But I took the saying “adopt and shop responsibly” to heart and looked up what a responsible breeder has to do to be considered one.
Genetic tests determine if the dogs have known genes that cause diseases. If one of the parents has a recessive gene for a disease that won’t express in the pups because the other parent doesn’t have it, you can keep dogs that have desirable traits like excellent personality, lack of anxiety and general health in the gene pool—helping to maintain genetic diversity while not passing down a disease.
The kennel clubs (CKC) have started helping to reduce inbreeding by keeping track of the lineage of dogs and avoiding inbreeding by calculating the coefficient of inbreeding. The COI is a metric used in dog breeding to measure the level of inbreeding in a dog’s pedigree. It is an excellent tool for an institution that used to inadvertently encourage inbreeding because they created standards. Can more be done? Yes, is this a step in the right direction? Yes.
It’s worth noting that genetic tests don’t know everything, they might only test for a handful of the 20,000 or so genes and we don’t know what all genes do, and some genes are benign in some breeds and dangerous in others. This is why x-rays and elbow and hip assesments of the parents are still important. It’s also why meeting the parents of you puppy is important. If you don’t like them, you won’t like their pups.
On top of that epigenetics massively impacts the behaviour of pups. This is especially true if the grandmother of a puppy had a happy stress free life. Yes, we now know that improvements from nurture not just nature can be inherited. Dogs with happy lives produce happy dogs.
A responsible breeder will have done all of this, as well as done early socialisation and desensitization for the first eight weeks of the pups and many more considerations like limiting the amount of times they use a dam. These tests and assessments would have cost them around $10,000 for the dam and sire.
I wrote this insane response because if typing this on a meme educated one person who might get a dog, then the world is just a little bit of a better place.
Tupperware is a brand. Calling all containers Tupperware is like calling all tissue paper Kleenex or all cotton swabs Q-Tips. Sure, many people do that, but it’s not correct.
Velcro, Hoover (in the UK), Band-Aid; there are tons of them. I’d say Tupperware is at that level, even if not officially so. I’d even argue Coke is - even if I know a palce only does Pepsi, I’m still going to ask for a Coke.
This is quite common in some languages. In Dutch they call plaster plates gyproc, tilt windows velux, a stick of glue pritt and there are countless other examples where an item is named, if not officially at least commonly, after a brand. And of course, also kleenex.
My mother once bypasses the refrigerator part and accidentally put leftovers in the cupboard over the oven. After a week or two, the smell had us thinking something crawled into the oven vent from outside and died. It took me noticing something bubbling up from between two casserole dishes to realize what happened.
Certified European here, can confirm individual member states and EU as a whole as not being a utopia.
Especially us Dutch folks who have been fucked over and held hostage by a waaay to large upper middle class for years. To the point where we’ve managed to abolish the ministry of housing, open up the housing market to foreign investors, replace a functioning healthcare system with a healthcare market where insurance firms rule with an iron fist and demand more bureacracy than actual care being provided.
… and the list goes on.
It’s a worldwide symptom of economic unequality and the decrease in social skills stemming from the fact that we live our lives increasingly isolated in our own online social bubbles. We’re turning increasingly hostile towards each other because we’re no longer confronted with all people and perspectives in our surroundings, but just the ones we like.
The United States, being a large country filled with very diverse people, despite all being taught to “love America”, still deals with Nebraskan farmers having wildly different wants and needs, and way different social standards than the Californian yuppies.
You’re a large country, with 334 million people spread out over a vast amount of land. Meanwhile, we’re 18 million living on a patch of marshy land roughly 3/4th the size of West Virgina, and we’re further from being united than ever before. The fact that you’re even holding together as a country is nothing short of amazing considering the fact that your political systems probably cause way more chaos than ours do.
A lot of Europeans probably mean it when they say “How are you even a country?”. And it’s not so much an attack on the American people as a whole (though some of y’all deserve to be made fun of), but geniuine amazement at the fact that it has more or less held together since 1776.
Thank you for sharing - I didn’t know the Dutch were getting hit with this crap, too. I always just think of it as a US and increasingly British experience.
I think the root cause is the deregulation/privatisation of everything that started in the 80s. It slanted the playing field towards those with capital at the cost of workers and the cash has been flowing into their pockets and out of ours ever since
It’s a global phenomenon, caused by infinite growth based economic modeling (you know, where you base your whole economy on extracting increasing amounts of value from finite resources).
This type of modeling has been proven wrong and debunked early in the previous century, but it is still practised because it works very well for those gaining most of the profits.
You’ll usually hear the politicians promoting policies that help the larger companies argue that such policies directly create jobs and thus economic value for the people. But this is more of that trickle-down economics bullshit that doesn’t apply in the real world.
Because politicians worldwide have been so fixated on financial gains as a measure of the economy, they fail to measure and correct on (mental) healthcare, housing, education and equality.
Just some context on how large our housing problems have become: There is currently a deficit of 450 000 homes, which is projected to grow past 500 000 by the end of 2024.
The time we stop running countries like we do companies is when we’ll see things improve.
Sometimes I have even thrown it out with the tupperware because it’s gotten so bad that opening that container would probably poison everything in a 100m radius.
A few years ago I had a roommate who just did not give a fuck about food never found enjoyment in it. All the leftovers went to him he’d vacuum up anything completely neutrally. I miss him
Well to be honest, I do enjoy and appreciate tasty food. But I don’t mind eating plain bland food (as long as it isn’t disgusting). I don’t really have a high bar. If it’s edible, in it goes
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