browsing random photos of purebred cats today...

[sciatrix]

...because while I have very little interest in owning a purebred cat, I like looking at them sometimes. And purebred Maine Coons are eldritch motherfuckers, which is always fun to look at.

This is how I stumbled across this Metatron Eyes cattery, which holy shit looks like one of the nicest, most ethically put together catteries I've ever seen. Damn. If I wanted a purebred cat, this is the sort of place I'd want to buy it from and support. I mean, in practice I have a strong preference for mildly special-needs cats with extremely strong personalities, and it's just straight up easier to find that sort of thing by going through rescue, and we have such a massive feral problem worldwide that sourcing random-bred cats isn't hard. But it's nice to know that if people are going to be breeding cats, there are people out there working to do it with as much attention to quality of life in their animals as possible.

(As I was writing this, Arthur Dent stomped up, crawled into my lap, and immediately started purring himself to sleep. Aw.)

I was having an interesting Twitter conversation about the weird cultural projections that different regions of the US put on dogs this morning, including a guess that a dog from rural Georgia might have some blackmouth cur in her (quite possible!) and some regional discussion of what people expect out of dog manners, so this is quite a nice bookend for my day. I've been thinking about how dog culture in the US might change as dogs in need of homes become less and less common (as they already are in many areas), especially as spay/neuter culture penetrates the US South, and how racism and classism inform rescue culture and the way different breeds and types of dogs are often promoted. (Especially with respect to pit bulls. It is impossible to understand the cultural trajectory of pit bulls in the US without understanding the racial associations and aspects of the dogs, and it's uncomfortably interesting watching the ways that different groups try to promote the breed for adoption by, well, presenting them as middle class white person dogs too.

People get pretty weird about it.

Disclaimer because it's a loaded topic: my opinions on pit bulls are:
a) they are dogs,
b) all dogs are perfectly capable of doing horrific damage to a human, if they are so behaviorally inclined,
c) there's a lot of really dumb myths out there about pit bulls specifically,
d) pits do tend towards dog aggression no matter what you do, and "it's not the breed it's how you raise them!" is a somewhat dangerous oversimplification,
e) that said "pit bull" is an enormous and extremely heterogeneous population that contains a wide variety of temperaments, body types, energy levels, drive levels, etc etc as well as at least five breeds of dog, some of them extremely popular in the US,
f) shelter workers are notoriously awful at breed identification and everyone is awful at identifying mixes,
g) that there are a lot of really fucked up expectations in North America regarding dog behavior and opportunities for socialization, and breed based legislation is a way less effective way to minimize dog bites than public education and dangerous dog laws.

I am currently taking a long break from MeFi after I, uh, got hit pretty hard in the exclusion trauma side of things in a thread about wlw. Again. So it's nice to have DW to come back to and natter in, and the hell with everything else for a bit.

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

Wow that is an ugly thread and I'm sorry you got caught in the crossfire of angry people there.

[siderea]

So, that's, what? At least the second time you've had that same run in with Metafilter user FMK? She says something which sounds exclusionary, you reply to her with something the upshot of which is "hey that felt exclusionary, do you mind" but doesn't actually expressly say that, she replies to you doubling down on the exclusionariness, and you feel extra-special excluded.

I think you don't have to stick your fork in that lightsocket any more? I think we conclude that, yep, she means to be exclusionary, and, yep, she'll reliably exclude you as hard as she can.

[silversandbea]

Oh man, I read the first part of that thread but decided not to engage, and hadn't realized how bad that thread had gotten. I'm sorry you had to experience that (and I totally get the impulse to engage - especially when it doesn't seem like anyone else is going to engage, and I don't want those statements to just hang about unchallenged).

With dogs - I think a lot about this with 'working' dog breeds, and ones that don't really have the temperament for a sedentary housepet. Obviously there's individual variation, but some breeds need a lot of exercise or space to run around in - and what's the future of those breeds? I grew up in an area where a lot of the people who had dogs had them for security (and there were always rumors of the family member of a friend who was into dogfighting). So I knew people who had pits, but I also didn't grow up with the idea that dogs were friendly - when I went to college and met people who just ran up to strangers' dogs, it was the weirdest moment of culture clash. There were also a ton of strays in the area, but the difference is that people would adopt the cats if they seemed friendly enough and leave food out even if they weren't. Enough of the stray dogs were former fighting/guard dogs that were dumped that most people wouldn't trust them or want to encourage them to stick around.

[writerkit]

...welp, that was a scary thread. Things like that are why I've never tried to join MetaFilter even though it's occasionally interesting. I see that discussion as being very similar to some of my ultra-left college acquaintances, the ones who think that anyone who disagrees with them on any point no matter how small or how nuanced is just as bad as the Republicans. You're never going to convince people like that; they're too bound up in needing to be the Most Oppressed to engage in good faith-- it's like they think if they acknowledge that they're capable of hurting people it invalidates their own pain. I spent a while seeking approval of people like that and then a while longer bashing my head against their walls, and now... I'm not sure there *is* an answer, except keep forming our own spaces where all of us who fall into "other" can hide out, because they're always so determined that they are Right and True and therefore anyone who disagrees is The Enemy. It's a very black-and-white worldview and those of us on the outside are all nuance.

[kaberett]

Hopefully will brain more later, but quickly: these people are explicitly telling you they're not interested in listening to you or communicating in good faith. It's probably worth believing them and approaching accordingly.

(I appreciated what you had to say.)