I meant mentally and developmentally dogs and cats are like children. We have stunted their development and made them more puppy-like or kitten-like. They retain behaviors that they normally wouldn’t and trust people to an extent that it is unfair to turn around and shove it in their faces - we took away their…

GMOs are not good or bad. However, they may have a detrimental effect on the environment, meaning they should be approached with extreme caution. Generally speaking, humans have a poor track record of test first, “SHIT!”, any solutions? For example, Roundup Ready corn is actually problematic because the Roundup gets…

Most farms are family farms, but “family” doesn’t mean small. Some of the biggest agricultural firms we have are “family owned.” Besides, a lot of the large agriculture companies don’t directly own the farms, but they do own them in another way - they sell them the seeds or lease them the livestock. While the family…

GMOs will not help deal with climate change or rapid population growth. It doesn’t matter how much food we have - we can currently feed everyone on the planet with the food we produce right now - what matters is money to buy food, stability (no war, fear), infrastructure (can’t easily go to market without a road), and…

GMOs will not help deal with climate change or rapid population growth. It doesn’t matter how much food we have - we can currently feed everyone on the planet with the food we produce right now - what matters is money to buy food, stability (no war, fear), infrastructure (can’t easily go to market without a road), and…

Well, science says the jury is still out. Science also says that the environmental damage from GMOs could be devastating, given our track record. Not that a lot of people aren’t very, very wrong about what GMOs are, but science isn’t exactly gung-ho about it, either. A scientist or doctor should be interested in what…

Haha, women were allowed to breastfeed in public all the time. At least, the women who did breastfeed, who tended to be poorer women, and the rich women who would have been ruined from breastfeeding in public generally gave their babies to poor women to breastfeed or got a goat or something. Hahahaha, modern fear of…

Oh, the AVMA touts that, for sure. But as someone in vet school, let me tell you it’s shit. Animal cruelty judged by public outcry is not tolerated, but thousands of vets are produced each year that promote the meat industry, work for SeaWorld, go hunting, etc. The AVMA itself takes a ton of money from the meat…

Feral cats generally only pose a threat to the local bird population. In any case, you shouldn’t be advocating killing any animal and gloating about it or just killing an animal deemed “useless” by human standards. Cats and dogs are like children - we domesticated them and use them for our own gain, then conveniently…

No, it’s not a faster death.

The problem with people is they see others as a means to an end. You’re willing to kill a cat because it doesn’t fall into your views of what is “useful”? You’re statistically more likely to behave cruelly towards other people, too. A dog’s usefulness isn’t whether it works for a human. Like all animals, dogs and cats…

We are still growing in population numbers because the birth rate in the world is still positive, just slowing down (i.e. there are still more births than deaths currently, but there are fewer births than there were previously). And that birth rate isn’t falling fast enough - humans topping out at 10 billion isn’t…

I think it wasn’t really looked at until recently what the healthy minimum between pregnancies is. 18 months was determined after looking at nutritional data (i.e. how much babies take away from mom’s stores and how long it takes to replenish them), getting input from many, many experts, reading journal articles,…

It used to be that the patriarchal culture wanted women to not breast feed so they could cycle back on again and have more babies. Breast feeding is (less effective, but) natural birth control. This is actually going against the previous research (that is to say, a lack of previous research) into how safe it is to…

I’m not going to say that we should start regulating this kind of thing because that’s a dangerous road to walk down, but it isn’t just her pregnancy if she is planning on carrying the baby to term (i.e. it’s a wanted pregnancy or there are plans for adoption) - it’s also the baby’s pregnancy. When you are an OB/GYN,…

You’re not correct about the birth rate. If the birth rate doesn’t fall, the results are going to cause problems with our own futures and the future of everything else here. Structurally, there might be problems with a lower birth rate - as in, how to care for an aging population, who will work to make the food, etc.…

I’ve heard otherwise from other commenters, but I’m no expert on this story. There are still a lot of problems with the age-related risks in pregnancy, the fact that she has other children who need her, the fact that she decided to keep four babies when one is risky enough...it’s still incredibly selfish.

I’ve had plenty of people on Jezebel and elsewhere say that I don’t count as queer because I’m asexual. It’s the “who’s had it worse” competition where everyone’s a loser! Sometimes people disregard comments from others based on some characteristic - you can’t comment this article on racism because you aren’t black,…

Eugenics is pretty misunderstood in historical context. Shitty, when looking back, but based on misunderstanding of genetics and evolution that we now know to be false (and some we know to be true). She just felt the need to treat humans as we treat many of our domestic animals (i.e. breeding). The problem comes when…

Sometimes, a comment is meant innocently, but your history of discrimination makes you interpret it as something else. I believe that is the case here. Just because a post about Hilary Clinton’s run for the presidency in 2016 touches on her past racism does not mean people are missing the point of the post. It just…