Not my normal post, but please spread this around!! I live fairly close to the fires and I know that is bad and how frightened they are! I lost my house in a fire once and the experience was traumatic. So if you, or someone you know lives in the area of the Paradise, or Malibu fires, please do this or share it if you don’t!
No no no no no. Do not leave food and water out for the animals. Definitely bring your animals in because the wild ones will be more frequent in your area but do not leave out food and water for them. They will become dependent on people and if that happens then they cannot survive on their own which harms them more in the long run. The department of wildlife has warned of this as it gets spread through social media every time we are on fire. The animals will be fine. They can find what they need.
Actually, you should probably leave out pans of water, because these animals are fleeing fire and need to cool down and recharge. Food, no; water, yes. They will be able to find food, but leaving some water out for them won’t hurt anything, I don’t think.
water is probably fine, I think? but absolutely avoid any contact with wild animals who show up. keep your own animals indoors out of reach, and stay out of their way and let them go about their business. stay safe out there!
OK we do this pretty much every year in CO and this is how it goes:
WATER IS FINE, WATER IS GOOD. Animals fleeing the fire are more dehydrated than anything else. I reccomend filling up a kidde pool with a couple inches from the garden hose, and leave a couple large rocks in to stablize the pool/let things like birds and bees drink from it. Also include a 2×4 with one end in the pool and the other over the edge to be an escape route for smaller animals. I also reccomend leaving some plates with a bit of water in them for really small animals like spiders, snakes, toads and other things that would have difficulty getting into the pool.
Beyond the necessary stuff to keep your own house safe in the event of fire, SKIP THE YARD WORK- you probably shouldn’t be exterting yourself in the smoke anyway, and fleeing animals will appreciate the additional cover.
LET THEM NAP. Most animals that come to your yard will usually keep moving within a day or so and are only there to rest until they’re well out of the smoke. If you find an animal in your yard that isn’t obviously injured or ill, just give it a wide berth and let it rest. If it’s in EXACTLY the same place after 48 hours, then you should call animal control.
KEEP FOOD, PETS AND CHILDREN INSIDE. Keep your trash in the garage, bring in birdfeeders, and if you let your cats roam… just don’t in general, but right now is a super bad time becuase there’s hungry coyotes about. Stick your head out the back door and give your yard a quick look before letting the dog or children out and supervise them while they’re outside.
EXCEPTION TO THE FOOD RULE: GARDENS. When animals learn there’s food in houses or trash cans, that’s not great. Foraging food off of plants like munching your tomatoes and that zucchini you weren’t going to eat is less of an issue, because it doesn’t really teach them to associate humans and houses with food. Let them monch your crops.
SECURE YOUR HOUSE COMPLETELY- lock doors, block off any pet doors you have, cover your window wells, and lock all your windows, even the ones on the upper floors. This will keep both displaced wildlife AND smoke out of your home. If possible, see if you can seal off your attic. If not, make sure your attic acess is secured. Racoons and bears are sneaky.
OBEY ANY AND ALL EVACUATION NOTICES, BURSH-CLEARING INSTRUCTIONS AND ANY OTHER INSTRUCTIONS GIVEN TO YOU BY EMERGENCY SERVICES. Stay safe kids.
In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.
There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.
I realized what happened after about two seconds.
The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.
For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.
I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.
This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.
So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.
after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.
these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.
but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.
triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:
– if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.
– if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.
Triggers are a case of classical conditioning, where association between a stimulus (In these cases, forms of trauma) and a neutral stimuli (such as the garage door or scent of bath products) becomes so interlinked that you associate them as one. This happens a lot to those going through chemotherapy, where the nausea they feel from chemo medication becomes linked with everything they interact with while feeling nauseous (it doesn’t help that this sort of conditioning is super strong when linked with nausea) so even after all chemo treatment is done, they can’t stand to eat what they ate at the time, can’t look at the doctor, or a white room, or smell cleaning products without feeling extreme nausea.
Triggers are subconscious, and we haven’t really got control of them. Even if you go through therapy for them, because they’ve now become learnt, they will still be there and mess with people. Don’t make assumptions about triggers, and try to be accommodating.
For those who are interested, EMDR has been shown to be able to lessen the effects of triggers.
do u guys understand how creepy the pledge of allegiance is though like every day when ur a kid everybody just chants how great america is every morning it’s creepy
You do that every morning???
EVERY MORNING.
wait
wait
is this a real thing i thought that was just in the simpsons
no son
Wait, other countries don’t do this.
*whispers* Not even Russia
I remember when my dad had a conversation with me
because I asked him what the Austrian pledge of allegiance was (because he’s from Austria)
and he said “we don’t have a pledge of allegiance”
and I said “why not?”
“honey, think about what training your children to mindlessly pledge to a flag, without really knowing what they’re talking about, sounds like to Austrians”
“oh. hitler.”
“exactly”
RE FUCKING TWEET
as an austrian, that is literally what i think about every time the subject comes up
Not just the pledge, but flags. FLAGS. The American flag is fucking everywhere. You can’t stand on a public street and look in any direction without seeing at least one American flag. For crying out loud, they are flying outside fast food joints. WTF does McDonald’s have a flagpole? I lived in Spain for more than a year and I’m certain I didn’t see the Spanish flag hanging anywhere that wasn’t an actual government building, and even then not every time.
Chriss’ Home of Gifs, Squee, and Fandom Issues 