Me too. It’s been so hard revisiting the lush forested places that I hold close to my heart and finding them barren and unsheltered and seemingly lifeless. We lost a lot of beautiful forest in Sask last year, but it did help me a bit to go back. Even though the area looked so grim as we drove by, I woke up in our campsite in the morning to a to huge variety of birdsong, many bees and insects, and the undergrowth still held a lot of biodiversity. Mushrooms and flowers, and the famously plentiful blueberries, while not productive, were still present and will rebound. It hurts to think it might take another 40 years or more to return to how I first saw it, but it will return, and hopefully I live long enough to see it.

Baling*

Is there any Canadian equivalent you’re aware of?

It’s okay, it’s fairly improbable that they will be built… it’s still unfortunate that such a flagrant disregard for climate change (which is already hurting us) is being pursued all over North America just because we desperately and urgently need data centres for ??? right away and we simply can’t use renewable energy for them either. Sask, Alberta, and Ontario are probably at highest risk for large data centres actually coming to fruition but there are some substantial hurdles to getting them built right now (chip shortage is a big one). And they may have gotten a little too eager and ambitious during the pump part of the pump and dump, and if the dump arrives early the poor AI companies might be decimated before they can actually get the forsaken things built (hence the rush). Fingers crossed and keep pushing back however you can!

Working as intended

What happened to fossilesque?? :(

That’s a great analogy!

What game is this ?

A long running antisemitic myth that Jewish people kidnap and murder Christian children and use their blood in rituals

Ohhh ok yea there it is. Sorry, not American.

Ok maybe I’m missing something but scumbag Stephen Miller didn’t really say anything contentious or bad? I’m sure he meant it disparagingly but wouldn’t a more effective response be something like “thanks for acknowledging this positive step towards inclusivity!” ? Idk

How is it a weakness? If anything it seems like it would help address inequity in how people are treated based on race, age, gender if people are interacting more anonymously, and maybe we could also dispense with this whole coworkers are a family bs that is meant to instil loyalty to a company that doesn’t care about you and offset a lack of work life balance

Does that mean it will be like a crown owned pipeline? Not that privatizing ports is worth a provincial pipeline but that would be an interesting outcome.

No satisfying answer there

What? What do you mean?

Dogs are a particularly useful model for heart problems in humans because they naturally get several of the same conditions and diseases humans do. You can try to create genetic variants of mice to have these conditions but it’s not nearly as good as a species that naturally experiences the condition. You may waste hundreds of mouse lives for poor quality research that way.

All studies involving animals require ethical approval involving a detailed assessment of the protocol by a committee that must include veterinarians, managers of the facility (not the lab members but outside of the research team), technicians who work directly with the animals, other researchers doing unrelated work, and a community member otherwise uninvolved in research at all. This is just for the ethical approval, they will also have to go through scientific merit evaluation by a different committee before this step. They must lay out exactly what they are doing and why it is necessary and how they are mitigating pain and distress. They may be under anesthesia for the entire heart attack, and then euthanized without waking up, or receive painkillers and be monitored constantly by a veterinarian. If they don’t do this, the work wont happen, and results wont be publishable either. Without being at that meeting we can’t know the exact technical justification, but there is a very strict process to follow and often everyone has more feelings about it when they are companion animals and they receive a lot of scrutiny.

I’m not all for animal research, some of it is poorly done and wasteful and doesn’t have any practical use. Or the data suffers from human incompetence. But a lot of it does help humans and animals. And there is a lot more tendency to intervene on pain and distress than you’d think - a distressed animal with no pain mitigation is not a good representation for your average human receiving treatment for something at a hospital. Your average local veterinary clinic almost certainly sees far worse cases of neglect and festering horrifying injuries and disease at the hands of incompetent dog owners than a study like this would ever produce.

Yeah not to mention animal testing isn’t just for human medical advancements… a lot of animal testing is to develop treatments for animal diseases, test new diet ingredients (after which the animals are adopted out), etc…