That's a leopard or a cheetah or something. Totally different. Fuck them.
I wonder how many Americans had actually heard of Cecil the lion before he died. I certainly hadn't.
On similar lines, see Alpa Shah's Is Yosemite a Better Home for the Wild Elephants of Jharkhand?
Isn't California too cold for elephants?
I'm fairly certain that the "local favorite" and "beloved" stuff didn't mean people were really into Cecil so much as that Cecil was a famous selling point for Zimbabwe tourism. The problem wasn't that some people got their hearts broken (though I'm sure some of them did) so much as the fact that it's a genuine loss for the conservation programs there that depend on those tourist dollars - that's why his reported calmness around humans was notable/important in the first place.
Otherwise though the guy is right about how demented a lot of the reactions have been. I mean, poaching is bad and the guy should be extradited to stand trial. But hunting itself is not the same as being a demented serial killer, and the number of people who seem unable to think of animals* as anything other than pets or anthropomorphic characters in movies is a bit creepy. From what I've heard there is a certain dark amusement in those areas regarding the number of tourists who show up for guided drives through the parks being excited at the opportunity to see lions (or whatever) hunting, only to have a very traumatic experience seeing it happen in reality.
*Though, usually, only animals that don't live around them. And only the charismatic I-had-a-stuffed-animal-version-of-that-one animals to boot.
I'd bet tigers would work just fine, but there's already a biggish wild cat there now.
I'd never heard of Cecil the lion. Poaching, defined as hunting animals where you're not supposed to, including luring them out of protected areas, still seems bad. Killing animals that are terrorizing villages is good. Miniature American flags for all, except those who don't want them. They will be sentenced to death.
I thought elephants were pretty hardy as far as the cold went.
I hadn't heard of him either, but from what I can see he was a known thing. (His willingness to hang out in front of cameras, as in the second link, was the relevant/important thing about him, though he was a genuinely beautiful lion.)
I don't really have strong opinions about these issues (animal rights/hunting/wilderness conservation/etc.), but I find them interesting as stark examples of how different people view the world from very different perspectives, informed by underlying values and assumptions that are so fundamental and implicit that people often don't even consciously know they're there until they encounter someone who doesn't share them (and sometimes not even then).
The first link in 11 gives some useful context on the history of the park in question.
Unfogged: another site for cat pictures.
I am as eager to defer to the oppressed as the next nervous Caucasian but trophy hunters are fucking despicable and not doing a public service to the wretched of the Earth.
Lots of Berkeley locals complained when a cougar was shot in the Gourmet Ghetto. Not so many small joggers or street people complaining, maybe, but charismatic large animals are charismatic.
There's lovely recrnt work strongly suggesting that coyotes are moving into US urban and suburban spaces and that they reduce rat populations and increase native bird populations. This seems like an excellent tradeoff but coyotes aren't widely thought charismatic.
16: If you have small children then a bunch of medium sized wild dogs wandering the neighborhood isn't real appealing.
Well, shouldn't be appealing, but morons are legion. (not referring to clew)
This is the least sympathetic subaltern perspective since that Indian-American Silicon Valley asshole wrote that thing about how everyone should be having loud conversations during movies because that's what they do in the colorful vibrant joyous cultures of the Third World and if you have a problem with it you're a pompous obsolete elitist with a monocle.
My Botswanan colleague disagrees with the OP. He's writing something on the topic and even asked me to coauthor but I begged off. Would say more (and subject you to my Amanda Palmer "Poem for Cecil" parody) but I'm typing this on my phone at work.
I was wondering if foxes were a threat to children, and discovered that the Daily Mail and Telegraph seem to do a nice line in "fox mauls kiddies" stories.
I wanted to make a joke about killing the lion named after Cecil Rhodes as an act of anti- colonial resistance but then I learned that the lion really was named after Cecil Rhodes.
Coyotes are very reclusive. I doubt they maul many kids.
I want the Cecil hunter punished on general principle but the notion that he'll get anything like a fair trial in Zimbabwe is laughable. He's completely hosed regardless of the actual rights and wrongs of the situation.
So, I guess Trump's going to pay the guy's legal fees.
Presumably a first step toward his ultimate goal of naming him as his running mate.
The cheetah chasing the guy belongs to this guy.
I have had the recent-ish opportunity to spend more time than I ever expected to talking to somebody who grew up near wilderness conservation areas in sub-Saharan Africa, and worked for a tour company that ran safaris of both the take-nothing-but-pictures variety and the go-ahead-and-kill-the-hell-out-of-some-animals variety. While it is true that he doesn't think that killing African animals is a particularly problematic thing to do (although he was not interested in running that variety of safari himself) he has talked a lot about how rich foreigners (mostly Middle Eastern) have been buying up enormous amounts of lands adjacent to the parks in order to have private hunting lands, and that it's a huge problem for good government reasons (in that a lot of bribes get paid pretty much constantly in order to get access to animals that mostly, at this point, live in the parks) and for (not quite as urgently, it my sense from him) conservation reasons. So my personal sense has been that insofar as this blow-up draws attention to just how many rich foreigners are paying to go to Africa and shoot charismatic megafauna, he's likely to consider it a net benefit.
...a lot about how rich foreigners (mostly Middle Eastern) have been buying up enormous amounts of lands adjacent to the parks...
We all know that ends.
If you're going to have one of the large cats as a pet cheetahs are probably the ones to go with. I mean, he also has lots of lions which is less advisable, but there is a history of keeping cheetahs as pets and they can apparently be tamed (or more tamed than most wild animals anyway).
Also 17 is being overly fearful. As long as you always carefully watch over your children's activities and never let them leave your sight or be unsupervised at any time, like a good parent, there's very little danger involved. And if you make sure to always carry a gun even that little danger is eliminated!
Never in my life have I been so happy to watch a video with no clue what was coming.
If you have small children then a bunch of medium sized wild dogs wanderingautomobiles speeding through the neighborhood isn't real appealing.
But it's obvious which one is a problem.
Yes. I'd like to stand on the streets with a rake and threaten cars. But them I'm the asshole. At least during the school year, we have a crossing guard.
|| Hi, Pittsburghers. I'll be in your city and free to have drinks on August 10 (next Monday). I could do the 11th, too, but the 10th is more convenient. Will have a car, not sure where I'm staying yet. |>
The 10th works for me. As does the 11th, if it comes to that. Let me be the first to suggest Fresh Salt.
We used to have a Salt of the Earth, but it's closed.
Goodwell Nzou comes across more like he's alarmed for the future of the trophy hunting sector of the tourism industry than anything else.
30 shows that you've really turned the my-Mom-married-the-safari-guide-in-exactly-the-same-way-as-a-Bridget-Jones-book lemons into proximity-to-the-African-other lemonade.
41: He does. I wonder if trophy hunting is really that much of a better source of income than other wildlife-related businesses (e.g. just looking at without shooting the animals).
24: Yeah, I was mildly surprised to find we do actually have an extradition treaty with them. (Maybe deteriorating legal systems in a signatory can be cited in extradition hearings?)
36: I'll be in town and am entirely up for it either day.
16: Coyotes are definitely moving in to suburban areas - maybe ten years ago now I saw one lope by my parents' patio doors in suburban Illinois. Granted, they lived by a large artificial pond full of ducks (and close to a much larger artificial pond full of corporate-owned swans) and we would also occasionally see foxes, but it did give me pause.
I couldn't remember the word "coyote" at one point when telling this anecdote and described it as possibly a jackal or a hyena, which would really have been something.
I used to be pretty sure I heard a fox behind my house, but now I wonder if it wasn't just somebody's cat.
Actually, at my old apartment I saw a grouse, a fox and a turkey in the backyard, although not all at the same time.
There are a lot of turkeys that live along the river bike path. I see them sitting in the lower branches of the trees when I bike home from work. Turkeys are really weird-looking, also very, very large.
I remember that we weren't supposed to pronounce subaltern like it looks, but I can't remember the actual pronunciation. Suddle-tern?
Subble-tern like subtlety. According to Ajay, anyway -- I was the one who didn't know last time.
Is there some how to interact with coyotes education that would help? I like the idea of having midsized predators around keeping the rat population in check, I just want them wary of people. "Throw a rock at a coyote -- it keeps both of you safe." Or something like that.
52: Huh, I've never heard it pronounced that way, but apparently that's the British pronunciation. [\sə-ˈbȯl-tərn, especially British ˈsə-bəl-tərn\]
Quick editing help -- I'm working on a document that uses em dashes, en dashes, and two hyphens randomly all over the place, and now I can't remember what's right. If I'm setting off a clause -- this sort of thing -- do I properly want an em dash with no spaces around it? Em dash with spaces? En dash with or without spaces?
54 - traditionally, you drop an anvil on one.
58 - Em dash, no space.
52 is right. In my accent, arguably, almost no vowels at all. Almost Slavic.
Sbltrn.
I used to be pretty sure I heard a fox behind my house
Many years ago when I was regularly reading this blog but well before I started commenting someone, Ogged I think, posted a link to a page of animal sound mp3s which included many fox sounds. One them was the distress call of a juvenile fox which I experienced as so disturbing that I found it made a really effective alarm for my phone. It would wake me up no matter how low the volume on my phone was set and even if it was across the room inside a briefcase under a pile of clothes or something. It just could not be ignored. I lost the phone and forgot the link.
60.2: Thanks -- that's what I thought, but lost faith in myself.
re: 55
That's one I have fairly regular cause to use.
I've always assumed the two dashes were the way an ordinary typewriter rendered an emdash. I've seen it with spaces and without. The html character "—" should I think stretch between words without a space, and my old typed college papers had two dashes, no spaces.
Canadian usage in my childhood pronounced the word subaltern stressing the first syllable, and also said left tenant, but with a North American accent/pronunciation/sentence structure.
The big instructing and sponsoring foreign army at the birth of the respective country's armies, from whom practice and terminology were learned, were the French in the case of the USA, the British in the case of the Canadian.
Subble-tern like subtlety
I've been mispronouncing "subtlety" all these years? How embarrassing.
"Wooster."
We had some of this sauce on our steak last night, here at my in-laws, and all four syllables were loud and clear.
We've got a ton of coyotes here in Arkansas -- pronounced Coyoteee by the way, not Coy-oat as they do in Oklahoma and points west.
And you'll be glad to know my students agree with gswift about them being vermin. But it's not because the coyotes kill their kids. Coyotes don't attack kids. Coyotes attack (and eat) your cats and small dogs, as well as your chickens and the eggs from your henhouse, and your very young calves and colts, lambs and kids and other vulnerable young on your farm.
It's illegal to shoot coyote without a permit here in Arkansas, unless you catch the act of attacking your stock; my students say they don't let them stop that for one minute.
I've said here before that there's a stray-cat munching coyote in my neighborhood, which is in one of the denser parts of a huge city and not really close to any plausible coyote habitat. I'm pretty grateful to him or her for culling the population of what was starting to look like that Japanese stray cat island.
unless you catch the act of attacking your stock
The south uses weird euphemisms.
67: As it should be when outside Englands Old and New.
68: In rural central New York, it's "kai-oat".
68: There's been a number of attacks on both kids and adults in CA, probably because out there they don't do anything to cultivate a fear of humans the way your students do.
62 Does no one remember that? You people are no help at all.
In rural central New York, it's "kai-oat"
Same here, and also generally among people who study coyotes. We've had them around the neighborhood for years—I saw an adult crossing the street in broad daylight last year, in a nice area where lush garden beds provide plenty of cover—but I have yet to hear of anyone being attacked or pets going missing.
I found the lecture linked in 4 irritating. She makes a lot of good, if obvious, points, but after a while she started to sound like someone from the Heritage Foundation mansplaining why wilderness conservation is bad.
58, 60: I agree with Tom but style guides do differ about the propriety of spaces around the em dashes. I was very sad when the style guide for the journal in which my first publication appeared dictated spaces around the dashes.
My first thought when reading 16.2 was borne out by 68/69. Go coyotes! If we're going to have smallish wild carnivores roaming around in our cities eating things I'm all for making them canids.
It seems like all the rats in NYC would sustain a substantial coyote population, but I guess the coyotes would have to figure out how to get into the sewers and buildings.
Acme Corporation profits would go through the roof.
The number of stray dogs in Moscow that learned to navigate the city by using the subways seems like a reason to think they could manage something like it. Of course, dogs pretty much evolved to live in that kind of village-dog style existence so there's less of a danger there than there would be with coyotes. Maybe that's what we should encourage in large cities.
37/40/45: Yay! Looks like this thread is pretty busy. I can ask for a separate post to plan if this comment ends up unanswered, but sounds like the 10th works. I'll be free after 5, maybe meet at 6:30? Or is that too early? Happy to go anywhere you suggest. I'll be near UPMC.
While people are talking random meetups, there's no one in Albany, is there? I've got a week's trial training the week after next.
73: The obvious solution is to (1) move some of our hill folk to CA, though we tried that in the 30s as I recall and it didn't work out so well and (2) give the people in CA lessons on shooting at coyotes instead of one another.
82: UPMC is everywhere. I'm assuming you mean the Oakland part of UPMC.
Around here, some people leave dog food out for the coyotes because they think it's cool to have them around. That's the kind of thing that leads to coyotes becoming dangerous. Last I heard, there was talk of a county ordinance prohibiting feeding them, but it hasn't happened yet, and the county still refers people with coyote complaints to the Audubon Society.
I do kind of think that the best route to coexistence is to encourage throwing rocks at them. People should be big scary animals to be avoided.
county still refers people with coyote complaints to the Audubon Society.
Has the Audobon Society tried informing the county that coyotes aren't birds?
A coyote is a type of flightless bird, I guess.
Chicago style says no spaces for em dashes. AP style says spaces on each side. AP is correct.
I think maybe the birds are using the Audubon Society to forge an anti-cat coalition with the coyotes, and I don't object in the least.
83: If you have a vague memory that someone's in Albany, that could be me - I'm native to Albany, and it came up around Election Day.
I'm not there now, though, and as far as I can tell my only upcoming homecomings neatly bracket your trip; I'll be there 1 and 3 weeks from now, but not the week after next.
93 -- The local Audobon Society is currently in a for-real, large-scale pitched battle with the crazy cat people over the proper means of dealing with the stray cat overpopulation. The Audobon Society folks are clearly right, but the crazy cat people are organized and there are a lot more of them. The result has not only been (predictably) lawsuits and court intervention, but also a total standstill in the City's doing anything at all about stray cats, since it can't and won't kill them and can't and won't support catch-and-release. So I say bring on the coyotes to do what the bureaucracy won't, and let a thousand birds sing.
What is catch-and-release? Do they de-gonad them in the interim or drive them into the desert or what?
94: Yeah, I think I must have been thinking of you. Bummer, I'll have to socialize with coworkers.
95: Why can't the city support catch-and-release? The cat people again? If it's just a cost issue, Rule 34 suggests that somebody is sexually aroused by cats being neutered. Find them, give them some training, and get them to pay the city to let them do it.
99 makes sense. LA's economy is built off of Rule 34.
Most of the crazy cat people I've known who feed feral cats not only support catch, snip and release, they try to do the catching and releasing parts themselves.
Come to think of it, while I've heard no reports of pets lost to coyotes, I see way fewer stray cats here these days, and I'm pretty sure we don't have a catch-and-release program.
As an editor, one of the reasons I cling to the Courier New font like an ink-stained 80-year-old reporter about to be downsized is the fact that an em dash, an en dash, and a hyphen are all basically indistinguishable from each other. Life is too short to worry about that, and I say that as someone who's job is picking the font of government documents. If your editor insists, note that many of them can be replaced with colons and parentheses and it would be just as correct if not more.
Not to be a naive techno-optimist, but em/en-dash/hyphen correction really sounds like something machine learning should solve once and for all. We should never have to think about this again.
Here, the peregrine falcons worked pretty well on the pigeons (except when the crazy old man feeds them). Maybe some larger hawk or an owl could get the cats.
I say that as someone who's job is picking the font of government documents.
Speaks for itself as far as Cyrus's editorial acumen goes, really.
99, 101 -- The crazy cat people want catch and release, done by crazy cat people like themselves under contract to the city. The Audubon Society people want civil servants to pick up stray cats, put them in shelters and then eventually kill them if they're not adopted into homes. The City capitulated (over the advice of its animal control people) to the crazy cat people. Then, the Audubon Society sued to prevent the catch-and-release program, arguing that it wasn't effective at stopping the growth of the stray cat population and that the City hadn't properly accounted for the environmental impacts of replacing kill shelters with catch-and-release. A judge issued an injunction banning the catch-and-release policy, so now the City does nothing at all. The crazy cat people still do catch-and-release on their own, which is totally ineffective at stopping the growth of cat colonies. The Audubon Society people are lobbying for kill shelters and praying for coyotes to save the songbirds.
I don't actually care myself about the varieties of dashes, I was just trying to make a document consistent and didn't want the option I picked to be objectively wrong. If the writer had picked one herself, I would never have thought about it.
I'm assuming all of 107 can be explained by my Rule 34 extension.
I don't actually care myself about the varieties of dashes
Right, outer darkness for you.
98: If you were, that's a tribute to your memory! (But I do share your suspicion that no one who comments is currently there.)
Space em dash space is ridiculous and you might as well ship some crayons out with your text so your readers can take advantage of the vast acres of blank space in the middle of your documents.
Hyphens and em dashes should absolutely be distinguishable. En dashes should too, but maybe they're more for connoisseurs; the en dash is like the viola of dashes.
107: My uncle had a similar situation except that the crazy cat people were his wife and he lived on a farm. The cats all died under mysterious circumstances that lead my uncle to remark about contagious diseases which are found in feral cat colonies. In actuality, drinking Prestone isn't usually considered an infection.
112 is correct. Unfortunately, I have to use AP style, and worse, the paper's blog tool turns em dashes into double hyphens. It looks ridiculous.
113: My keyboard only has a minus sign. Which one is that?
the en dash is like the viola of dashes.
<3
catch-and-release ... is totally ineffective at stopping the growth of cat colonies
I guess this means the number of newly abandoned cats and kittens is maxing out the local environment. There has to be a way to better regulate that supply.
It could just mean that it is not possible to sterilize enough cats to constrain the number of kittens below levels which the local environment can support.
106: Ouch. Fair enough, that's embarrassing.
108: If you want some rules to go by... an en dash is only for replacing the word "to" when hyphens are also used and you need something to set them apart, like "Pub. L. 85-1-85-20." (I would have said never use it, but fair enough, it looks sensible to have a different kind of dash when it could be confused for one long string.) The various lengths of em dash are only for direct quotes from archaic text. (In other words, don't use them yourself.) Hyphens with no space on either side are only for compound modifiers, like "trade-in." Hyphens with a space on either side are fine for parenthetical remarks or abrupt shifts in tone or message, but it seems to me that usually the parentheticals could be set off with parentheses and the abrupt shifts could be turned into separate sentences.
None of that exactly matches any style guide I know of, but it should be an easy way to make any given document for a non-technical audience look internally consistent, I hope.
An en dash also replaces a hyphen in open compounds! You see this a lot in pre–Civil War documents, for instance.
And, for that matter, in Civil War–era documents.
119: Doesn't that suggest that the catch-and-don't-release strategy is doomed?
Probably. I'm personally fine with catch-and-send-to-a-nice-farm. Unless a bird has shit on my car that week, in which case I'm more pro-cat.
Maybe even more so, because fertile strays are no longer competing with infertile ones?
Okay, it interpreted my emoticon as html. 122 & 123 are awesome.
123: Pros: With catch-and-don't-release you never catch the same one twice, which is a waste of time and effort. Catch-and-don't-release should be able to remove many more individual feral cats from the breeding pool.
Cons: Relative to catch-and-release, this increases the relative percentage of feral cats able to reproduce. To some extent, sterile cats should crowd out breeders.
So...I dunno?
IMO one of the biggest benefits of catch and don't release would be that it would stop people viewing feral cats as normal or feeding them as totes cool and OK. The scale of the problem is pretty crazy. We're out of the house now for a renovation but one day when we left I counted 26 different cats in either my front or back yard, and we're not even feeding any of these cats.
s/b "before." It's not actually enough of a problem to drive us out of the house, though I think it's made our housecats nervous. But then again we're not songbirds.
Aren't all the song birds going to die of thirst anyway?
Not many stray cats in the Arkansas hills, I will just point out.
Hell, it's hard to keep house cats up here.
I like catch-and-release because, selfishly, that's how we got our cat. He's got a notched ear to make it clear to future catchers that they don't need to catch him, he's already been neutered. But we try to get him in at night and we've taken him to the vet a few times and he has a litterbox, so we figure he's ours, even though other people probably feed him now and then. We still let him spend a lot of time outside - sorry, songbirds, but he's going outside either way, the only question is whether we're letting him out or he's going to chew his way through our windowscreens.
Way, way back up but I agree with teofilo in 12. It's not hunting that's the problem, it's trophy hunting (i.e. killing the big males). This kind of hunting doesn't mimic natural mortality patterns so it has a disproportional effect on the population. Killing big old females (if they are reproductive) is the worst (because they produce the most and best offspring).
With deer hunting, this is a big trade-off with hunters. Some of them are hunting for food and will just take whatever they see - you can assign them tags to only hunt females or juveniles or whatever and the hunters will be fine. The hunters that want to kill the bucks with the big antlers take out the senior males and mess up the social structure. Then you keep taking out the big antlered males and you end up with evolutionary pressure for smaller antlers (see elephants).
Anyway, compensatory mortality, not additive mortality!
Also, I'm so anti-outdoor cats that I'm not even going to trust myself to argue the point. Catch and non-release. Bring back the coyotes (except that pack that killed a girl in NS). In conclusion, go birds!
I didn't know elephants had even very small antlers.
Not after all the hunting they don't.
...and that's how the elephant lost her horn.
...and didn't get the joke right.
Poor elephant! Lost her horn, didn't have antlers, and got the joke wrong!
-I used to be pretty sure I heard a fox behind my house, but now I wonder if it wasn't just somebody's cat.
- well, what did it say?
"Nobody here but us chickens!"
We have a lot of outdoor cats around here, and the odd fox, but I don't think they affect the songbird population much because they don't get a chance. The three species of resident corvid sort out the eggs and nestlings of any small bird stupid enough to try and breed in the neighbourhood.
Barry, was it one of these?
Fox cries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6NuhlibHsM
Subble-tern like subtlety. According to Ajay, anyway -- I was the one who didn't know last time.
As I was falling asleep, this comment flitted across my mind. Am I really pronouncing "subtle" wrong all these years? Isn't it "suddle"?
144 Something like between the "vixen's scream" and the fox cry at :32 and the fox cry at 1:42.
145: No, you're right, the two words have a different consonant in the middle, they just scan the same. I'd call 'subtle' sut-ul rather than suddle, but I'm not sure that there's really a difference in how I'm saying it. But certainly not subble.
146 s/b it sounded something like between the vixen's scream at :32 and the fox cry at 1:42.
145: I pronounce it with a sound roughly halfway between d and t. The b is silent in at least one other person's idiolect, as I've seen the expression "that puts the 'b' in subtle" used to describe particularly subtle remarks. That might even have been here.
county still refers people with coyote complaints to the Audubon Society.
They call it impiety
And lack of propriety
And quite a variety
Of unpleasant names?
Just to clarify, subtlety is "suttle-tea" with the stress on the first syllable, and subaltern is "subbletern" with the stress also on the first syllable.
(Menzies, Dalziel, Magdalen, St. John, Althorp, Colquhoun, Beauvoir etc)