FC was fun! I commissioned some new arts, and I'll be posting them up later.

Sooo excited to go again this year. Hope to see many many friends there. <3

This still amuses me months later, so I figured I'd share. At FC 2012, I got to see the live animal panel with serval, fennec fox, Abyssinian cat, 1st gen Bengal, and other small felines. One of the "wild" cats there we were warned not to touch because she bites. This in no way diminished my desire to touch the cat. My brain coldly calculated the likely severity of the bite (probably about four to eight times as bad as the opossum bite,) and deemed this an acceptable risk for getting to feel the fur of an amazing "wild" species of cat.

What stopped me? consideration for the animal's owner, and the animal. When I caution people not to touch a rat because he will bite, this is the most intense warning I give about my animals, it is me trying very hard to make people not touch the rat by invoking self-preservation instinct. There are always other compelling reasons not to touch the animal as well, the biting one is just the most effective. Then I thought about the mental state of the few rats I've had that were chronic biters. They were always either insecure in their space, or easily overwhelmed by stimuli or still afraid of predation. I decided I wasn't gonna be the one to make an already difficult day harder on them.

I remember when they talked about platypus briefly in biology class, and how they lay eggs like birds. They always seemed interesting, so when I wandered across this video, I watched it. Seems platypus straddle the bird/mammal divide in many ways, especially in the reproductive area.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnzyupjTy4Y