#if you do not like seeing bears behave as they naturally do -- as apex predators -- then please filter this tag accordingly friends | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cfdiamonds · 3 years

Text

[ ARON PIPER, CIS GENDERED MAN, HE/HIM ] shh ! LEOCADIO SYNDER, the TWENTY-TWO year old SECOND year ECONOMICS major from MADRID, SPAIN, is known as a DIAMOND around here. HE was invited to join because OF HIS PERSISTENCE AND HIS FATHER WAS IN THE SOCIETY, and now, they’re here to stay. HE reminds me of A LEGION OF STAFF CONSTANTLY AT YOUR SERVICE, A WARDROBE FILLED WITH THE FINEST MATERIAL, + EXPENSIVE RINGS ON EACH OF HIS FINGERS.

helloooo!! it’s been a long time coming but i’m finally excited to be here and join in on this super cool story the admins and all of you have created! i’m lia, i’m 23 and i go by she/her and they/them pronouns, so feel free to use either of them. i was going to make a graphic and a google doc but i’ve got plans with my family to watch a movie tonight, so until i can make the time i hope his app is enough!

a past and character reflection.

you were born into success and luxury, the only child of two glencore billionaires — a diversified natural resource company. the synders are responsible for the marketing of lead and make a little over a billion dollars each year. all they’ve ever known was their jobs and their money, leaving little room for anything more than that, especially the addition of a child. the nannies changed your diapers and the maid picked up your toys, while the butler handled the broken glass splayed across the marble flooring from one of your daily tantrums. they bit their tongues because you were raised to view yourself as extraordinary living in a world of the ordinary. despite this, these people meant more to you than the ones who brought you into the world. you had a mother that asked you how your day went and then immediately turned her attention back to her phone or laptop, checking off that mental to-do-list that made her believe the question was enough effort. you had a father that saw you as weak and continuously pushed you past your limits, focusing on every little flaw you had and giving you no choice but to be better. you became so conflicted between your drive to be the best and your need for love, that anger became your method of coping. even the lightest of offenses were met with your spite and you glorified material things as if it were the only thing that mattered in the world. even at the tender age of ten, power was the one thing that kept you driven.

growing up, you never had any real or close friendships. the people that you called your friends were just more people that you could benefit from — the children from rich and influential families that spanned the globe. regardless of your rude and cold exterior, they still found reason to look up to you like you were their leader, be it an inheritance from your father’s charisma or your mother’s sophistication — because everything you had, you had to thank them for right? you knew exactly how to draw people in and use them until you didn’t need them anymore, kicking them to the curb the second their time ran out. the kids that excelled in school got you the highest grade, the kids that excelled in sports helped you become captain of their teams, and the kids that assisted you in breaking the rules always took the fall. and yet, no matter how hard you proved yourself as this apex predator, your parents saw you as inferior. they always told you to work smarter not harder, but when you did, it still wasn’t enough. what more could you take from the world? it had nothing left to give you.

the next chapter in your life became your second chance to prove yourself, but this time with a different method to your persistence. just as your parents did, you’d build yourself from the ground up, not taking whatever you wanted but fighting to obtain it. you already had the determination to do what had to be done to reach your goals, now all you needed to do was make it yourself. you enter your first year at strathmore university and you never take what you need to succeed, you push yourself until you earn it. every time the fates fight against you and you feel hopeless in meeting these high expectations you and your parents have made for you, you grasp onto the anguish of that ten year old boy yearning for approval and press forward with your strength. you still hold onto that cunning aspect of your character but this time, it’s something you keep hidden beneath the surface — away from prying eyes. you slip up once or twice, but it’s never enough to allow others to see you for who you truly are. you join several clubs even though you barely have the time, slipping your name into the minds of those spanning the entirety of the campus. you maintain one of the highest grades in your classes through dedication and hard work, scoffing at the students that request your assistance … they don’t deserve your help. not now anyway. not while you fight to be noticed in a place filled to the brim with excellent minds. not while you await your invitation to the society, the first step at proving that you can be great just like them. just like your parents.

on the society

upon arriving at strathmore university, leo became obsessive in his studies and joined many clubs to assist in his quest of standing out amongst the other first years. unbeknownst to many though, he also did this in hopes of earning a spot in the secret society. this is because his father had been in the society when he was young and in order to prove his potential, this was an organization he knew he had to be involved in. despite not knowing what the society was like or what they were about, he knew that they existed because of his father but that’s the extent of his knowledge on it.

when he was finally given his chance thanks to the diamond opal, leo became passionate about his spot and willing to do whatever means necessary to keep his spot. he takes advice willingly ( but goes against it if he believes they’re wrong ) and pushes to lead in some situations, not letting anyone or anything stand in the way of his goals. although he mainly does everything for his parents, whether they will ever notice or not, it is also for himself and his desire to be something great ( something he outwardly believes he already is but has struggled with internally for a long time ). leo wants to be the best prodigy and opal that the society has ever seen, and visualizes himself as the diadem when he builds himself up to that point.

when it comes to poppy nighmore, leo is more intrigued than he is worried about the reason for her disappearance. if those within the society that knew poppy are upset about her disappearance, leo is willing to take initiative in trying to solve the mystery. he will take risks and push limits in order to find information, but does so for selfish gain than anything else. he believes that he may prove himself as a worthy and necessary addition to the opal society if he continues researching and physically proving he cares. it also gives him a chance to show the others that he is capable of big things.

wanted connections.

as i read about your characters i’ll be able to generate a bit more ideas when directly plotting with each of you! these are just the ideas i have coming into the group, so if you do not see your character fitting them, worry not! we can brainstorm<3

his soft spot — the person that leo can’t seem to say no to no matter how hard he tries. his entire life he has felt little to no remorse in his conquest for power, no matter who he trampled along the way but suddenly, out of nowhere, the world presented him with this person and every time they’re around, every ounce of him becomes vulnerable. when they tell him to do something or to behave a certain way, he seldom disobeys. if they happen to be in the room when he’s behaving as he normally does, he avoids their eyes in fear of backing down. in a way, this person in his anchor that protects him from himself.

his adversary — the person that gives leo a run for his money, testing him and pushing him every step of the way. they bear too many similarities to get along and compete over even the littlest of things. when one says yes, the other says no. the steve rogers to his tony stark. the thor to his loki.

fellow rich kids — those he knew by association prior to strathmore university or the society. they all understand each other because they grew up in similar conditions, where material things were the forms of love they received as children. they understand the lifestyle and flock together, regardless of whether or not they actually like each other. they board a private jet and escape real life for a weekend, only to return like nothing had happened come monday morning.

his best friend — leo doesn’t know it yet, perhaps neither of them do, but this person is his best friend. close relationships of any kind are foreign concepts to leo because he had, in his opinion, more important things to focus on as he grew up. love doesn’t exist in his world. so by his words, he trusts this person the most and is constantly inviting them around with him. he would never call it as it is in fear of cutting them loose and never feeling an ounce of remorse, but he’s acknowledged it in his head once or twice. this person is like the sibling he’s never had.

his mistake — in leo’s first year, he befriended this person and the pair eventually started to see each other romantically. however, leo wronged them somehow and now that he’s in the society with them, he realizes how big of a mistake he made hurting them. perhaps he fell back into old habits and made their acquaintance with the intention of gaining something, maybe in a class or by their personal influence in the world / at school, and they eventually found out about it. just an angsty exes plot.

his mentor — the diamond that took him as their prodigy. leo takes the dynamic between them incredibly serious and is willing and ready to do whatever they ask of him in order to prove they made the right choice taking him under their wing. he understands that his place in the society must not be taken for granted and so he treats it as a passion, rather than just another club around campus. he rarely does something society related without first receiving the opinion of the opal, but he also would ignore their opinion if he feels they are the one that’s wrong. this is business as usual and leo is their prodigy knowing that if all goes as planned, he will have their seat in the future.

#𝓁𝑒𝑜𝒸𝒶𝒹𝒾𝑜 𝓈𝓎𝓃𝒹𝑒𝓇 〳 ⑉ introduction.#opalsintro #i sweat i'll have a stats / more in depth bio / wanted connection list soon okay #and by sweat i mean swear #sweating too though because all of you are so cool ? catch my leg on fire more like catch my heart on fire #nobody read these tags

19 notes · View notes

pokepartners · 6 years

Text

Team Request

If I’m not too late, might I get one of these?

My MBTI is INTJ, my favorite season is Winter, my sign is Capricorn, my favorite Pokemon type is Dark, and my favorite color is purple!

Hobbies of mine include reading,writing, playing Medieval Fantasy games, Pokemon Showdown (Or just Pokemon in general), playing Yu-Gi-Oh!, and shiny hunting!

As a person I’m generally quiet and withdrawn, preferring my own company to that of other people. However, despite my general aloofness, I’m actually a highly competitive person and despise losing (And often times take it out on myself if/when I do lose). Among the handful of friends I have, I like to be as supportive as I possibly can for them when they’re going through tough times, but often neglect my own mental health due to me focusing more on helping people and not myself. And finally, probably the biggest con of my personality would be the fact that I can hold grudges for a long long time, and even though I say I might say I’ve forgiven someone, my past grievances with them end up resurfacing whenever they do something that repeatedly gets on my nerves.

hello! 💕 this one took a bit of thinking, and it took me longer than i thought it would, but i think i finally have a suitable team for you:

✧ the sharp juxtaposition between aloofness and ambition is one that toxicroak knows well. its bright colouration and rough-n-tough appearance tend to ward off attackers before it ever needs to rise to the challenge - but even so, this pokemon is ferociously territorial. by churning the potent toxins in its throat sac and pumping them into its knuckle claws, toxicroak can protect its land with fatal venom and a flexible, acrobatic style of attacking that catches its opponents off guard.

✧ as your companion, toxicroak will be steadfast. much like its pre-evolution, it isn’t known for playing fair, and regarded as a competitive mascot for its habit of fighting dirty; but this strictly a method of survival. toxicroak understands better than most that winning is a necessity for those who want to not just survive, but thrive, and as such, it has a bit of a merciless streak. however, it isn’t all bad; its toxins, regardless of their potency, can be used in pain medicine, and its competitive nature usually only tends to manifest in a desire to please you. just don’t expect toxicroak to play nice with everybody - it may be reserved, but that doesn’t mean it’s polite.

✧ much like its fellow poison type, toxicroak, scolipede takes territorial aggression to a whole new level in the wild, and it shares with the frog a deadly poison that most wouldn’t dream of getting close to. many of your hobbies appear to centre around indoors, and seem rather stationary - with scolipede on your team, you will find yourself forced into the outside world for the sake of exercising this aggressive bug in an attempt to curb its fighting spirit.

✧ scolipede can relate to your habit of holding grudges even though you claim to forgive - though the key difference is that scolipede doesn’t pretend to hand out second chances if it doesn’t think people are worthy of them. it will just attack with its painfully-sharp horns and stomp its feet until whoever’s wronged it has fled for the hills - perhaps this bluntness will prove helpful?

✧ spiritomb isn’t known as the “forbidden pokemon” for nothing; it is bound away in its keystone for the sake of the world around it. 108 spirits in one, spiritomb has a loud mind that refuses to stop, its body the manifestation of the misdeeds performed by the souls it contains. however, this pokemon may not have been formed consciously by those spirits - perhaps it is some sort of containment device, some malevolent-seeming police officer of the evil?

✧ spiritomb’s mischievousness often comes with a selfishness. though it can become loyal to you, it will always preach a level of self-care that prioritises its own success above that of other people. much like toxicroak, it’s no stranger to fighting dirty to win - but more importantly, it can be a slightly-spooky reminder of the importance of taking care of yourself! spiritomb cares not for those outside its tiny circle; it will pressure you into focusing on yourself sometimes, rather than your friends - people who it misguidedly discards for the sake of your own wellbeing (even if the outcome is rather sweet in a morbid sense).

✧ in ancient times, kabutops was almost a hero of evolutionary success. its adaptable, flexible nature allowed it to alter its behaviour in order to keep up with its prey - and though it ultimately ran out of time, as many species do, while it lived, it was an apex predator. its restored self is no different; it has keen senses despite the fact that it’s a bit of a freak caught between terrestrial and aquatic living, not quite perfectly formed for either. these setbacks could very easily frustrate kabutops, but it refuses to let them get it down; it relies on its strengths and continues to modify its behaviour to improve.

✧ kabutops can be a source of inspiration for you. your frustrations around losing will quickly evaporate if you spend time training alongside kabutops; for it, failure is merely an obstacle to overcome, a lesson to be learned, and not something it dwells on. in its mind, dwelling on losses only wastes time that could be spent succeeding; this thought process is what let it be such a successful predator.

✧ greedy, combative, vicious. zweilous is a creature of hubris and sin - or so the media will tell you. it’s true that zweilous heads don’t always get along; they’re preparing for evolution, squabbling to see which will become the most dominant, but can you blame them? the one that’s weakest dies, its brain shrivelling - in effect, by evolving zweilous, you are killing one half of your friend.

✧ as such, there’s a sort of desperation in zweilous. remarkably, any minor study into their behaviour would find that something as simple as an everstone would almost instantly quiet their viciousness, allowing it to give way to a curiosity that most wouldn’t consider zweilous capable of. much like its pre-evolution, zweilous is almost entirely blind; its snapping jaws are its only method of discovering the world around it. by providing it with a familiar, easy-to-navigate space, you can help negate that behaviour too. in doing so, you can help put your kind nature to good use, soothing and taming a pokemon that is otherwise seen as reckless and too-bloodthirsty for most.

✧ with a running theme of competitiveness and determination, your team needs a steadfast, placid leader - and there’s no better pokemon for that position than gogoat. gogoat will be your right hand man through thick and thin thanks to a capacity for empathy beyond most. with little more than a touch to its horns, you - and any other living creature - can tell it exactly how you’re feeling, allowing it to adapt to your wishes and behave accordingly. with this easy method of monitoring, gogoat can make sure you aren’t burning yourself out for others - and it can also make sure your team isn’t too tense.

✧ while other members of your team may compliment some of your traits, gogoat encourages you to move on. it will coax you into letting go of old grudges, providing they aren’t anything major (and if they are, then it will do the grudge-bearing for you) and push you on when failure gets you down. being the quiet sort, gogoat will sit by you as you indulge in your hobbies - or distract your more active pokemon so that you actually have a chance to relax. just be warned that gogoat’s affection sometimes comes in the form of tough love - but regardless, it only wants what’s best for you.

i hope you like your team! i know a lot of them seem quite aggressive - but hopefully gogoat’s influence should be able to calm all that energy. also, i wrote more than i was expecting, but i hope the insight helps! 💕

#pokemon #pokemon team #pokemon partner #pokemon companion #pokemon match up #pokepal #toxicroak #scolipede #spiritomb #kabutops #zweilous #gogoat #submission #pokemon trainer #requests

6 notes · View notes

avialaeandapidae · 6 years

Link

By Christopher Solomon

July 5, 2018

You might not guess from looking at him that Rob Wielgus was until recently a tenured professor of wildlife ecology. Wielgus likes to spend time in the backwoods of the American West that lie off the edge of most tourist maps, and he dresses the part: motorcycle leathers, tattoos on both forearms, the stringy hairs of a goatee dangling like lichen from his lower lip. Atop his bald head he often wears a battered leather bush hat of the type seen at Waylon Jennings concerts. A Camel smolders in his face like a fuse. The first time I called him, he told me that he couldn’t chat because he was riding his Harley home from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota.

When we met last fall, Wielgus, who is 61, wasn’t wearing his bush hat, however, but a straw cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He was, he explained, in disguise. We had rendezvoused in Republic, a faded former mining town of about a thousand people in the northeastern part of Washington State. Stores wore boomtown facades to tempt passing drivers and their dollars to linger. But this was mid-October: Pickup trucks throttled past on the main drag, hauling hay and firewood for a winter that would slump down from Canada any day.

Wielgus had spent years in the surrounding woods doing research, and he loved the area. Now he considered it hostile territory. Before he pushed through the swinging doors of a bar, he paused and lifted an untucked shirt to show me the black handle of a .357 handgun poking from the front pocket of his jeans. “Too many death threats,” he said. “I never started carrying this till I started studying wolves.”

Not long ago, Wielgus was a respected researcher at Washington State University in Pullman, in the far eastern part of the state, with his own prosperous lab and several graduate students under his guidance. His specialty was North American apex predators — mountain lions and bears. Over a 35-year career, Wielgus has published surprising research about how these animals behave, especially once their paths cross with civilization. Unlike some wildlife research, which can be esoteric, Wielgus’s work by its nature has concrete, real-world implications. And Wielgus, by his nature, hasn’t been shy about emerging from academia to tell wildlife managers, ranchers and politicians exactly how they have screwed up and why they should pay more attention to him and his findings. He is accustomed to being the least-popular man in the room.

Wielgus had no idea how unpopular he could get, though, until he began to study wolves. By the time I met him, his academic reputation lay in shreds. His lab was essentially shuttered. He was $50,000 in debt, he said, and he had had to pull his daughters out of college. His career, he told me, was over.

Even today, no animal in North America is at once more loved and reviled than Canis lupus, the gray wolf. Once as many as two million of them loped the forests and arroyos of the continent, Nate Blakeslee writes in “American Wolf.” Then European settlers arrived and got to work. There were bounties for wolves as early as Jamestown. “Wolfers” later roamed the Great Plains, shooting buffalo, lacing the carcasses with strychnine and returning the next day to collect the poisoned wolves’ pelts for their $2 bounties, Barry Lopez recounts in “Of Wolves and Men.” A federal program would kill tens of thousands more, including in our national parks. By World War II, wolves had been eliminated from most places in the country.

In 1973, Congress passed the landmark Endangered Species Act. Within a few years, the gray wolf was listed as “endangered” throughout the West. Gray wolves were successfully reintroduced in the mid-1990s when the federal government relocated 31 wolves from Canada to Wyoming’s Yellowstone country and 35 to central Idaho. Since then, wolves have wandered across state lines to take up residence again in their former homes in Oregon and California.

Wherever the predators have arrived, blistering conflicts have followed. Shouting matches at public meetings. Threats to government officials. Dead livestock. Dead wolves. So in 2008, when biologists found that the first wolves had returned to Washington since the animals were extirpated there in the 1930s, officials pledged to learn from other states’ mistakes. They would finally move past the “smoke a pack a day” threats of the virulently anti-wolf crowd, not to mention the incessant carping of environmentalists. In time, the state would go so far as to spend $1.2 million on a consulting group that applied to wildlife issues the peace-building strategies learned in places like Rwanda and East Timor.

But no conservation issue in the West today is more polarizing than wolves, where the trenches on each side remain well worn and deep. On one side are people who want to see the return of an important predator — physically and symbolically — to the landscape (or, more precisely, simply to know again that it is there, because spotting a wolf outside of Yellowstone can be famously difficult). On the other side are people who also care about the land but for whom the Great Outdoors is often where they make their living. Some run cattle or have flocks of sheep or horses. When wolves and people share the same landscape, sometimes wolves kill what people value, like cows and dogs. These killings take money from their pockets, and it spreads fear.

In a larger sense, the argument over wolves is a gulf of values: In bringing back wolves, one side wants to atone for the sins of the past and knit back together a wounded landscape; the other sees in wolves’ proliferation a refutation of the rural way of life of the American West. A wolf, in this debate, is always much bigger than a wolf. “Wolves are Democrats,” I was told more than once; they symbolize Big Government and regulation and all the ways that distant bureaucrats and coastal elites want to destroy the cherished rural ranching culture of the West.

The strange story of Rob Wielgus is a tale of what happened to one loud scientist who ran afoul of powerful forces. More broadly, it’s a parable of the American West in the 21st century and of how little we still can agree what it should look like. And it’s a reminder that, if you find yourself in a powder keg, the last thing you want to be is a struck match.

Since their howls were first confirmed in the North Cascades a decade ago, wolves have prospered in Washington State. Today 22 documented packs are sprinkled around the state, totaling at least 122 animals — a conservative estimate, as the state acknowledges. In 2015 a wolf was hit by a car within a commuter’s drive of Seattle.

A state recovery plan that covers the eastern third of Washington allows no killing of wolves except in special circumstances until their numbers sufficiently rebound. (Federal regulations protect them in the western two-thirds of the state.) As the wolf population has grown, poaching has occurred. Six years ago two ranchers and one of their wives were sentenced for violating the Endangered Species Act after she tried to FedEx a box that was dripping blood. It contained a fresh wolf pelt being sent for tanning.

In Washington State, politics and cultures split as sharply as the climate does along the crest of the Cascade Mountains — generally wet, urban and liberal on one side, and dry, wide open and deeply red on the other. Government-mandated protection of wolves doesn’t go over well in a region where independence is prized and where rural residents tend to look sidelong at any mention of environmentalism or endangered species, seeing the words as code for an attack on jobs like ranching that aren’t easy, or necessarily lucrative, to begin with. And wolves sometimes do cause losses to ranchers: A 2015 look at wolf predation in three Rocky Mountain states said that wolves killed 967 animals — cattle, sheep, goats, llamas and horses — between 1989 and 2008.

Washington State has a program to reimburse ranchers for wolf depredations. But not every death is compensated. And ranchers are proud: Some won’t take the dollars. “I don’t raise my animals to get ate,” as one horse rancher put it. They would rather address the problem at its source. In Washington’s wolf country, it’s not unheard-of for a county’s leaders to authorize the sheriff to usurp state authority and kill wolves if needed or for a billboard to appear in Spokane bearing demonic yellow eyes above a laughing little girl and the question, “Who’s next on their menu?”

Agriculture and ranching are powerful in Washington State — agriculture is a $10.6 billion industry, and the state leads the nation in producing crops like apples, hops and blueberries. This means serious sway in the Legislature, which controls a chunk of funding for Washington State University, a land-grant university with a heavy focus on agriculture research. All of this can make for a complicated pas de deux between politicians and the university. This was the fraught world that Wielgus, the maverick academic, was thrust into.

Wielgus grew up hunting rabbits and poking around the woods that fringed the suburbs of Winnipeg, Manitoba. (He holds Canadian and American passports, and his voice still tilts upward pleasantly at the end of some sentences.) After college he took provincial jobs with wildlife agencies, studying moose, elk and caribou.

He first became interested in carnivores when he embarked on graduate school and received an offer to join a grizzly-bear research effort in Alberta. “The danger of grizzlies really turned my crank because I was an adrenaline junkie,” he told me that night at the bar in Republic (where the evening’s chief threat turned out to be a bartender who didn’t have Wielgus’s preferred whiskey). He got his doctorate studying grizzlies in western Canada and northern Idaho, then went to the Pyrenees for a year to help with bear recovery. In 1997, Wielgus took a job as an assistant professor at W.S.U. He started the Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory and began to study mountain lions. Through their work, he and colleagues discovered something fascinating: Killing adult males actually increased cougar sightings and also the number of cattle and sheep killed by other mountain lions, as younger cougars showed up in the old cat’s territory. The studies later played a part in a decision not to expand the hunting of mountain lions in the state.

In 2012, the state asked Wielgus to calculate a population model for Washington’s wolf-recovery plan. Wielgus had never studied wolves before, but he had a successful ongoing collaboration with the state’s wildlife agency, and the job aligned well with the lab’s overall focus. The agency was pleased with the modeling work and came back with a much larger offer: to oversee a multimillion-dollar research project as part of wolves’ return to Washington. Funded by the state Legislature for at least four years, the work would try to get to the bottom of the age-old conflict between wolves and livestock.

For a carnivore scientist, it was a tremendous opportunity. Wielgus designed a study that would radio-collar hundreds of livestock and dozens of wolves. “It was the largest study of wolf-livestock interactions ever conducted on the planet,” he told me. In other places where wolves and livestock share the landscape, only about 20 percent of wolf packs ever attack sheep and cattle. But there wasn’t a lot of good information about what accounts for those attacks and therefore how they might be prevented. Tracking both predator and prey would help provide answers. Fewer dead cows would mean fewer wolves hunted down. And that could mean peace among the humans.

Once Wielgus got his first round of money to start the study, the associate dean for research at W.S.U.’s College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences asked Wielgus to come see him. At the meeting, according to Wielgus, the dean reminded him that his work would be controversial and unpopular with some politicians. Then, Wielgus said, the dean drew a box in the air between the men, and added, “If you step outside of this box, then basically your job is over.”

It felt like a threat, Wielgus said: “I didn’t even start the research yet.” (The university says the dean denies making the statement.)

Both men knew who was likeliest to be unhappy: State Representative Joel Kretz, the Republican deputy minority leader of the State House. At least 15 of the state’s known wolf packs live in Kretz’s northeast Washington district, which is largely rural and forested and is the size of Massachusetts. Kretz is a vocal supporter of his constituents’ way of life and fights back when he perceives it to be threatened. He advocates for a lower bar to kill wolves when they prey on livestock. And, in a cheekier move, in 2013 he introduced a bill that would have shipped wolves off to the San Juan Islands, the popular getaway northwest of Seattle.

One morning in late autumn, I drove a few hours and turned at the crossroads of Wauconda, to visit Kretz. When not in the state capital Olympia, he lives here at his 1,400-acre Promised Land Ranch. Kretz poured coffee in his kitchen near a sign that read “Life’s Better in Cowboy Boots.” He wore a hide-colored Wrangler pearl-button shirt and a tooled leather belt with a silver buckle, his trademark wrangler’s mustache completing the effect. Out the window, a weak December sun rose above a corral steaming with quarter horses, which Kretz raises and sells.

Kretz told me he had mistrusted Wielgus for a long time, since Wielgus’s initial mountain-lion studies. “A lot of the state’s wildlife policy has been based on his work over the last 10 or 15 years, and I’d say at one time he did good work,” Kretz told me. “I mean, he’s a smart guy.” But Wielgus had “drifted,” Kretz said. Kretz himself is a sometime lion hunter; in a local newspaper, I found a picture of him sitting on a pickup’s tailgate beside a big dead tom, wearing stripes of its blood on his cheeks like war paint. Wielgus “has an animal rights agenda, and it taints his work,” Kretz said, though he didn’t point to any science refuting the peer-reviewed lion research. By leading to policies that maintained low limits on the number of cougars that could be harvested, Kretz said, Wielgus’s cougar work made it harder for people in rural areas to manage (i.e., kill) the cats. He suggested that tying the hands of his constituents could increase attacks by the animals on children. (Cougar attacks on humans are in fact rare.)

So Wielgus and his graduate students already had an ardent skeptic watching them when they got to work in 2013 recruiting ranchers for their wolf-livestock study. It was slow-going at first. Many ranchers were reluctant to collaborate in a study about wolves. And Wielgus didn’t always endear himself to people. Over hours of conversation, I found him to be articulate, irreverent and passionate — and also blunt, cocksure, hyperbolic and prone to melodrama. It could be hard to tell at times whether he was performing for me. Among scientists, who can be a maddeningly careful, even beige species, he was unusual for saying exactly what he thought, often at high volume. His indelicacy made him poorly suited to enter the charged world of wolf politics.

All sides got a taste of Wielgus in the summer of 2014 after wolves from the Huckleberry pack in northeast Washington killed dozens of sheep that belonged to a single rancher. (Packs are usually named after a nearby mountain or other feature, in this case Huckleberry Mountain.) As events unfolded, there was plenty of blame to go around, said Carter Niemeyer, a well-regarded wolf expert who worked with Wielgus at the time: The rancher didn’t take prudent efforts to safeguard his sheep, which fomented the chaos; then, a government shooter made the critical mistake of killing the wolf pack’s breeding female. Afterward, at a meeting of the Wolf Advisory Group, a regular convening of ranchers, hunters, local politicians and environmentalists that helps guide the state’s wolf policy, Wielgus stood up and criticized just about everyone involved, recalled Niemeyer, who was at the meeting. “Some of the stuff Rob is doing is what a lot of us would like to do, but we know better,” Niemeyer told me. “He walks in and doesn’t respect the politics of wolves.”

Wielgus didn’t particularly disagree with that assessment. “I’m crude and rude,” he said the day after our talk in the bar. “Always have been.” (Chulo lobo — Spanish for “wolf pimp,” a slur someone once called Wielgus — is stenciled on his Harley’s gas tank.) We were driving east, through a land dressed for autumn. Over Sherman Pass, Wielgus turned his black pickup onto a Forest Service road. His satellite radio was set to Outlaw Country. When I asked whether he’d considered the merits of deploying honey versus vinegar, he retorted, “Bullshit is superdiplomatic.” And he added: “I’m not gonna mince my words and pretend to be a nice diplomatic guy, ’cause I’m not. I’m a pissed-off scientist.”

We rattled higher through dark spruce and lodgepole. Mist snagged on the peaks. “It’s great wolf country,” he said, waving a hand before the windshield. We crossed one cattle guard, then another.

In the fall of 2014, Wielgus and a colleague published the lab’s first wolf study in the journal PLOS One. Crunching a quarter-century of data about wolf attacks on livestock in three other states, the authors found something unusual: Killing wolves one year was associated with more, not fewer, deaths of livestock the following year. The paper further suggested that killing wolves may cause the increased livestock deaths. Just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one causes the other, but Wielgus posited a firm connection. As he explained to me, killing wolves fractures the highly regimented social order of the pack. “So, if you kill wolves, you get more breeding pairs, you get more livestock depredation.” This was of a piece with his previous work: When humans kill the apex predator, a chaotic reshuffling is set into motion, with unintended consequences.

If Wielgus’s reasoning was correct, the finding was explosive. It undermined “lethal control” — killing wolves — a major, and controversial, tool many states use to manage wolves and that some environmentalists reluctantly tolerate as the price of getting the animals back on the landscape. (In Washington today, if a livestock owner loses three animals in 30 days, or four in 10 months, and has undertaken at least two measures to deter wolves, the state may begin to eliminate the predators.)

The study made national headlines. It also fired up some lawmakers and ranching and agriculture groups. At the time, Wielgus’s university had been looking for money and support for a few major construction projects, including some tied to the College of Agriculture. W.S.U. also was gathering support to build a medical school in Spokane. As reported in The Seattle Times, when the study appeared, an outside lobbyist for W.S.U. wrote to the university’s director of state relations, Chris Mulick, “[H]ighly ranked Senators have said that the medical school and wolves are linked. If wolves continue to go poorly, there won’t be a new medical school.”

“[W]e’re looking a wee bit like Sonny on the causeway here,” Mulick wrote to another university official, alluding to the assassination scene in “The Godfather.”

Soon after that, in early 2015, several of Wielgus’s graduate students visited the state Capitol to present their ongoing wolf-livestock work to lawmakers. When they stopped by to see Kretz in his office, he was friendly and showed off some hunting pictures, they said. Then he told them matter-of-factly that he planned to shut down Wielgus’s lab. (Kretz said he only vowed to cut off state funding.)

During state budget negotiations a few months later, when it was time to fund the next round of wolf research, many Republican legislators balked. Kretz was willing to work with Democrats to secure money for the work, which he told me he thought was important for ranchers, his constituents. But he had a condition: The money had to be rerouted through another research group, essentially laundering it of Wielgus’s name. No longer would Wielgus be the primary researcher, a professional blow that also meant he couldn’t be paid for his months of summer work each year — a change that would cost him tens of thousands of dollars. Kretz told me that he undertook the action to be fiscally responsible, to not let money flow to a researcher he found disreputable.

By that fall, Wielgus had started to see signs that his university no longer supported him against his critics. He and a doctoral student published two more papers about the behavior of mountain lions. Again, the results were counterintuitive: They found that hunting older male cougars seems to increase the preying of cougars on populations of mule deer and also critically endangered mountain caribou in the Pacific Northwest. Before the papers’ publication, Wielgus worked with a university writer on a news release to the media. “I’ve just learned another Wielgus study news release is set for release,” Chris Mulick wrote to fellow administrators. “I am happy to beg that we not go forward with this.” The interim co-provost then emailed the writer who wrote the release: “[P]lease do NOT release this on Monday. Our government relations staff have advised that this could potentially create substantial difficulties for CAHNRS [the ag school] and W.S.U.” W.S.U. also spiked an already-completed profile of Wielgus slated for the university magazine. Wielgus emailed his doctoral student, “My name is voldemort in wa. ... he who must never be mentioned.”

So Wielgus was already feeling persecuted when, in early 2016, researchers at the University of Washington and Kathmandu University published a study that contradicted Wielgus’s 2014 findings. Tweaking the statistical models, they determined that killing a wolf one year decreases the number of cattle and sheep killed the next year. To his opponents, the rebuttal study was support for their case that Wielgus was biased and doing shoddy work in the service of his prejudice. Wielgus saw it as part of a political vendetta against him — a rival university prompted to do a hit job.

Later, Lyudmyla Kompaniyets and Marc Evans of W.S.U. took a third cut at the same data and came to yet another result. Their study found that Wielgus was correct that more cattle died even as wolf deaths increased. But they concluded that Wielgus’s study overlooked a simpler explanation for that rise in livestock depredation: Wolves were proliferating at the time. Recent papers from other researchers have added texture to the data around the effectiveness of lethal control but as yet provide no definitive answer. From a distance, this just looks like science as usual, moving forward in its crooked line.

But the topic here was wolves, and that weaponized everything.

After what seemed like hours of driving, Wielgus turned onto a rough spur road and stopped the truck at a hairpin turn on the hillside. On the drive he had been talkative; now he grew quiet. He climbed out and motioned with a fresh cigarette: A few hundred yards from here the Profanity wolf pack, named for nearby Profanity Peak, made its den in the spring of 2016. Wielgus wouldn’t walk any closer. “I just don’t want to go where the pups were gunned down,” he said.

Wolf packs have large territories — Profanity’s was about 350 square miles, and it overlapped with parts of the Colville National Forest where ranchers lease public land to graze their cattle for market. That spring, the Diamond M Ranch released its cattle a few miles from the new den, where the pups had been born. By July the Profanity pack had killed its first calf. By August as many as eight more cows were dead. That’s when the agency shot two wolves by helicopter.

Wielgus was livid. He isn’t against killing wolves as a last resort, he explained, but this, he said, was no last resort. He and his grad students were monitoring the radio-collared Profanity wolves at the time. By the end of June, the wildlife agency knew where the new den site was, and that the pack had pups. They also knew that the ranch had set salt blocks nearby, which attract cattle, who lick them for the needed minerals. But even after the first livestock was confirmed killed in early July, no one moved the salt blocks, “and no one moved the livestock,” Wielgus said. Trail cameras used to monitor the pack showed that cows were all around the area through July. Once the area’s deer, a preferred prey, were scared off by the cows, wolves opportunistically attacked cattle, he said. Wielgus insists to this day that the Diamond M’s patriarch, Len McIrvin, could have been prodded by the state to take steps — quickly moving the salt blocks, removing cattle from the den site — to avoid serious problems. But McIrvin, who has a well-documented antipathy to wolves and has three times had the state kill wolves for him after taking cattle losses, all but forced further confrontation by his inaction, Wielgus claimed. And, he said, the state was complicit for making nice with the rancher while not forcing him to do more. “The movie is called ‘Set Up and Sold Out,’ ” Wielgus fumed.

Threading through and animating Wielgus’s fury is what he sees as a systemic problem: Little is legally required of ranchers before the state agrees to kill wolves on their behalf. At the time, ranchers were required to remove any dead animals and undertake just one additional preventive measure from a menu of options, which could be as basic as not turning out to pasture underweight calves that could be easier targets. Low bars like this, in Wielgus’s view, result in more conflict; we’re dragging out this century-long fight over predators rather than resolving it. But there’s a smarter, more humane way to live in harmony with wolves, he said. Yes, it will require uprooting some of the old ways. It will take more effort. But these are also public lands, and the wolves belong there, too.

In a seven-year case study published last year, researchers found that sheepherders in Idaho who used a strategic array of nonlethal deterrents — from flagged fences to dogs to increased human presence — to protect sheep from wolves on public lands experienced significantly lower wolf depredations. Sheepherders lost just 0.02 percent of the sheep population in those protected areas, the lowest loss rate among sheep-wolf areas statewide. The rate was 3.5 times as high in a study area not protected against wolves. And no wolves were killed in the area in which the deterrents were used.

Of course, fencing and cowboys cost money. And lethal control is often better funded in the West than deterrence. But to demand less deterrence before we kill wolves, Wielgus argued, is unfair to wolves, cattle and even ranchers, who may over time lose their access to public lands if wolves keep needing to be killed. And it sets up a cruel paradox. “We spend millions of dollars on wolf recovery, and then what — we just shoot them? It’s insane.” He kicked at a cow pie in disgust.

The Profanity wolves killed more cattle in mid-August of 2016, and the state wildlife director approved the shooting of up to the entire pack. “I snapped,” Wielgus said. When The Seattle Times called to ask what was going on, he lashed out — at the decision to kill the wolves, at the rancher (by name) and at the rancher’s actions that, Wielgus claimed, provoked the depredation. “This livestock operator elected to put his livestock directly on top of their den site,” he told the paper.

The Profanity saga is a complicated one, more nuanced than in Wielgus’s telling, with accounts that turn on details that I have been unable to reconcile. But it does seem that Wielgus, in his anger, exaggerated some statements he made to the newspaper. The rancher didn’t know of the den’s location when he first loosed his cattle a few miles away, said Donny Martorello, the wolf-policy lead for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and he cooperated with wildlife officials. The situation that summer was “dynamic,” Martorello said, with the wolves moving around the area quite a bit. Wolves and cattle-grazing areas overlap almost everywhere in the state, he concluded: “To think we’re going to stop all conflict is not realistic.”

I called the rancher, McIrvin, who lives hard by the Canadian border. He said that he and other ranchers weren’t told precisely where the den site was. He didn’t put his salt lick right atop a wolf den that spring; he put it right where he has put it for decades, where the Forest Service had told him to put it, he said, which turned out to be near the den.

But McIrvin showed little interest in relitigating the past, and he also showed little patience for anyone who wanted to accommodate wolves. “The range riders, all they are is coroners to find the dead ones,” he said of cattle, of which he claims to lose 70 per year to the predator, though he acknowledged the state can’t confirm that. There’s only one deterrence that works: “Putting the fear of man into that mother wolf,” he said. “We could take care of the wolves. That’s no problem. It’s the bureaucracy that’s the problem.”

In any event, Wielgus’s comments to the newspaper were a grenade tossed into a tomato patch. The rancher got death threats from wolf advocates. Martorello had to hide his wife in a hotel. Wielgus soon received a call from Ron Mittelhammer, who was dean of the College of Agriculture, grilling him about whether he made false statements about the Profanity incident. He was ordered by the dean not to speak to the public about wolves without coordinating with the university.

Internal emails that I obtained through public-disclosure requests reveal university administrators deeply worried about blowback from the uproar; they were in repeated contact with Republican legislators and the cattlemen’s association as they coordinated their response. Within days W.S.U. issued an unusual news release that excoriated its own faculty member, apologized to the community and “disavowed” Wielgus’s statements. He received a “letter of concern” — his first of two in the next several months — reprimanding him for inappropriate conduct. Later, at the urging of Kretz and other Republican legislators, W.S.U. had a professor of statistics and mathematics analyze Wielgus’s 2014 wolf study for error. (The university found “no evidence of research misconduct.”)

W.S.U.’s swift action after the Profanity incident earned high praise from Wielgus’s opponents in the Legislature. “You guys really kicked ass on that wolves thing,” Mark Schoesler, the powerful anti-wolf leader of Republicans in the State Senate, said in a call to Chris Mulick afterward, as recounted in an email from Mulick to W.S.U.’s president. Mulick added, “His wife does some work of the Cattlemen’s Association and he joked that their dinner conversations have been much improved.”

Back on the mountain, a low slid across the sky like a dirty blanket. Wielgus finished yet another cigarette and looked around. His voice quavered. “I tried my best, Blackie,” he said, naming a wolf that had been killed. He kicked at the ground again, turned away, groaned. I thought I was seeing an act. Then I realized that’s just Wielgus: passionate, at times almost to the point of self-parody.

I thought of what I had heard a few times from people who knew Wielgus, both fans and critics: He was a man bearing a valuable message: that with more deterrence, you can reduce livestock deaths. Handled more deftly, the incident could have been a chance to talk more constructively about how to manage wolves better going forward, said Paula Swedeen, policy director of Conservation Northwest, whose group is trying to bring back wolves while bridging the divide with ranchers.

What doubly frustrated some people about the Profanity incident is that, after years of mistrust and false starts, the warring sides finally had reached a tentative détente and were starting to move forward, albeit carefully, they said. But by attacking the rancher and getting some things wrong, Wielgus “ruined the credibility of his own work and the students’ work,” Swedeen said.

A gallery of Herefords had gathered in a half-ring behind us as Wielgus and I spoke, and now they watched him as if they were some mute Greek chorus. “[Expletive] this place,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Wielgus and I climbed into his pickup and jounced back toward the blacktop. I asked him what he would do next. He said he didn’t know. Six months earlier, his lawyer filed a complaint against W.S.U. alleging numerous violations of academic freedom and requesting “corrective actions” including a retraction of its public excoriation of him and reimbursement of pay lost when his grants were shifted out of his lab. The complaint was prelude either to a lawsuit or a settlement. Though Wielgus continued to teach, he knew his career at W.S.U. was over. He would see if he could find other work at other universities, out of state, he said. He still had research he wanted to do. (In the spring, Wielgus would resign his post and drop the complaint in exchange for a $300,000 settlement.) Some of the research recently completed in his lab — work done by graduate students and potentially useful to all sides — now sat on the shelf, too toxic to touch, at least in Washington. Everyone had lost, including taxpayers who funded the work.

The state’s wolf population, meanwhile, was growing by about 30 percent annually. This spring the federal government announced that it was reviewing the status of Canis lupus in the Lower 48 and, by year’s end, could issue a proposal to revise the wolf’s status, possibly to reduce protection for the animal. But for now, and despite occasional poaching, sanctioned shooting and rough-and-tumble human politics, the wolves were doing pretty well.

#washington (state)#usa #conservation #science #industry #sociology #politics #wolves #mammals #ecology #i know this is long but it is important

0 notes

gaiatheorist · 7 years

Text

“Reintroduction of apex predators.”

(My head is playing the 2am game again, there are dozens of things I should be concentrating on, but I’m busy going mad. It’s fine, I usually come back eventually.)

2am-ish. “Bleurgh. Ick. Cold. Timesit?”

Yes, ‘Bleurgh’, and yes ‘Ick’, that’ll be the wine. Yes, ‘Cold’, because I’d fallen asleep on the sofa again. ‘Timesit?’, bollocks, I didn’t put my phone on charge, so there’s an on-screen reminder that a pending update couldn’t be installed overnight. I hate phone updates, I always worry that something will go wrong, which is ridiculous, because I haven’t ‘always’ had a mobile phone, and there must, logically, be a way to un-install an update if something does cock up. It’s just after half past three now, so it’s taken me about an hour and a half to convince myself that ‘nothing bad will happen’ if I update my phone. Not that updating my phone would stop OTHER bad things from happening, I’m not THAT mad.

The sensible thing to do if you wake up at 2am on the sofa would be to go to bed. I’m not sensible, and, since the brain haemorrhage, there’s been even more of the “Ping! Wide awake!” malarkey. It is a behaviour I need to change, and, yet again, I failed to do so. (Side-thought about setting up a GO TO BED screen-saver on my phone?) I’m differently-mad to my friend, who called around for a cup of tea after his eye test this week, we share some similar traits, and we’re open-ish with each other. He wakes up every single morning crippled by confusion, processing the fact that he’s one of billions of bipedal beings on the surface of a spinning rock, and, every day, it takes him ‘hours’ to shake off that confusion, and regain some semblance of functionality. In a way, I’m glad I just wake up in the middle of the night, with hundreds of fragments of nonsense-thought running through my head, because his existential anxiety every morning sounds awful. (Waking up at 2am, knowing it’s going to knock-on my sleep pattern again, and immediately checking the internet to see if anything has happened is awful, too, but I’ve normalised it to an extent. It’s my awful, I’m used to it.)

We’re similar in that I knew where his post-vasectomy anecdote was going as soon as he started it, I guessed the ‘masturbating with a bag of frozen peas clamped to his testicles’ part, but the ‘while the police raided the house next door for cannabis’ twist was a surprise. We talked non-stop for an hour, about what utter chaotic twats we were two decades ago, about the times he’d driven the ex and I home out-of-his-mind drunk, bouncing off kerbs, that I couldn’t remember, because I was also out-of-my-mind. He couldn’t remember the time he’d stayed at our old house, and put his foot THROUGH one of the stairs. We both remembered disgusting days of just not going to work, and arsing about. We both remembered the Ouija board, his unflattering nickname for one of my friends, and how unpredictable-unstable our weird little pre-bubble group was. We’ve concluded that we were twats, and we’re trying not to be any more.

Part of his twattery was multiple affairs, his wife is an absolute stoic, and keeps taking him back, they’ve divorced twice. He’s married her 3 times, and she was his third wife, I think. Other people’s business, isn’t it? After one of the affairs, she banned him from associating with us, like she was a grown-up, and we were teenagers, leading him astray. I became ‘Her!’, and the focus of her hate, more so than the ‘other women’ he was having affairs with. (To clarify, there was never any of that between us.) I’d forgotten about being ‘Her!’, but, apparently she hasn’t, and still resents me. I’ll live, but now sort-of-understand why I don’t have his actual mobile number, he only ever contacts me on Fakebook, AND he deletes the chat-messages. “She’d go mad if she knew I was here.” For fuck’s sake, unwittingly duplicitous-complicit in a married man’s sneaking-about.

I went the long way around that, didn’t I? There are several escaped crickets having a little adventure on my living room carpet, I really ought to pick them up.

OK, I woke up at an unreasonable time, and did what I shouldn’t have done, in checking the news, to see if anything had happened. With me, that’s a hang-up from September 11th, I’d been ill with a migraine, and missed the news, I plunged into obsessive-panic about not missing ‘The News’, which, back then, was on the TV, there was one computer in the house, which took about a century to boot up, and then the rest of your life to connect to the dial-up. How times have changed. I’m not the only one doing it these days, logging on, and hoping for the best, but acknowledging that there is the possibility that something catastrophically ominous is on the horizon. Please, please, let me find something in the news that’s not Him, or Her, like the lovely nun yesterday.

Lettuce? I don’t buy it as a matter of course, the father-in-law used to plant millions of the ‘butterhead’ bastards on the allotment, horrible, floppy-limp things, full of mud and slugs, for years my fridge was guaranteed to contain mud and slugs. “Here, lass, I’ve fetched you a lettuce!” I don’t like lettuce all that much.

Wikipedia? OK, it’s a side-swipe at people telling huge great big massive lies, but the ‘many hands make light work’ approach is encouraging. A chain is only ever as strong as its weakest link, but so many links could effectively knit truth-chain-mail. Too relevant, though, too linked to real-time events.

Bullshit Barbie? No thanks, I read that yesterday.

I flicked through, looking for something that wasn’t ‘that’, ready to be witty, or engaging, or insightful before some knobhead invariably weighs in with “How is this news?” That’s the fucking point, knobheads, we’re aware of the news, which is why we’re also looking at “10 ways to tuck in a shirt.”, or whatever, with courses as heavy as these ones, we absolutely need palate-cleansers as well. The ‘breaking’ banner will pop up if something happens, in the meantime, we’ll read the fluff, and the filler.

It would appear that it’s not working, though, the distraction-method. I clicked on an article about a proposal to reintroduce lynx in Northumbria, thinking that couldn’t possibly have any “We’re all fucked!” connotations. (Except if you’re a roe deer, apologies to any roe deer reading this...) I can see the logic, the lynx would be brought in to control the roe deer population. The deer haven’t done anything ‘wrong’, they’re just being deer, you know, making more deer, eating leaves, making more deer to eat more leaves, when the tree really needed those leaves, to photosynthesise, and keep us all breathing, and such. The local farmers don’t want the lynx, because they worry for their livestock, and I’m relatively certain there’s probably some knobhead setting up Fakebook pages that say lynx eat babies. (Note ‘relatively’, and ‘probably’, I talk shit, but I’m not Bullshit Barbie.)

It’s not the ‘people refusing to accept science, because it threatens their lambs’ thing, it was one phrase, used repeatedly. ‘Apex predator’ (Food-chain, chain-mail, my head is misbehaving, but that’s why I’m rattling it all out here, to purge my cranium of these thought-snippets.) Apex predator, top of the food-chain, it’s nature’s way, because most creatures on this revolving rock don’t have access to family planning. Oh. The thing at the top of the food-chain, or food-pyramid, or food-web, depending on how they’re teaching it now eats the things below it. (Fucking hell, woman, park THAT Gaia Theory, this potential catastrophe for the planet ISN’T a global phone-update, move away from the rats-and-cockroaches ideation.)

Nature does its thing, or, at least it did, until we started trying to boss it. We’re twats, some more so than others, we kill things we have no intention of eating. We kill each other. We bugger about with the environment, and then complain about lettuce. We, in the UK have eradicated most of our apex predators, what chance do a handful of nappy-eating foxes have of controlling the rabbit population? (Especially if people in silly clothes carry on with their ‘sport’.) We ate all the dodos, and all of that particular kind of turtle, we’re killing the fucking BEES, and we all know how that ends. (Removes tinfoil hat.)

We have new apex predators, and we need to figure out how to keep ourselves as safe as we can, because these new apex predators don’t behave in exactly the same way as the ones we’re used to. The ‘bubbles’ are electronic versions of stone-age tribes’ perimeter-spikes against sabre-toothed tigers. (I don’t know, I’ve already told you I never paid attention in History, sometimes I used to pick my ear until it bled, so I could get out of class to see matron for a plaster.) I’m dithering around a vague notion that our greatest weapon is the truth, but also dabbling with the idea that our strength is our number, not in the same way as animals produce ‘spare’ young, because they know some will be eaten, though. We are little, but there are lots of us, aside from good guys always coming last, we DO need to remember that we’re human, in the face of this inhumanity, the first big collection of little things that stoops to the level of the new predators is on a very shaky foundation.

This thing will run its course, as all things do, we just need to remember to show our arses to bears, and punch sharks on the nose, not the other way around. Personally, I’d prefer this fuckpuddle to be mopped up with paper rather than projectiles, and soon, because this limbo-uncertainty is exhausting us, and sending us mad. Nobody’s going to pop out from behind the sofa with a hidden camera crew and shout “Fooled you, you’ve been part of the biggest reality TV experiment ever!” We need to watch and wait, keep ourselves and each other safe.

0 notes