate their parents for no real reason. it's one of the endless ways older folks trivialize the real hurt and frustration and pain that teenagers experience - which, with no small amount of irony, can come from that very kind of trivialization.

when i was an angry and hormonal teenager, i was taught i was having a rebellious phase. my mother taught me i was being disrespectful to her. media taught me it was a product of being an irrational teenager. but when that shit didn't fade as i grew up, when i grew even more bitter towards her, i started learning that it was actually a completely rational response to the literal years of abuse from her. i wasn't just angry, i was traumatized. still am.

and to this day, I've never met a teenager who is "irrationally" hateful towards their parents. and maybe that's a product of not knowing any entitled rich kids, but my point stands. teenagers are real people with real emotions, which don't come out of nowhere or exist for no reason. teenage anger and pain may be harder for them to express or control, but its existence is not irrational. and i HATE every depiction of the irrational, parent hating teenager in media who opposes all adults just because they are teenagers, rather than because of any of the very real reasons teenagers have to be angry and hurt.