Georgia HB 177: Family judges could include pets in protective orders from abuse

A proposed law in Georgia:

"Fear of losing the pets kept Heatherland in the relationship longer than they otherwise would have stayed, they said. But the General Assembly recently approved legislation that could have made it easier for Heatherland and others to leave abusive partners.

If Gov. Brian Kemp signs House Bill 177, people who’ve experienced domestic violence could ask judges to include family pets in temporary protective orders. The bill passed both chambers with overwhelming support.

House Public and Community Health Chairwoman Sharon Cooper, a Marietta Republican, said she sponsored the bill because it has become more common for abusers to threaten the pets as a way to keep victims from leaving. Abusers know how important pets have become, she said.

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If HB 177 becomes law, it would create a space on the form to allow those petitioning for a temporary protective order to indicate they would like to include a pet. HB 177 would then allow a judge to determine plans for a pet when deciding to grant a temporary protective order. Judges would not be required to include a pet in their order."

— "Georgia judges could include family pets in domestic violence restraining orders under new bill: Victims sometimes stay in abusive relationships to remain with a beloved pet, advocates say." Maya T. Prabhu, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 9, 2025

Learn about your options if you're seeking child custody with a concern about domestic abuse in Georgia.

Arkansas already allows a judge to give an abuser's pet to someone who seeks an order of protection.

Climate: Denmark will tax farmers per cow

"Dairy farmers in Denmark face having to pay an annual tax of 672 krone ($96) per cow for the planet-heating emissions they generate.

The country’s coalition government agreed this week to introduce the world’s first carbon emissions tax on agriculture. It will mean new levies on livestock starting in 2030."

— World’s first carbon tax on livestock will cost farmers $100 per cow, Hanna Ziady, CNN, June 26, 2024

Cow by Leopictures from Pixabay

Birds are being renamed

"Now this end is called the thagomizer ... after the late Thag Simmons."
— Gary Larson, The Far Side cartoon, 1982, fair use

The Far Side joke is based, yes, on the idea that the dinosaur smashed a caveman who was peering too closely. A big part of the joke is in the word "late," as in, deceased.

However, more generally, it also satirizes the common practice of naming animals after scientists who "discovered" them. It's just kind of ridiculous, and often offensive in various ways, to name something a "thag" because a guy who reported it to a biology journal was named Thag. Take a listen to this NPR story: "These American birds and dozens more will be renamed, to remove human monikers". Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR, November 1, 2023.

We learn that something is called a "thagomizer" and we assume there's some actual meaning behind it, and then we learn it just derives from a caveman grunt like everything else.

"In 1987, the team found, each route had 2,034 birds on average. By 2017, that average had decreased by 304 birds per route, or 15 percent." 🌎🧪

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— Ethan Freedman (@ethanpfreedman.com) February 27, 2026 at 12:10 PM

If you worry about sex development, please look at environmental inputs

Microplastics are in "dolphin breath."

Climate change and pollution affect the sex of sea turtles.

"Green sea turtles are producing more females in response to a warming climate — and human-caused pollution is helping fuel the surge, a recent analysis suggests.

Writing in Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers say ocean contaminants are contributing to a surge of female green sea turtles.

Like many other reptiles, sea turtles’ sex development is influenced by the temperature of their nests. Green sea turtles incubate in large clutches of eggs their migratory mothers bury in the sand on nesting beaches. Over the course of about two months, they develop from embryos into tiny turtles, with warmer sands producing more females and cooler sands producing more males.

* * *

Turtles born with higher concentrations of ... metals such as chromium, lead and cadmium and industrial byproducts like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — were likelier to be female."

— Pollution fueling a sex imbalance among endangered green sea turtles (subscriber gift link). Erin Blakemore. Washington Post. November 26, 2023.

Many people who claim to be "concerned" about the sex development of children are working to make transgender life illegal, inaccessible, or generally unworkable or untenable. If they are truly concerned about children's bodies, and if they think of themselves as so grounded in "biology" and "reality," they should think more about climate change and pollution. That would be good work they could do.

Or they could think about other environmental inputs and health effects, like:
New Cancer Cases Are Expected to Pass 2 Million This Year. What Does That Mean for All of Us?: An American Cancer Society report predicts a record-breaking number of cases in the US. BU oncologist Naomi Y. Ko discusses why cases are going up, particularly among younger people, and how to reduce your cancer risk. Alene Bouranova. Boston University. January 30, 2024.

What affects sea turtles could indicate something that might affect humans too.

This book argues that chemical exposures affect sperm counts: Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. Shanna H. Swan. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Oh, and by the way: "On the podcast this week [March 2024], we talk about how hackers are exploiting electronic prescription systems to order mountains of drugs..." (404 Media) if you're worried about exploitation of prescription drugs, you should be worried about large-scale fraud, theft, and addiction — not a trans kid.

"Toxic plastic chemicals number in the thousands, most are unregulated, report finds," Sandee LaMotte, CNN, March 14, 2024

"Sex is real. So is global warming. To believe in their reality is an indispensable precondition for making normative claims about them... the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism. ...[This right comes] from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious food and clean water, and, crucially, the right to health care." — Andrea Long Chu, "Freedom of Sex: The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies," New York Intelligencer, March 11, 2024

"Why do we trust the scientists who predict eclipses but doubt those who warn us about climate change? ... Perhaps the answer lies not in the science but in ourselves. Embracing the full spectrum of scientific discoveries requires intellectual acceptance and emotional and practical engagement. It demands that we move beyond viewing science as a series of disconnected events and see it as a narrative of life history—a narrative that we are not merely observing but actively shaping." — The Paradox of Selective Scientific Trust, Dr. Pine, The New Climate, April 18, 2024

"Microplastics are in human testicles. It’s still not clear how they got there." People eat, drink, and breathe in tiny pieces of plastics — but what they do inside the body is still unknown. Joseph Winters, Grist, May 23, 2024

ProPublica on PFOS compounds (May 24, 2024):

It started this way: "For decades, the company [3M] had used chemicals that break down into PFOS in its top-selling fabric coating, Scotchgard, and in a grease-proof coating for food packaging. It also sold PFOS and firefighting foam that contained it." Then, "a handful of 3M scientists and lawyers had learned in the 1970s that the chemical PFOS had seeped into the blood of people around the country and that company experiments around that time had shown that PFOS was toxic." In fact: "3M had conducted animal studies on PFOS in the 1970s and that those tests had shown PFOS was toxic." In those 1970s studies:

"Jim Johnson, Hansen’s former boss, said in an interview that he knew 'within 20 minutes' that PFOS wouldn’t break down in nature and that he had identified the chemical in a sample he obtained from a blood bank in the 1970s. He also determined back then that the chemical binds to proteins in the body, causing it to accumulate, and found it in the livers of animals that were exposed to the company’s products. Yet he didn’t disclose this information to Hansen before he gave her the assignment that led her to find PFOS in the blood of the general public almost 20 years later. Johnson told Lerner that he knew that Hansen would discover — and thoroughly document — the presence of PFOS in the blood of the general public. 'It was time,' he said."

"In the late 1990s, 3M chemist Kris Hansen tested samples from dozens of blood banks around the country and found PFOS in every sample." So: "In 1999, Hansen was invited to present her PFOS research to top 3M executives," and after she did, another scientist was appointed to lead the research she had been doing. And yet, after learning that it was toxic to humans, 3M produced "tens of millions of pounds of PFOS and related compounds" and "kept making the compound until 2000." This was the message: "The company’s medical director told The New York Times in May 2000 that the presence of the chemical in human blood 'isn't a health issue now, and it won’t be a health issue.' 3M stopped making PFOS by 2002 but replaced it with PFBS, another forever chemical that persists in the environment and accumulates in people."

"In 2022, 3M said that it would stop making the broader group of forever chemicals known as PFAS and would “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio” by the end of 2025. (PFOS and PFBS are PFAS compounds.)"

In 2023, someone with inside knowledge of 3M revealed what happened. "In April [2024], the Environmental Protection Agency set drinking water limits for six forever chemicals, including PFOS and PFBS. The agency noted that PFOS is “likely to cause cancer” and that no level of the chemical is considered safe." (See EPA site)

See how small a microplastic is: "The Plastics We Breathe: Every time you take a breath, you could be inhaling microplastics. Scroll to see how tiny and dangerously invasive they can be." Simon Ducroquet and Shannon Osaka, Washington Post, June 10, 2024

"Microplastic discovery in penises raises erectile dysfunction questions: The contaminants have also recently been found in testes and semen amid concerns about falling male fertility," Damian Carrington, Guardian, June 19, 2024

The Plan To Make America Hazardous Again: Trump’s EPA could stop states from warning people about potentially dangerous chemicals sprayed on their food. Lever News, Mar 3, 2025

Scientists discovered microplastics in human semen and follicular fluid, Kristen Rogers, CNN, July 1, 2025

If you're skipping over this article about the effect that environmental inputs like pollution have on children's sex development, maybe you're not really worried about children's sex development after all. Maybe you're just worried about trans people existing.

When I say you don’t have to worry about microplastics in your brain I mean that there is much stronger evidence that you should be worrying about other things that you don’t ever think about, like the draining of peatlands for agriculture, and things that you think about all the time, like fascism.

— Hank Green (@hankgreen.bsky.social) April 13, 2025 at 10:50 AM

More And More People Suffer From 'Chemophobia' — And MAHA Is Partly To Blame: The fear tactic strikes a nerve with both conservatives and liberals alike. Here’s what you need to know. Jillian Wilson, HuffPost, Sep 1, 2025

The health risks from plastics almost nobody knows about: Phthalates, chemicals found in plastics, are linked to an array of problems, especially in pregnancy. (Washington Post, 2025)

This is part of it: they are building energy-guzzling data centers for "AI" that lies about trans people. Read: Trump Sacrifices Alaska Wilderness to Help AI Companies: Trump’s approval of the 211-mile Ambler Road Project through Gates of the Arctic National Park hinges on winning an “AI arms race.” Gavin Feek, October 8 2025

"At the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin announced 31 “historic actions” in what he called 'the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,' driving what he called 'a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.'" (Josh Powell, Dec 28, 2025)

Men in their 50s may be aging faster than women due to toxic ‘forever chemicals’, Sandee LaMotte, CNN, Feb 26, 2026

Carbon dioxide levels are higher than humans have ever experienced. It could be changing our blood chemistry, Laura Paddison, CNN, March 19, 2026

What should we ask the plastic doctor? I'm interviewing her tomorrow! Emily Atkin, HEATED, Apr 09, 2026

The FDA won’t tell Americans where their generic drugs are made, so ProPublica did it instead. Use information from your prescription label to locate the factory and see if the plant has a history of inspection violations.

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— ProPublica (@propublica.org) May 14, 2026 at 9:45 PM

Greenpeace Raises Alarm After Microplastics Found in Top Companies’ Baby Food Pouches “Plastic pollution is not just wrecking our environment, it’s entering our bodies, starting from infancy,” said one campaigner. “How our food is packaged is designed for profit, not for people’s health.” Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, May 21, 2026

'Why Aren't We Inspecting The Shrimp?': GOP Senator Revives Wild Under-The-Sea Concerns: Sen. John Kennedy tried to net answers from a top Trump official about seafood from abroad. Ben Blanchet, HuffPost, Jul 22, 2026

The animals we may lose

A moment to remember threatened animal species:

"...it is important to say the names of some of the creatures whose remaining time on Earth may be cut short due to human action. Among them are the African forest elephant, Amur leopard, black rhino, Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, Cross River gorilla, eastern and western lowland gorilla, hawksbill turtle, Javan and Sumatran rhinos, saola, Sumatran elephant, Sunda tiger, vaquita, Yangtze finless porpoise… To recite aloud the names of all the earth’s threatened species one by one would take about two sleepless weeks."
Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "It Is Time for a New Covenant."

Recently, hundreds of elephants died in Botswana from cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) in their drinking water. (This 2023 article by Muhammad Arif is on Medium; you may encounter a paywall.)

In 2024, Zimbabwe will shoot elephants for people to eat. In a drought, the land cannot support human needs as well as a large number of elephants, authorities have decided.

"...a team of economists from the International Monetary Fund estimated a single baleen whale provides about $2 million worth of Earth services, both in life and death." (CNN, 2024)<.p>

2024: An endangered whale gets tangled in lobster gear. Threats to life come from various directions and cannot be forgotten because they all add up.

In 2024, a new species of anaconda was discovered in the Amazon.

Erratic Fish Behavior In Florida Prompts 'Emergency Response' From National Agency
Endangered smalltooth sawfish are spinning around and dying in unusual numbers in the Florida Keys. Curt Anderson. HuffPost, March 30, 2024

Biologists Rescue Sawfish As Dozens Of Ancient Animals Die For Unknown Reasons, Curt Anderson, HuffPost, April 13, 2024

‘The final result was good’: 130 whales rescued from mass beach stranding in Western Australia, Teele Rebane, Heather Chen and Manveena Suri, CNN, April 25, 2024

The animals know it, and they're panicking

About 100 rescued elephants escape flash floods at popular sanctuary in northern Thailand, by Helen Regan and Kocha Olarn, CNN, October 4, 2024

This gruesome discovery of nearly 150 dead turtles is a warning for the future, CNN, March 2026

For more: "Climate change is expensive, but that's not the point". It's a 9-minute read on Medium.

Parrot sings wonderfully

The bird is really good.

Why it’s not a good idea to keep a tiger as a pet

Tigers are among the most beautiful animals on earth. It's no wonder that some people are fascinated by them and feel a desire to keep them as pets. However, tigers are not domesticated animals. Small tiger cubs will soon grow up to weigh hundreds of pounds, and they can easily overpower and kill a person. Furthermore, because tigers are endangered, it is especially important to the overall tiger population and the ecosystem for more tigers to live in the wild.

Don't get a tiger

Tigers are stunning creatures, but their care and feeding is a delicate matter that requires heroic effort. They can kill their human keepers, they are difficult to capture once they've escaped, and because of this, a license is generally required to keep one. If you are inclined to keep a cat, an animal shelter will have a small one for you. (Millions of unwanted cats are euthanized in the United States each year.) If you are inclined to help tigers, a good start would be a donation to a wildlife charity or to an organization like the Shambala Preserve that takes large cats from people "who realize they have purchased an animal they can no longer handle".

For kids, check out the book Big Cats Are Not Pets! by Julie S. Marzolf.

But if you do have a tiger, and if you're married, I guess you should write a tiger custody agreement so you know who will take care of it in the event of a divorce.

Tigers can turn on their human keepers

Tigers occasionally maul their keepers. In 1998, in Florida, a tiger put Richard Chipperfield in critical condition. It was shot by Graham Chipperfield. The brothers were trainers for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.


In 2003, Antoine Yates was mauled by a 500-pound tiger that he secretly kept in his apartment in a Harlem housing project. His brother found him injured on the floor and brought him to the hospital. To capture the tiger, police had to rappel down the side of the apartment building with a tranquilizer gun. Yates served six months in jail for endangerment.

He fondly explained his relationship with the tiger, "Ming": "To be close to such a beautiful animal 24 hours a day is magical. I began to really understand a big cat. At that point I was ready to disconnect from the world."

Also in 2003, a leashed white tiger mauled Roy Horn during a performance in Las Vegas. Horn, who had performed with tigers for three decades, lost enough blood to put him in critical condition.


In December 2013, a circus tiger mauled its trainer, Danny Gottani, in front of spectators in Madrid, including Gottani's own mother. Gottani had nearly two decades of experience with tigers. His injuries were not life-threatening. A spectator captured cell phone footage of the mauling.


Tigers are difficult to contain

One might think that the risk could be minimized simply by keeping the animal in a cage. It's not quite that simple. It's one thing to put a tiger in a box, and another thing to keep the box sealed.

In 1893, the Walter L. Main Circus Train derailed in Pennsylvania as it traveled downhill, leading to the escape of many exotic animals. One tiger entered a barn where it killed a cow and scared away the milkmaid. The farmer, Alfred Thomas, shot it.

The obvious danger presented by captive tigers was alluring to one depressed man who climbed into a tiger enclosure in China in a suicide attempt in 2014. (The tiger dragged him but refused to eat him.)

In the wild, tigers rarely bother humans. However, once a tiger learns to stalk humans as prey, it becomes a menace. A Royal Bengal tiger killed 10 people in Northern India over just two months in early 2014 and remained on the loose. Villagers were intent on finding and shooting the rogue animal, but it is easier said than done.

Celebrities who are known to have tigers


Tigers are expensive, and celebrities sometimes purchase them as status symbols or curiosities. These arrangements are usually short-term, as keeping a tiger is a lot of work.


An article in USA Today in 2003 reported that Michael Jackson kept two tigers ("Thriller" and "Sabu") on his Neverland Ranch; Mike Tyson kept three tigers at home ("Kenya," "Storm" and "Boris"); and Paris Hilton kept a mostly untamed tiger ("London"). All of these tigers were subsequently sent to live elsewhere. Hilton, whose TV show is ironically called "The Simple Life," wisely said of her tiger: "I don't have it anymore...[It] got too big, and if it ever got loose I'd be in so much trouble."

A four-month-old female tiger cub was given to Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko during her presidential campaign in 2009. Tymoshenko became a political prisoner, and the tiger, who had been named "Tigryulia" during its stint as campaign mascot, was sent to a zoo, where it gave birth to four cubs in 2012.


In 1837, U.S. President Martin van Buren was sent a pair of tiger cubs by the Sultan of Oman. Congress did not permit van Buren to keep the tigers and had them sent to a zoo.

Tigers are endangered

Tigers are endangered in the wild. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2011 that more tigers live in captivity in the United States than roam wild in all the world: "Because of a flourishing trade in exotic animals, there are an estimated 5,000 privately owned Bengal tigers in the U.S. There are only 3,600 Bengal tigers left in the wild."

In addition for the demand for tigers as pets, the demand for products made from slaughtered tigers leaves them vulnerable to hunters. For example, on Sept. 4, 2012, the HuffingtonPost reported:
 "Police have seized four baby tigers and more than 100 pangolins being transported in a car in central Vietnam...Tiger bones are used in Vietnam to make a traditional painkiller that sells for several hundred dollars an ounce." Superstitions about the curative properties of tiger products thus sadly contribute to the animals' decline.


This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 27, 2014.

Tiger image by Eddy Van 3000 from in Flanders fields - Belgiquistan - United Tribes ov Europe (Sleeping beauty, dreaming of lots of meat.) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

A response to 'Why vegetarians should be prepared to bend their own rules'

In a short article "Why vegetarians should be prepared to bend their own rules," Alberto Giubilini claims: "If people perceive vegetarianism as a position that allows for no exception, they are probably less likely to become vegetarian. A flexible moral position is more appealing than a rigid one that allows for no exceptions."

The word "probably" raises questions. Can't we find psycho-social data about whether "flexible" positions are indeed more appealing than "rigid" ones overall and also specifically in regards to choosing a personal diet to support animal welfare? The result could also vary based on the relevant knowledge base, cultural context, and personality of the individual being exposed to the new moral idea. Many people appreciate flexibility to support an abstract goal like "reduce the consumer demand placed on the meat industry" which could allow for eating meat in certain circumstances, but others are more attracted to moral commitments that are simple, concrete, and inflexible like "never eat an animal for any reason." Cultural context is important here because it drives assumptions. Some people are more familiar with vegetarianism as a result of religious commitment, family tradition, or poverty, while others know it mainly as a lifestyle choice prompted by modern concerns about environment and health, and still others know it as a more universal, timeless ethical issue. Dietary flexibility isn't clearly always the approach that will be most readily understandable to others. (Exactly what is a "flexible" religious commitment or a "flexible" moral imperative, after all?) Nor is it obvious that dietary flexibility, even if understood, is the diet that is most likely to be imitated.

Giubilini makes a good point that more animals overall may be helped if a larger number of humans reduce their meat intake rather than a smaller number of humans completely eliminating their meat intake. Indeed, if three chickens have their heads on the chopping block, the chickens care not whether they are to be eaten by a single human or three humans. Therefore, convincing three people to eat one fewer chicken each is surely the same (to the chickens) as convincing one person to eat three fewer chickens. On that point, Giubilini has got it right.

However, as there are different kinds of existing vegetarians and they will convert different kinds of new vegetarians, it isn't necessary to make an "either/or" choice about how everyone should eat. Different behaviors and justification will appeal to different people. Some individuals will reduce their own meat consumption and some will completely eliminate it. A "numbers game" of animals spared suffering is quite valid from a consequentialist point of view, but we still need to see those numbers so we can accurately predict the consequences. If I care about this consequentialist approach, then what I need to know is the precise likelihood that my willingness to eat chicken publicly will inspire a greater increase in other people's future vegetarian meal choices than if I had refused to eat it. Saying "probably" doesn't cut it. Data is needed.

A couple further objections:

If non-vegetarians are most inspired to reduce their meat intake when they see a self-identified "vegetarian" eating meat because they perceive that person as "flexible," isn't the logical consequence that all self-identified "vegetarians" will always eat meat when they are being watched? And wouldn't that ultimately result in a large number of animals being eaten?

The assumption that meatless meals should be consumed in secret so that the effort that goes into making them is kept secret, while meat should be consumed in public so that eating meat-free seems easy, needs to be unpacked. Growing or buying food, cooking it, and serving it always requires effort. As long as meatless options are available, they are easier to prepare because they generally require less cooking and refrigeration for food safety. They are sometimes also cheaper. Eating meat publicly is not a demonstration of simple lifestyle or accessible ethics any more than eating meatless food publicly.

Giubilini may have intended to restrict his argument to the scenario in which a self-identified vegetarian is offered meat in someone else's home, but this restriction is not made clear within the article, as the wide-ranging justifications could easily apply to other scenarios.

See also

"Big Meat is lying about sustainability. These media outlets are helping." Can newsrooms really expect people to trust their reporting if they fund it by spreading misinformation? Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson, March 6, 2024

You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local: “Eat local” is a common recommendation to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet. How does the impact of what you eat compare to where it's come from?, Hannah Ritchie, Our World in Data, January 24, 2020

Tracking Meat’s Environmental Hoofprint, by Matt Davenport, Stewards Magazine, UMich, Fall 2025