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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • This whole idea that they “saved” it is philosophically flawed and deeply problematic from a moral and ecological perspective. Claiming that the mother “abandoned” it demonstrates ignorance of the way these animals live and care for their young.

    Regardless, a proper wildlife rehabilitation program by a zoologist would have actually kept the moose alive and been in a position to judge if the moose was safe to be re-released. Your moose story could have easily ended in the death of people in addition to the moose. This isn’t some kind of vain high horse I’m on. It’s just simple facts learned through decades of direct experience with wild animals in the wild, in rehabilitation, and in zoos. I stand by my earlier statements. I’m sorry this bitter pill is hard for you to swallow I guess. So it goes.


  • Feeding wildlife, even one treated as a “pet”, is a death sentence for them just as surely as if you had fired the gun yourself. Your neighbor killed that moose.

    Other prime examples include: feeding alligators (now you’ve created a danger to others as well, so you’ve not just killed the animal, which will need to be destroyed by officials, you’ve potentially maimed or killed a person); feeding ducks and geese (I once has a neighbor that would feed ducks in the parking island adjacent to the main entry to our apartment complex, no surprise to me that we saw many near misses and a few dead ducks in our driveway); bears (this one should be obvious, same scenario as the gators except bears are faster, climb trees, and are probably smarter than the average person they are going to encounter when they leave the woods looking for human food).

    Undomesticated animals (wildlife/wild animals) are not pets. They’re never going to be pets. They’ve just learned to manipulate some humans for food or shelter. Maybe you’ll get along for a little while with them, but that relationship has poisoned the fear keeping them safe for and from other humans.















  • Sports photography is not a cheap hobby. Expect to spend 10 times your budget just to get started. You can save (some) money by shopping used on sites like adorama or B&H. Older models of DSLR can be had for a pretty good deal because all the kids these days are hyped about mirrorless. Expect to do a lot of research and wade through a lot of articles written by gear obsessed people with money to burn. I think you can still browse archives of dpreview.com for some in depth reviews and specs, especially if you’re shopping older models.

    Pretty much any consumer camera with an interchangeable lens will do the job, it’s the lens that will really determine how good a picture you can get. There’s a reason you see a lot of HUGE (and expense) lens on the sidelines. Megapixels are much less important these days because pretty much everything has enough. The metrics you’ll be looking to maximize will be a fast autofocus system, a fast lens, and a long enough focal length to get your view in close to your subject from a distance. You might be able to find something that is “good enough” in a cheaper range with a camera with a built-in lens. If you get bit by the photography bug though, that might turn out to be a waste of money if you decide you want to upgrade.


  • I think we agree here. “A few” is debatable, based on opinion, but also context matters. If I say I need a few minutes to either put on my shoes, prepare dinner, wake up, take a shower, or take dump, those are all different lengths of time. I just feel that conversation and interviews take a lot more time than the edited results we commonly see in print and on TV. Things like pauses to reflect on questions, introductions, and warm up questions never make it to publication. If I was asked to sit for an interview and it ended after 35 minutes, I would absolutely characterise that as “a few minutes”. And unless I’d ended it myself, I’d be concerned that it ended too quickly. If it had ended that wuickly, I’d be worried about what insane things I had done in those few minutes to provide them with enough material for a piece or that they had cancelled the piece entirely because they quickly determined I wasn’t worth continuing the interview. That is my opinion, but I feel that it’s well grounded in my experience and expectations, especially for a sit down interview with a candidate. I can see how calling 35 minutes “a few minutes” could be characterised as exaggerated, but getting incensed over it in a headline (a large font single line intended to grab attention in a few words) is overcompensating a bit.