Vaccine wankery from well-meaning people

In case my comment gets removed (and so no one need suffer by missing a piece of wisdom from yours truly). Last week I spent a bit of my time on a comment in response to this blog post .

Here it is. Enjoy:

I don't disagree that an indoor-only pet may not need a rabies vaccine - rabies isn't like panleuk or upper respiratory infections that can be tracked in on your shoes, for example. But the risks from vaccines in general are very small. Why such the freak out? The links you provided just go to highly biased and non-scientific "opinion" websites. Not very convincing.

And there are not "countless" studies that say that vaccines are "damaging". That's false, or at least dishonest. There *are* well-documented and well-known risks from vaccinating, but serious reactions or development of soft-tissue sarcomas are very, very rare; Statistics we have aren't great, but indicate less than 1 in 100,000 risk. You put your cat in more risk by driving him to the clinic in a motor vehicle.

It's unfair to say that the woman's response meant she "didn't care about the health of animals" and it was "just to make money".

It's standard to vaccinate dogs and cats for rabies between ages 3-4 months based on the recommendations of multiple scientific organizations using current health data. And it's very reasonable for a humane society clinic to insist on vaccinating upon intake for spay/neuter surgery - from their perspective, they're dealing with a lot of animals who may never see a vet again in their life. It's in their best interest, and the best interest of the community as a whole,  to help maintain good herd immunity in the community they're serving.

Here are some less-biased links:

http://www.vet.cornell.edu/FHC/resources/brochure/vaccbr.html

https://www.avma.org/About/AlliedOrganizations/Pages/ownbroch.aspx

http://www.vmd.defra.gov.uk/pdf/ati/Catvaccinesinjsitesarcomas.pdf

Lengthy Jay Lake quote'o'the day

"I'm a relentless empiricist, firmly moored in the world of logos, who doesn't have any trouble acknowledging the value and power of mythos as a key component of human existence. Including my own personal version of mythos.

My sometimes ugly public quarrels with religion and the religious have entirely to do with people confusing their personal beliefs with some form of objective truth, and then projecting that confusion into the public square to the detriment of both themselves and the rest of society. When it comes to religion, I am a First Amendment absolutist. I will defend to the death your right to worship as you please (and equally my right to find your worship ridiculous); and I will defend to the death my right to be entirely free of the pleasures of your worship.

In the faith-holding sense, I don't believe in anything. The universe just is, evolution and thermodynamics don't require my spiritual assent to exist, any more than gravity or climate change or tomatoes do. That's not to say I'm some mindless, amoral spiritual void. My mythos is always aboil, bubbling over, as anyone who's ever read my fiction can probably attest. I just don't confuse the structures of my consciousness with the external reality of the world."

From his personal blog.

I'm not much of a romantic, I guess

This Guardian article I ran across today needs a new headline:

Advances in technology leads to slightly larger handful of rich elites able to climb Mt. Everest every year. This is bad because... ROMANCE RUINED.

OK, fine, that's his opinion; boo hoo for him that he doesn't like that the unwashed masses are DARING to tread where only rich white men were allowed to go before. Whatever. That he thinks that the motivations of modern-day Everest climbers is somehow LESS WORTHY than the motivations of climbers from 50 years ago is pompous and irritating, but beside the point.

But, really? The first paragraph: "This is a photograph of all that has gone wrong in humanity's relationship with nature... it is a picture of how profoundly we are failing to have any kind of decent respect for our world: how our romance with nature has become sick and twisted."

Gimmee a break.

This is a photo of a sick and twisted relationship with nature.
Also, this and this and this and this.


Having a few extra rich people who are able to stomp around a sterile mountain top? Not even on the f*)cking radar.

Dear Jonathan Jones, please call yourself a whambulance, and then, once you have been administered an anti-venom for your whiny elitism, repeat after me: nature tourism is a good thing. Those same tourists that are cluttering up your view of Everest are the same ones who are literally pulling species back from the brink of extinction.

A brief moment of thanks

In the words of another:

"If more of us are dying of cancer and heart disease, it’s because many, many fewer of us are dying from diptheria, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, rubella, plague, influenza, malaria, common bacterial infections, polio, typhus, childbirth, “childbed” (puerperal) fever, malnutrition, scurvy, &c... The more I learn about the distant past, the happier I am that I never had to live there.  I feel like I won the f^(king lottery every day of my life to have been born when and where I was born, a middle-class American in the late middle of the twentieth century.  ...  I will probably live to die of heart disease, or cancer, or kidney disease, or sclerosis of the arteries.  Hooray!  I’m not exactly looking forward to it, but I must acknowledge how relatively fortunate I have been to have survived this far."

Some Thanksgiving Links

There's a reason this blog has been lacking in content recently, and soon I will tell you.

For now, here's some semi-random Thanksgiving related links for you.

This is very close to the 'pumpkin' pie recipe I use (for the last four years anyway, since I discovered delicata squashes). Guys. It is so much more delicious than canned pumpkin. If you're a fan of pumpkin pie, try making it from a delicata squash.

Food photography at its best. I want to fall into this picture and hang out/live in this rustic place.

Raising and slaughtering turkeys - the way it should be done.

I've never poached anything (hunting or cooking), but this photo of poached wild turkey makes my mouth water.

And here's a fully-random photo of my dad picking chanterelles on a very wet day Thanksgiving day in 2009.





Have a great week everyone.