My first comic and my first non-hugbox image! I was inspired to make this while procrastinating doing my taxes (nope, nothing Freudian about that).
I’ve always had a bit of a morbid fascination for the practice of neutering domestic animals. It may be genuinely, undeniably necessary for their individual well-being and the well-being of their species, but it still seems kind of brutal, in a way. So how much more-so for an animal that is consciously aware of what’s being taken from it?
Sorry if the dialogue is difficult to follow; I didn’t really think about it until it was too late.
(Background courtesy of https://pixabay.com)
Ahh, now that’s some awesome neutralbox. It’s the closest thing to true “justified abuse.” The recognition that sometimes, with fluffies or with anything else, the best you can do… may still be pretty awful.
This is hugbox yo. Catch-Neuter-Release. That’s like what you SHOULD be doing if you ever want to make fluffies acceptable as pets and not seen as a social stigma and all around pests.
This comic is great. It’s short term abuse; long term hugbox.
Thank you kindly! These kinds of gut-wrenching, morally ambiguous situations are half the reason I’ve gotten hooked on fluffies. They serve as such an interesting microcosm for those sorts of things.
(Btw I appreciate the quotes on “justified abuse” because, IMHO, it strikes me as an absurd concept when employed at face value and unironically.)
That tension between short-term-abuse vs. long-term-hugbox is why I ultimately decided to tag it as “Neutralbox” + “Abuse-ish” after mentally debating it for a minute. Of course I’m super glad that we don’t actually do TNR programs like this (ie: on pleading, restrained subjects, without anesthesia. yikes!).
But I do think it poses an interesting ethical question: what if anesthesia wasn’t an option? I know, for instance, that many people’s head cannons include the caveat that fluffy-grade anesthesia either doesn’t exist , is prohibitively expensive, or poses a substantial danger to the fluffy’s health.
Obviously I don’t personally know what the “answer” is to those kinds of moral quandaries; if I did, I’d be spending my life writing papers on ethics instead of drawing pictures of adorable tiny horses being mutilated
Complete knock-out anesthesia might be unavailable for fluffs since they’re way too tiny and fragile to safely control the dosage, but surely a local anesthetic (like a simple numbing shot, or even just a topical cream) would still work.
Based on the fact people get small animals like guinea pigs fixed irl, fluffies could easily be put under. Let’s be honest, it is probably just done this way to save costs and to speed things up.
Honestly, I think that this (cost, time-saving) is the most plausible explanation. People are needlessly callous/cruel for all sorts of banal reasons irl, I see no reason the same wouldn’t be doubly true with fluffies. Even if the person in this picture performing the surgery personally loves fluffies and volunteers his time, that doesn’t mean the clinic is going to spend any more than necessary on supplies for a TNR program that is most likely a PR move / public health measure and not fluffy philanthropy.
True but I think the clinic is forgetting an important thing. Bad word of mouth. The fluffies are gonna talk about how awful getting neutered was wich’ll get Hugboxers frenzied and maybe more importantly, Make other fluffies fearful of of the collectors. That’ll make it harder to catch fluffies if they actually hide. If word of mouth spreads of the humans that took fluffies wumps and special places (Painlessly) but gave sketty, more fluffies would be willing to go. Having coopertive fluffies makes every step of the process easier, as well as keeping your workers from getting depressed and deaf from all the screaming and pleading.
Also, feeding the nuetered fluffies and maybe letting them sleep at a shelter for a day or two is good because it increases their survival chances. If most of the fluffies die from infections or starvation a day or week after nuetering you might as well just kill them then and there and not go through all the effort of transport and surgery. The point of catch and realse is to have none breading fluffies out compete the breeding fluffies.
There’s a vid somewhere on the net of a kid in Belarus getting his tonsils removed without anesthesia…they tie him to a chair first. The doctor explains that their budget doesn’t allow for anesthesia.
And thank you!
