pacificpikachu | (no subject)

No siblings for cute baby serama yet, but I candled the eggs and soon there should be more soon. I am proud that I am able to resist feed store chicks. There are a lot of moral issues I have with hatcheries, so it's for the best if I resist feed store chicks as much as humanly possible. I go say hello to them, but that is it. They do not come home with me.

I went to Janey's chicken class again last night, and a wildlife rehab class today. Tomorrow's plans? Clean out the chicken coops and give Fakir (butterscotch call duck) a bath in the bathtub. I don't know why, but his feathers are in terrible condition! They're not waterproofing and look all ratty, it's awful. I hope a good bath will solve whatever the issue is, otherwise I'll have to go to BYC for advice. The other four call ducks (plus my two black east indies and four big ducks) all have gorgeous feathers, so I'm not sure what's up with Fakir.

Another family came to look at Tippy. This family was even more promising! Two kids, another dog to play with, very nice people. It's up to them now! I think Tippy would be happy with them. She's curled up next to me right now. I'm going to miss her a lot whenever she goes to a new home, but I generally do all right when I give up foster dogs no matter how much I love them. I have a knack for separating myself just enough that I can pull through it without much angst. Probably from years of wildlife rehabbing, where around 50% of your patients die no matter how much you want them to live, and you sometimes have to make euthanasia decisions yourself. By comparison, giving up a foster dog to a loving new home is much easier. I make a mental distinction between them and my dogs, and somehow that partition seems to work.

Aaaand abrupt change in blog tone!

I went on another morbid-things-on-the-internet hunt and this time what I looked at toned me down to feeling rather "..." Not that I'm in emotional turmoil or even upset or sad, but not jolly either. Just sort of blank. Suicide freaks me out for some reason. I am not remotely suicidal and have never been, even in my worst moments, but reading about suicide and looking at pictures of people who committed suicide stirs up strange feelings in me. It's like...I can't comprehend going so far as to do something like that, and therefore I find it darkly fascinating as well as terrifying. I guess, even more than the darkness that exists in serial killers, I find the darkness that leads a person to complete suicide terrifying and I can only grasp the very edges of such a feeling. (Thankfully, as I do not want to feel suicidal of course, but I just mean on an empathetic level.) So I guess I seek understanding of it, somehow, even though I don't think there is a way to understand such a thing without experiencing it (which I clearly do not want to do). I mean, I can understand it symbolically, but the actual act of following through with it is hard for me to wrap my mind around. It's such an extreme and final gesture of helplessness, and while I know psychologically why it occurs and I'm fairly knowledgeable on the subject, it still just seems like this big question mark to me and something I find disturbing for reasons I can't entirely pinpoint.

I sometimes think my fascination with the darker sides of my species is a way of balancing myself spiritually, in a way, and also of trying to understand my own species. Thanks to being involved with animal rescue, I see the extremes of people's compassion regularly--people who dedicate themselves to saving even those species that are considered virtually objects and unworthy of life in our culture, and so then I must also seek out the opposite--the people who destroy life, whether it is their own or the lives of others. I have trouble tolerating watching actual suffering while helpless to do anything about it, but I can try to seek out understanding of those cause suffering and those who suffer, and I can try to find ways to lessen suffering when I can.

Gloomy topic, sorry. I want to write about lighter things buuuut really all I want to do now is go play Pokémon until bed so for now I shall leave you all with this grim topic to ponder!