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Can we get a group picture of the research coyotea?

These are both full of coyotes, I do not desire dragging them all out m'friend

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I was looking up javelina skulls and

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Are police dogs like.. good. W regard to apprehension, detection, etc. Like are they a net positive for the community 😬 those dogs in the hands of People Like That makes me a little nervous tbh

So my opinion on this distinguishes amongst apprehension dogs and narcotics detection dogs and the misc other dogs

Apprehension dogs theoretically have value in that they can assume the risk a human otherwise would need to in order to subdue an actively violent individual. In addition to the potential advantage dogs have infiltrating many situations a human would struggle to navigate. But, sending a dog bred and trained to hunt humans as prey at someone is an incredibly violent act. It would be a wildly disproportionate and atrocious punishment in response to any crime, yet right now it is occurring often for the crime of running away… A terrified pet frantically snapping can traumatize a person and cause them severe injury in moments. A confident dog who has your arm in the back of its mouth, and is using the full power of its jaws to grind down repeatedly, while grappling your body in the process, is on a completely different level. That level of violence cannot be reconciled with the nonchalance with which k-9s are currently deployed. If a human officer dealt comparable force, so many cases would be perceived with total horror. I am itching to say nearly all cases but that is purely my impression. Ultimately this is an insane level of violence to be dispensing so casually and so broadly. I am constantly horrified by the apprehensions (video or press summary) I see online. But there is suuuuch a cultural disconnect in how apprehensions are perceived, because dogs are adorable and charming and wildly popular. And the public imagination struggles to reconcile our love affair with dogs, with the simultaneous fact that they are powerful predators who can fuck up your life. And cops know this and exploit that fact for PR.

Narcotics dogs are infamously unreliable. Their purpose is not to find controlled substances. Their purpose is to give the cops probable cause. The cops have zero incentive to maintain or proof their training - our courts consider the word of the dog implicitly trustworthy, despite the increasing evidence that these wonderfully intelligent animals are Clever Hansing it up. In Chicago they were doing so in a strikingly racist pattern… I oppose basically everything about Americas approach to the war on drugs, and even if narcotics dogs weren’t as inaccurate and egregiously invasive as they are in their current capacity, I still wouldn’t support their role in our coercive system.

Other gov dogs I don’t have an issue with. Allie my former lab now works for TSA catching poachers… explosives detection dogs are obviously good… etc

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Black-backed jackal

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Lynx in the Harz National Park

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ranch fox skull

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when sending in pets for tanning, sometimes owners will request that i don’t make an incision on the tail so that the leather doesn’t show and it looks more like it did in life. unfortunately, it is necessary for the tail to be completely split down to the tip in order to flesh off all the fat (there can be a lot more fat in a tail than you’d think!), and ensure proper degreasing, tanning, and softening of the skin. however, what can be done in lieu of leaving it unsplit is to sew up the incision after tanning! that way, the tail can both be properly tanned and the incision be invisible. the left is the underside of a cat tail with the incision not sewn, the right is the underside of a cat tail after it was sewn up.

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*September 1st on Tumblr*

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Three male coyote skulls at varying ages. First one was only a few days old, second was about 5-6 months old, and the third is about a year and a half old.

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Planet Earth II (2016) Episode 03 “Jungles” Directed by Emma Napper

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Taxidermy mount of Phar Lap at Melbourne Museum, Melbourne.

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a huge water monitor i tanned for a client. the first reptile i ever tanned, and quite a challenge! shaving it was a pain in the ass with all the ridges in the skin- i couldn’t just smoothly shave off the flesh in one swipe. and their skin isn’t very stretchy due to the hard scales so the leather didn’t turn out nearly as soft as a mammal. but it was a very interesting experience and i’m still pretty happy with how it came out!

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just a few rad little dudes

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a lovely roadkill grey fox i tanned for a client 🐾

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Coyotes of East and West. The top coyote is a Mountain Coyote (Canis latrans lestes), and the bottom is an Eastern Coyote (Canis latrans var.). You can see how distinct Eastern Coyotes are compared to thier western cousins due to the hybridization with dogs, gray wolves, and Eastern wolves over the last few hundred years. When wolves were eradicated during early colonization, and pushed on more by the beaver fur trade, cattle ranching, and the gold rush, coyotes moved eastward, filling open food niches and hybridized with the other canids they met. This resulted with the current Eastern Coyote which have morphological traits similar to small Eastern wolves, though genetic analysis has shown traces of gray wolf and dog as well.

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Pristine skull of Eucyon khoikhoi from Langebaanweeg (South Africa). 

Eucyon khoikhoi marks a critical moment in the evolution of African jackals 5Ma, the moment when they began to diversify outside North America, becoming more diverse and common later in the Pleistocene, until they culminated in the four living species on the African continent: the side-striped jackal (Schaeffia adusta), the black-backed jackal (Lupulella mesomelas), the African golden wolf (Canis lupaster) and the Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis),”

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