Pretty sure most studies about the effects of coffee and red wine are flawed.
Nothing is more natural and free range than the occasional murder between animals.
What I've been told is that opossums are much worse than foxes in the sense that a fox will usually eat a chicken or two to survive but opossums seem to freak out and will kill all the hens in a henhouse in one go.
I've often wished I could talk with my cats but more than ever I wish I could ask them what they knew about the fox. There is this lady
https://www.youtube.com/@debs3289
who meets them in the street, has them come to her door, and feeds them chicken (!) Secretly I imagine that the fox is really a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune
and my wife is always reminding me that it has just one tail, not nine.
Mostly we've had people around, either tenants or neighbors, who keep chickens so we don't have to. I'll say the eggs from a small scale chicken operation taste a lot better than commercial eggs.
I definitely thought about trying to draw in the fox but as much as that British lady makes it look easy on Youtube Shorts the legends are that foxes can cause a lot of trouble.
Am I out of place if I say I also like coyotes? (Remember: city boy, so nothing is at stake for me here. I also like wolves!)
And yeah, Japanese folklore has taught me that it's best to avoid kitsune. Though they sometimes turn into magical women who help you?
I don't tell the SPCA, however, that I am getting a cat there because it's a replacement for one lost to predators. They die of old age, get hyperthyroidism, high blood pressure, become blind, walk around mindlessly and crash into things, and one morning you find them dead at the bottom of the stairs. I think they would find dying at the claws of a predator an honorable death.
As for kitsune they are the Japanese version of a myth that is widespread in East and South Asia, for instance Daji
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daji
is probably isomorphic to Tamamo-no-mae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamamo-no-Mae
and is sometimes believed to be the same entity. I was into anime for a long time (Urusei Yatsura was a watershed but it really goes back to seeing Star Blazers on TV) but lately I have been into Chinese pop culture like Three Kingdoms, Nezha and Wolf Warrior 2 and that's gotten me reading about Chinese mythology and one clear thing is a lot of Japanese mythology comes from China, for instance it seems there is a "world tree" in almost every JRPG that they climb to get to heaven and even if they call it Yggdrasil it is not from Norse mythology it is from Chinese mythology. (Turns out also a lot of Chinese mythology as well as neopagan ideas comes from India as well.)
The Japanese do derive a lot of their culture from the Chinese, don't they? I would like to one day read some of the stuff around the Three Kingdoms. Alas! So much to read and do, and so little time!
Anyway, thanks for this conversation, I enjoy it.
The old adage applies: "everything nice is either illegal or bad for your health". Or both, I would add.
And is known to cause cancer in the State of California.
Never the middle ground, it's always a shocking new finding "by science" (spoiler: scientists seldom say the things newspapers and pop-science/nutrition & health articles claim they say).
I think peeing more lowers your uric acid.
Look in the medical literature and it seems outright spammed by reports on the positive effects of caffeine and negative reports on any of the harmful effects one would expect.
Similarly the main active ingredient of red wine (alcohol) is harmful, red wine in particular causes a lot of discomfort, dispepsia, hangovers and other unpleasant effects if you get a bad vintage but look the literature and it is like it will transport you to a blue zone and you will love forever.
And you find those kind of papers spammed in “real” journals, not MDPI or “Frontiers” journals.
Coffee prevents headaches for me so I'll always drink it. And no it's not related to physical dependence although at this point the withdrawal will guarantee a headache.
Got a mild flu/Covid/cold couple years ago. Better in a week. But, during the illness and since, the slightest bit of caffeine would make be incredibly wired to the point of panic attacks. Had to quit cold turkey. I’ve tried a cup now and again, and it’s the same thing: 6 hours of overwhelming anxiety.
Wierd. It’s like I became hypersensitive to caffeine. Oddly, though, nicotine doesn’t have that effect, and I always figured the two stimulants were similar.
I frequently switch between that and coffee (coffee has a much more pronounced effect and sometimes you have to grind)
Dose size matters.
I have the same issue w/ cannabis. Right now I have a few plants (legal) in the garden and also a bag that is going to a friend and I don't care. If I had a little puff though the next day I would want another little puff and another and in a week or so I would be like the guy in the Bob Marley song