animals in your life

[billy rubin]

dammit

im going to have to kill a bunch of raccoons.

im trying to feed my bees for the winter and the coons are chewing up my plasic jugs to get to the syrup.

too late this season so im expecting to lose some hives before the spring bloom. but when i start feedong next im going to have to depopulate the raccoons severely

[Ecurb Noselrub]

dammit

im going to have to kill a bunch of raccoons.

im trying to feed my bees for the winter and the coons are chewing up my plasic jugs to get to the syrup.

too late this season so im expecting to lose some hives before the spring bloom. but when i start feedong next im going to have to depopulate the raccoons severely

So, you can't protect things better?

[billy rubin]

not using the gallon cans. they just sit upside down on the lids and the cap fits through a hole into the hive. they look like this except theyre rectangualar plastic jugs



theres no way to protect them from the raccoons climbing up the beehives and knowcking them over.

its possible i might switch to division board feeders. these are a file-folder-like open top container that firts inside in place of one of the frames. not near as convenient, but its inside the beehive



even then the raccoons can knock the hive over

[Dark Lightning]

Can you build a structure to encompass them, with holes big enough for the bees, and tough enough to fight 'coons? I was at Gatorland in Florida, and there was a 13' gator in a pen. That pen was made of chain link, made from THICK wire. Thick enough to keep a gator captive. Like this, but I didn't price it. You'd probably have to bury some of it and form a cage over the whole magilla. heavy duty chain link

Fun story. A bunch of us naked apes were standing there staring at the gator and it made basso profundo growl. We all jumped, big time! 

[billy rubin]

well, an electric fence could work, but theyre high maintenance. plus i only have around 15 beehives and im on track for maybe 100. im just goi g to keep dividing until i get the bee equipment out of the warehouse and out with bees in it. id need several setups in different places.

i burned up maybe 300 empty hives after the Big Die Off, and abandoned some 300 more because i had no money for petrol to go get them. so my equipment inventory is downsized

i suspect decorating the beeyard with half a dozen dead raccoons might have the most beneficial effect. i have no sense of smell so im ahead of the game.

[billy rubin]

raccoons and possums still  on the porch. theyll geta good feed tonight, as i got up in the morning to make some fried rice for dinner. cooked the rice yesterday, then today boiled some carrots, dropped in some green peas, chopped up some of my sons chilis, added garlic and ginger (lots), did some green onions, separating the roots from the leaves, and opened a can of waterchestnuts. then some soy sauce mixed with sesame oil, mixed in a cup and ready as is. and some snap peas.

is that it? took about fifteen minutes to arrange all the ingredients. when i do fried rice, i have to set it all up in advance, because the wok is hot and cooking time is very quick. mostly just dropping stuff in the oil, searing it for less than a minute, and then adding the nextthing. it goes in order:

--garlic and giner and chilis. and onions

--snap peas, carrots and peas

-- dtaes (i forgot to mention the dates.)

-- and waterchestnuts. (i forgot to mention those too)

--then drop in all the pre-cooked and dried out rice, and stir it in until the rice starts popping.

-- finally stir in the soy sauce and s esame oil, and toss all the stuff in the hot wok over and over.

anyway, all was well, and it looked really good, until i poured in the soy sauce and sesame oil. the laststep.

then i put the cup down and noticed that itwasnt the soy sauce cup, itwas my coffee cup.

i had just poured all my coffee into the fried rice, at the stinking last step.

so i took the almost perfect fried rice out and dumped it into the animal dish on the kitchen porch, and started over. the new rice wont get  to sit all night, but ill make do. the cats were not impressed.

but in the meantime, the possums and raccoons will have a feast tonight.

[Icarus]

Here is an article about the eyeballs of the Greenland Shark. One of the longest living creatures, it manages to maintain sight capability for hundreds of years...................Who knew?

https://www.popsci.com/environment/greenland-shark-eyes/

[Recusant]

Interesting article, thank you Icarus. I was intrigued enough to check what the Wikipedia page has to say about the Greenland shark. Really an amazing species, regrettably it seems we humans aren't doing them any favors. It would be splendid if we learn how to preserve eyesight in those afflicted by things like glaucoma and macular degeneration though.

It's good to see pop science media (in this case the venerable Popular Science) noting the effect of the politicos slashing funding for research. The enmity of militant ignoramuses toward the search for knowledge is dismaying, to put it mildly.

[Recusant]

About 20% of people have found losing a non-human companion to be harder than (some?) human companions. I don't think I'm in that 20%, but significant grief is there certainly.

"1 in 5 people say losing their pet was worse than losing a person" | Medical Xpress

For one in five people, losing a pet has been more distressing than losing a human loved one. New research has revealed that 21% of those who experienced both types of bereavement found their pet's death harder to bear.

The findings challenge how society views pet loss. It's often dismissed as "disenfranchised grief"—a type of mourning that isn't socially recognized or validated in the same way as other bereavements.

Yet for most pet owners, their animals are family. A 2025 survey by the animal charity RSPCA found that 99% consider their pets part of the family rather than "just a pet." On Instagram, #dogsarefamily alone has 3.4 million posts.

The latest study of 975 British adults revealed something striking. Around 7.5% of people who'd lost pets met clinical criteria for "prolonged grief disorder"—comparable to rates following many human deaths. The work is published in the journal PLOS One.

[Continues . . .]

The paper is open access:

"No pets allowed: Evidence that prolonged grief disorder can occur following the death of a pet" | PLOS One

Abstract:

Background
Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) is a psychiatric disorder in ICD-11 and DSM-5-TR that can only be diagnosed following the death of a person. Despite considerable evidence that people form strong attachments to their pets, and experience high levels of grief following their death, the current guidelines do not allow PGD to be diagnosed following the death of a pet. This study tested several hypotheses to determine if there is anything unique about grief that follows the death of a person versus grief that follows the death of a pet.

Methods
A nationally representative sample of adults from the United Kingdom (N = 975) provided information about different bereavements, their most distressing bereavement, and ICD-11 PGD symptoms.

Results
One-third (32.6%) of respondents experienced the death of a beloved pet, and almost all had also experienced the death of a human; 21.0% of these people chose the death of their pet as most distressing. The conditional rate of PGD following the death of a pet was 7.5%, similar to many types of human losses. The relative risk of PGD following pet bereavement was 1.27, and pet loss accounted for 8.1% of all PGD cases in the population, both of which were higher than many types of human losses. Full measurement invariance for PGD symptoms was found between people who reported symptoms for a human bereavement and for a pet bereavement.

Conclusions
People can experience clinically significant levels of PGD following the death of a pet, and PGD symptoms manifest in the same way regardless of the species of the deceased. Implications associated with excluding diagnosis following pet bereavement are discussed.