Anima: Animals, Faith, Compassion

...ts meat or not is just part of the issue. Right relationship to our fellow creatures is what is important. Home gardeners, chicken keepers and permaculturalists well know the difference between stewardship and dominion, the difference between working with as opposed to our culture’s mad control freakery. A personal note. I had, in the past few months, fallen off my ethical eating wagon and taken to occasionally consuming what I knew to be factory...

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CritterCam Reveals Yet More Rats and a Plea to Not Use Poison

...further the IPM cause. At the time, and to some extent to this day, there’s a lot of incentive to sell poisons. IPM offers a balanced, common sense approach to dealing with critters like rats: observe, reduce habitat for the creatures we don’t want and increase habitat for predators, use barriers, use biological controls and use toxins as a very last resort. Our own health and the health our planet demands a less toxic approach to pest management...

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Why You Should Have a Cat Fountain

..., won’t drink anything but water flowing from a tap. While cats are desert creatures they still need water. For our cat’s wild ancestors rodent blood (yum!) provided supplemental hydration. The ideal diet for a cat would be a mouse a day, but we’d get in trouble with the PETA folks if we started a mouse farm at the Root Simple compound. So we’ve got to get them to drink water. Our two cats drink happily from our cat fountain and from bowls of fres...

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Bird’s Nest

...onto our patio every night, as we steadily lose our war with the nocturnal creatures for our grapes. But that is the subject of another post. Anyone have any guesses about what kind of bird made this nest? The bowl is about 3 inches (7.5 cm) across. ETA: I’ve been looking at this great page of bird nests–it’s heaven for the bird nest enthusiast. So many types of nests! Wee little eggs! Baby birds! One bird even made its nest in a sweatshirt hangin...

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Weekend Links: We’ve Gone Crazy!

...tsimple) April 20, 2016 This car said “No”. RIP bike sign in #boyleheights. 04/18/16 – 04/19/16.@MCMHandles @GoHumanSoCal @josehuizar pic.twitter.com/z8AhthDAeZ — From Lot to Spot (@fromlottospot) April 19, 2016 Beautiful Japanese “minimalist survival kit” that fits in a tube you wear on your back https://t.co/Phke4nngrN — Root Simple (@rootsimple) April 20, 2016 A thought experiment: What would a world without Internet look like? https://t.co/Y6z...

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