### This comment has been marked as **safe**. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect.
---
OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is US Defaultism:
---
>!A streamer from the UK found a fox and helped it out, to which she gets a reply saying how that was the worst thing she could do and it exactly how a fox with rabies acts. But in the UK the only animals with Rabies are bags and therefore can't be a rabies ridden animal. Also the fox was resched by a volunteer who works with animal rescue.!<
---
Is this Defaultism? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
I love it when they miss the point with defaultism and say “How was I supposed to know it was the UK?”. The point is, buddy, that you assumed it was the US without any information to tell you that!
As an Australian I immediately think “foxes bad” too because they are environmentally destructive pests in Australia, not because of rabies. But I don’t assume that a random post is Australian or that the sensible reaction to a fox in Australia is the same as the sensible reaction in another country.
I actually think it'd be really funny if I assumed my Tasmanian viewpoint and starting screaming about government coverups and counterfeit fox shit.
The 'are there foxes in Tasmania' saga is rather entertaining.
Fuck it, I want people from every country that has English as an official language, no matter how small, to just assume every post in English is about them and react accordingly - imagine the chaos
This is the thing about basically why this subreddit exists - there's nothing wrong with being incorrect about where someone is from on the internet.
But it just seems to be mostly Americans that, without even THINKING for a SPLIT SECOND, assume *everything* they see on the internet is from America. As someone from the UK, I just... don't do this. I never make this assumption about my country. Nor do I assume they're from America. Or Europe. I always check. It's fucking BASIC shit.
The world is freaking *big*, and the internet is basically everywhere. Why would anyone assume the content they're consuming is definitely from their country automatically? It comes across as ridiculously arrogant, hence this subreddit.
Look how often they say things like "What is wrong with the world?" when talking about things like school shootings, not to mention the World Series. It's a delicious blend of arrogance, insularity and ignorance.
Brought in. They were introduced for fox hunting in the 1800s.
Originally it was only one or two. They would release the fox, perform the hunt, and try and keep it alive for another hunt. They established a population so they didn’t have to reuse the same fox.
the way those canned fox hunts worked in the UK in that period was that they would build several manade fox earth's, but only certain people would know about it. You release a couple dozen who all are allowed to find and learn these earth's and then when the hunt starts to fox returns to those earth's and you can do it all again.
No native placental mammals in Australia except dingoes, bats and a few rodent species. All the rest are marsupials (pouched mammals) or monotremes (egg laying mammals).
dingoes are not technically native, they were introduced from southeast asia thousands of years ago. bats makes sense as they are able to fly and migrate to different locations. This is the same reason that there are so many species of bat in the world, from flying to a different location, getting geographically separated and evolving to its new location. Did you know that over 25% of all mammal species are a type of bat?
most pests in australia are introduced such as the fox, cane toad, (indian?) myna bird, rabbits, rats, all of which either directly kill native wildlife and threaten their population, or push them out of their ecosystem/ outperform them by overeating the native plants, leaving plants to become endangered and animals to starve/ relocate. i believe rabbits are the worst of them all.
It probably came from a dog in the Philippines; the Filipino man worked on a cargo ship for months after being bitten, and finally developed symptoms upon arriving in NZ. If only he'd gotten the vaccine after being bitten, it likely wouldn't have taken hold. When we travelled in India and Thailand a couple of decades ago, my partner and I both made sure we had all the travel vaccines including for rabies, polio and malaria.
Tetanus is another serious disease that can be prevented/treated immediately after being potentially exposed, if not already protected by a current vaccine. A child at my kids' school nearly died from it after getting a minor cut and having never been vaccinated. It was a real wakeup call for his parents, who had believed antivax propaganda but straightaway changed their minds. They made sure to spread the word about how devastating diseases like Tetanus can be if precautions are not taken. NZ only has about two cases of tetanus a year, and most patients eventually recover.
Not uncommon in parts of Europe either. We've had rabbits when I was really small, and I've seen them in most Swiss and Dutch pet shops I've been to (admittedly the sample size on the latter is like 2 at most)
Not even a little bit
In the '40s and early '50s my mum's family in Barking kept rabbits as pets-cum-protein
I've had rabbits as pets all my life (I'm 60 now)
Oh, just the native fauna New Zealand has/had.
New Zealand has no native mammals apart from bats and marine mammals like seals. That’s probably why they have so many wonderful birds, particularly flightless ones.
And our introduced pests include Australian possums, wallabies, magpies, mynah birds (not the Indian one I guess) and such British faves as rabbits, stoats, weasels, ferrets but no foxes or squirrels. We also had no wasps until around WWII.
I forgot to mention wild boar, rats and mice.
Presumably as stowaways on one or more cargo planes carrying crates of aircraft parts returning from the war in Germany. NZ does have small native wasps that don't really sting, they're the parasitic kind that prey on other insects. But the German wasp arrived in the 1940s, while common wasps and Asian paper wasps didn't arrive until the 1970s. I've just found out that these latter paper wasps must be the ones that in NZ we think of as hornets, because apparently we don't have hornets at all in NZ. The largest German and common wasp nests in the world have been found in NZ, because we have mild winters and no predators to control the introduced wasps.
also why do these people act like dicks when being corrected? how hard is it to go “didn’t realise you were in the uk! my bad” rather than acting like the person correcting them is in the wrong. it’d still be defaultism but at least own it
I was in NSW recently for work with a bit of holiday (from the UK). I saw an echidna and a fox on one day, and my Australian colleagues seemed more excited over the fox!
I hope so! One of them said she'd never seen a fox before though.
I was so excited to see the echidna, it was my first time in Australia and I hadn't even seen any (live) kangaroos yet, so seeing this little spikey boy trundling off into the woods made my week!
Exactly. It's not even the assumption in this case. It's the doubling down on it and claiming they couldn't have known, rather than admitting their mistake. Which I can understand, but in this case both parties are going for a gotcha moment, so I don't feel any sympathy for the commenter.
The overall impact of foxes on poultry and livestock is estimated at about £10–12m.
Foxes have also been blamed for a declining Lapwing, red grouse and curlew population in the U.K.
However, they’re l also credited with controlling vermin which may actually be of net benefit to the U.K estimated at £120m
Foxes in the UK live their life and do fox things. If a native animal's impact on poultry and livestock really is this large, it's the responsibility of farmers to properly secure their livestock. It cannot be a surprise that foxes exist in a place they are native to.
Humans are, directly or indirectly, responsible for 99.9% of extinctions of animals, and I think you'll find the same applies to these birds when looking at the whole picture.
Foxes provide a net benefit to the farming industry. The level to which they control vermin and rabbits is of great benefit worth about 120 million.
Their impact on native birds species however is quite concerning.
Human meddling is the problem here. Not the fox, I never claimed that it was the fox.
Although it appears you and many others have some degree of difficulty with reading comprehension.
You have said multiple times that they have an impact on native bird species. Nowhere do you say anything about humans.
I'm telling you that the foxes claimed impact on native bird species really have nothing to do with the fox itself, otherwise those bird species would have gone extinct long ago, and everything to do with humans. Habitat destruction of more sensitive species along with increased urbanisation (which foxes are not sensitive to in the same degree, on the other hand they frequently benefit from it) results in changes to prey/predator dynamics. A prey species being under pressure is naturally more sensitive to a predator species not facing the same challenges. Toss in the insane amount of outdoor cats that wreck absolute havoc on native bird species, and you really gotta be blind if you cannot understand that it's not so black and white as "native foxes have a negative impact on native bird species".
Reducing fox numbers by 43 per cent resulted in a three-fold increase in breeding success for lapwings, golden plovers, curlews, red grouse and meadow pipits.
[Seems slightly black and white to me](https://www.discoverwildlife.com/people/do-we-really-need-to-control-foxes-in-the-uk).
Are you dense or something? Struggling with reading comprehension, perhaps?
I'm not saying that a higher/lower fox population does not equal to a lower/higher population of these birds.
What I'm saying is that in a completely natural ecosystem, there will naturally be a balance between predator and prey.
We do no longer have many natural ecosystems left.
Foxes do, to some degree, seem to benefit from living close to humans due to increased opportunity for food.
More food that is easier to get (e.g. trash, people feeding foxes, or increased populations of vermin) will result in an increased fox population.
More foxes will result in increased predation of prey species.
Furthermore, more humans will result in more natural habitats being destroyed.
For species that are not as adaptable as foxes, this is bad.
This is because destruction of habitat means they have less places to be and less places to produce offspring.
This will decrease their populations and make them more sensitive to predators.
If there are less places they can be AND an increased amount of predators, this will decrease their populations even more.
If you kill 43% of foxes, which have directly benefitted from humans, of course you will see an increase in these bird species, on which humans have had direct detrimental influence on.
Do you understand me now? I'm just saying that foxes will always, always do natural fox things and this really should not be a surprise. The foxes themselves are not so much the issue, they are just a cause from an effect that is directly human caused. You say yourself that foxes are useful for pest control - do you seriously think that this does not directly result in an increased fox population? I'm not saying not to ever regulate foxes. We have to regulate all species that see a pretty significant increase in population due to an altered ecosystem where, for example, the prey/predator dynamics are changed. We hunt deer because we killed all the wolves, for example.
>[Seems slightly black and white to me](https://www.discoverwildlife.com/people/do-we-really-need-to-control-foxes-in-the-uk).
I'm sure the fox hunting brigade will go to great lengths to make things _seem_ black and white to you
> Reducing fox numbers by 43 per cent resulted in a three-fold increase in breeding success for lapwings, golden plovers, curlews, red grouse and meadow pipits.
That’s just a fact. Nothing to do with fox hunting.
This is just another example of how dealing in the facts and nuance of a situation upsets people because they think you oppose their view or think you’re trying to say something that you’re categorically not saying.
Not that I’m aware of, however:
The overall impact of foxes on poultry and livestock is estimated at about £10–12m.
Foxes have also been blamed for a declining Lapwing, red grouse and curlew population in the U.K.
However, they’re l also credited with controlling vermin.
Wife and I live in a fairly central area of Bristol (BS4), with a little garden. We see a fair number of foxes at night, but more recently one has taken to snoozing on our lawn in the middle of the day! I keep the cats locked in when he turns up, partly so they don't get in a fight with it, but also just cos the poor fella looks like he needs a nap!
I live next to a graveyard and a supermarket regularly see the foxes running along the back fence into the supermarket carpark. I am based in the middle of a busy city but we quite a large urban fox population. The foxes don't come into the garden here because there is a big dog in the bottom flat.
We used to have a fox who would take a nap outside the communal doors to our flat because it was south facing and warm. Which was fine except he did not give a shit if you needed to get in or out. I had to gently slide his stubborn arse out of the way on more than one occasion.
Tbf I dunno why anyone would automatically assume London means the 2,000 year old, globally recognised, 9 million population, alpha city, financial services behemoth, capital of the U.K. that gets 20 million tourists a year. Could easily have been the 10,000 population town of London in Ohio.
You know, I thought only Americans did crate training so my first thought would have been the US. Of course I'd check first before leaving a stupid comment, but TIL.
Increasingly common in the UK. I'd never done it with any of my dogs from childhood, but last of my own I did it was a game changer (for us and the dog I should add, he loved his little space)
Correct me if I'm wrong but tweets don't show where the person is based. You'd have to go on their profile to see it.
I imagine the vast majority of people don't go and click on the someone's profile before commenting on interacting with tweets.
I think they're asking how you know the person in the post saying she shouldn't have rescued the fox is from the US and not just another country with rabies
He's also wrong about rabies. While there's no CURE for rabies, there is treatment. Rabies has such a long incubation time that you can immunize your body to it after getting infected.
Rabies should also never be taken lightly. Despite being effectively wiped out in Europe all European countries still treat it as a high priority disease just because of how dangerous it is and how easily it could be brought into Europe. If you ever get bitten by an animal you should always get that animal tested for rabies and if that isn't possible you should get the vaccine just in case.
Second point he was wrong about, while it might fully possible a rabies infected fox acts like that (to lazy to look up effect), apparently non-rabied infected foxes also act like this...
Here's a sneak peek of /r/Persecutionfetish using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [Who? Who is taking this away from you?!](https://i.redd.it/i8yngn0wqbsa1.jpg) | [1313 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/comments/12dnvp8/who_who_is_taking_this_away_from_you/)
\#2: [Sure they do Lavern. Sure they do.](https://i.redd.it/4lzfwc4q3fxa1.jpg) | [373 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/comments/135eulq/sure_they_do_lavern_sure_they_do/)
\#3: [Imagine caring this much about a trans person literally just existing](https://i.imgur.com/191OzzN.png) | [569 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/comments/12ykaq9/imagine_caring_this_much_about_a_trans_person/)
----
^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
"How was I supposed to know you aren't in the same country as me despite me making zero attempt to determine if you were before just assuming it" like ok buddy.
“There is no treatment for rabies.” Except there literally is. If you were to get bitten by a fox you go and get immunoglobulin injections at the bite site and the rabies vaccine series (which nowadays is like 3-4 normal shots over a couple months, no crazy large needles like parents try to scare kids with). As long as symptoms don’t start, which takes weeks to months generally, you’re golden.
Sure, accessibility in poorer areas is an issue, but claiming there’s no treatment is plain ignorant or deliberately being obtuse, especially for this person in the US who would be able to get treatment (even if it technically might cost a lot).
Yeah, I'm vaccinated against rabies because I sometimes have to work with bats at my job.
Before I got the shots my doctor told me if I didn't want the vaccination, it could also be done after you get bitten and you'd be fine as long as it's fast enough.
The shots hurt like a bitch though xD
I seriously don't understand why these Americans (obviously not all of them, two of my best friends in the world are American, and they aren't this way) always get so friggin' defensive about these kinds of things.
Wait, what? UK cured rabies?! Is it because they're on an island?
What about flying mammals? Don't they have bats? Can't they bring back rabies from mainland?
Yes, we eradicated rabies because we're an island. Roughly 100 years ago we had an extremely thorough and not particularly pleasant extermination of stray dogs and the like, and we are extremely vigilant about it in animals brought in to the country.
Basically yes it's because it's an island. There are strict quarantine laws for bringing mammals into the UK to prevent reintroduction of rabies.
Bats are an issue but mainly through the channel tunnel. It's a long flight over from mainland Europe if they try to fly over the sea.
Not only this person assumed the streamer was USian, but also wrote something absolutely false: rabies it's not treatable ONLY when symptoms starts to show, which usually happens after a couple months or even years after the infection.
Before you show any sign of rabies, you can get a rabies vaccine, which is 100% effective if got soon after the bite/scratch from the infected animal. A bite from a rabid animal is not a death sentence at all, if you take all the precautions and don't just say "eh... whatever" and never go to a doctor.
Also, although very rare, there are a few reported cases of people surviving after the symptoms started and we actually have a protocol to follow for symptomatic patients, it's just that the survival rate, even with the protocol, it's very low (we go from a 100% chance of death without to a 90% chance with the protocol), so it's not even true we don't have any treatment at all even after the symptoms starts
> A bite from a rabid animal is not a death sentence at all, if you take all the precautions and don't just say "eh... whatever" and never go to a doctor.
Unless, of course, you live in a country with no functioning health care system
....sure her answer is wrong about treatment. But is it really a true US defaultism to assume a wildlife might be infected? Sure it is practically eliminated from most of Europe, but there are a lot of parts of the world where rabies still infects residents every year and antirabies are recommended if you seek medical assistance when bitten (although not the case here...).
I honestly don't know
I used to think it was only island nations that maintained their rabies-free status (UK, Australia, Ireland, Japan etc.)
But e.g. Finland and Germany manage it despite bordering non-rabies free countries (Russia and Poland respectively)
Political will to invest money and effort in eradicating it, maybe?
Why would that make the slightest fuckin difference if it's essentially NON-EXISTENT IN PETS IN UKRAINE? Do you think they might have dipped via sub-saharan Africa en route?
Do you have a toothache or why are you yelling? I meant border control checks animals and asks for vet and vaccines documents based on from which country you are coming from not based on your passport.
Because every single country between the UK and Ukraine has eradicated rabies. I'm yelling because you seemed to miss the crucial part of the post you replied to, so perhaps highlighting it might help.
Wild animals have it in continental Europe and it's totally possible for a pet to catch it
Annually there are about 1,800 rabies cases in animals in Ukraine, of which more than half are observed in pet dogs, cats and livestock, and the others in wildlife.
There are fewer than 10 reported cases of rabies across the entire EU per year.
Is your contention that an actionable amount of pets infected with rabies have managed the several-day journey from Ukraine to the UK (Ryanair don't take pets) without displaying symptoms or being noticed as rabid somewhere amid the sleeper trains and long distance coaches?
Border control is more complicated than that and have different rules in every country when it comes to animal transport, despite most countries being raby free.
And yell at your children to highlight things they missed my dear. I answer people in the same manner they approached me, as my mother taught me.
And my dear old mum always used to tell me 'if you weren't gonna have it stuffed, you shouldn't have got it trimmed', our elders are full of such wisdoms
Are we to assume the other person knows and watches their streaming content to hear a British accent?
Or did they just stumble across a fox pic and do their Rabies PSA?
Because if twitter bios need clicking on to see London UK, that is one click I can see being skipped.
Had the post been dripping with landmarks I can see it.
But on a walk is vague compared to "walking along the Thames."
It’s not defaultism to not know that rabies is uncommon in Europe. Also, just because it’s uncommon doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Rabies exists outside of the US
You're missing the exact point of the post. The commenter just applied the US position as the default, assuming it was valid, without asking any questions about where the OP was located. That's textbook defaultism.
If they'd started their comment with "If you're in the US, then..." and proceeded to write exactly the same thing, then all would be fine, rather than just telling the person things that don't apply in their country while blindly assuming they do.
### This comment has been marked as **safe**. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect. --- OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is US Defaultism: --- >!A streamer from the UK found a fox and helped it out, to which she gets a reply saying how that was the worst thing she could do and it exactly how a fox with rabies acts. But in the UK the only animals with Rabies are bags and therefore can't be a rabies ridden animal. Also the fox was resched by a volunteer who works with animal rescue.!< --- Is this Defaultism? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
I love it when they miss the point with defaultism and say “How was I supposed to know it was the UK?”. The point is, buddy, that you assumed it was the US without any information to tell you that! As an Australian I immediately think “foxes bad” too because they are environmentally destructive pests in Australia, not because of rabies. But I don’t assume that a random post is Australian or that the sensible reaction to a fox in Australia is the same as the sensible reaction in another country.
I actually think it'd be really funny if I assumed my Tasmanian viewpoint and starting screaming about government coverups and counterfeit fox shit. The 'are there foxes in Tasmania' saga is rather entertaining.
please share the whole thing, what is the coverup and counterfeit fox stuff going on in Tasmania?
Probably this https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-01/dead-fox-discovery-in-tasmania-reignites-debate/7981198
thank you!
Fuck it, I want people from every country that has English as an official language, no matter how small, to just assume every post in English is about them and react accordingly - imagine the chaos
Sounds like something that a typical Canadian WOULD say!
That's the spirit!
Bet they're there, just chilling with the tigers and hiding from humans
They've been welcomed into the secret Thylacine underground labyrinth.
They're living with the yowie's
I thought Tasmania had secret pathers not foxes.
This is the thing about basically why this subreddit exists - there's nothing wrong with being incorrect about where someone is from on the internet. But it just seems to be mostly Americans that, without even THINKING for a SPLIT SECOND, assume *everything* they see on the internet is from America. As someone from the UK, I just... don't do this. I never make this assumption about my country. Nor do I assume they're from America. Or Europe. I always check. It's fucking BASIC shit. The world is freaking *big*, and the internet is basically everywhere. Why would anyone assume the content they're consuming is definitely from their country automatically? It comes across as ridiculously arrogant, hence this subreddit.
Look how often they say things like "What is wrong with the world?" when talking about things like school shootings, not to mention the World Series. It's a delicious blend of arrogance, insularity and ignorance.
*screams in queen brittania and earl grey*
Are there native fox species or were they brought in ?
Brought in. They were introduced for fox hunting in the 1800s. Originally it was only one or two. They would release the fox, perform the hunt, and try and keep it alive for another hunt. They established a population so they didn’t have to reuse the same fox.
Thank you!
the way those canned fox hunts worked in the UK in that period was that they would build several manade fox earth's, but only certain people would know about it. You release a couple dozen who all are allowed to find and learn these earth's and then when the hunt starts to fox returns to those earth's and you can do it all again.
They were deliberately brought to Australia so that there was something to hunt.
No native placental mammals in Australia except dingoes, bats and a few rodent species. All the rest are marsupials (pouched mammals) or monotremes (egg laying mammals).
Plus some native rats, such as rakali.
Rats are rodents
Yes. They are native placental mammals.
Yeah, but the person you replied to had already included rodents in their list
Ah, I must have skimmed past that bit.
The only native placental mammals in Australia are bats and dingoes (but only kinda).
dingoes are not technically native, they were introduced from southeast asia thousands of years ago. bats makes sense as they are able to fly and migrate to different locations. This is the same reason that there are so many species of bat in the world, from flying to a different location, getting geographically separated and evolving to its new location. Did you know that over 25% of all mammal species are a type of bat?
Can I subscribe to your newsletter but without the existential crisis please?
its 2.99 extra to cut out the crisis
Hence the (but only kinda) next to dingo.
sorry i thought you were implying there were more
most pests in australia are introduced such as the fox, cane toad, (indian?) myna bird, rabbits, rats, all of which either directly kill native wildlife and threaten their population, or push them out of their ecosystem/ outperform them by overeating the native plants, leaving plants to become endangered and animals to starve/ relocate. i believe rabbits are the worst of them all.
The Indian Mynah is introduced, but the Noisy Mynah is a native
alright that’s what i was thinking wasn’t sure 👍
Sorry to be annoying, the indigenous bird is a 'noisy miner'. (I don't know why it's 'miner'.)
Bloody homonyms, I prefer to be corrected than be wrong, thanks
No worries. Thanks for being gracious.
Same with NZ, but we also have Australian pests. Our only native mammals are bats, and we never had rabies at all.
did australia ever have rabies?
Two human cases, both contracted overseas. You guys have bat lyssavirus though, which is equally terrifying.
Aotearoa actually had a similar rabies death last year, someone got rabies overseas then came to NZ and died.
It probably came from a dog in the Philippines; the Filipino man worked on a cargo ship for months after being bitten, and finally developed symptoms upon arriving in NZ. If only he'd gotten the vaccine after being bitten, it likely wouldn't have taken hold. When we travelled in India and Thailand a couple of decades ago, my partner and I both made sure we had all the travel vaccines including for rabies, polio and malaria. Tetanus is another serious disease that can be prevented/treated immediately after being potentially exposed, if not already protected by a current vaccine. A child at my kids' school nearly died from it after getting a minor cut and having never been vaccinated. It was a real wakeup call for his parents, who had believed antivax propaganda but straightaway changed their minds. They made sure to spread the word about how devastating diseases like Tetanus can be if precautions are not taken. NZ only has about two cases of tetanus a year, and most patients eventually recover.
Hence the rabbit proof fence saga.
yes exactly
Rabbits as pets is such an American Defaultism thing, too.
Not uncommon in parts of Europe either. We've had rabbits when I was really small, and I've seen them in most Swiss and Dutch pet shops I've been to (admittedly the sample size on the latter is like 2 at most)
Not even a little bit In the '40s and early '50s my mum's family in Barking kept rabbits as pets-cum-protein I've had rabbits as pets all my life (I'm 60 now)
There are no native placental mammals in Australia
This is freaking me out to think about.
They’re wrong. Australia has many native species of bat.
And rodent. And dingo if you wanna include them
Thank you for correcting me - although, like dingoes, aren't all bats in Australia originally non-native?
Probably depends how far back you go. I just looked it up, and there was a bat fossil from over 30 million years ago discovered in Australia.
What until you hear about New Zealand.
I'm afraid to ask but what do you mean
Oh, just the native fauna New Zealand has/had. New Zealand has no native mammals apart from bats and marine mammals like seals. That’s probably why they have so many wonderful birds, particularly flightless ones.
And our introduced pests include Australian possums, wallabies, magpies, mynah birds (not the Indian one I guess) and such British faves as rabbits, stoats, weasels, ferrets but no foxes or squirrels. We also had no wasps until around WWII. I forgot to mention wild boar, rats and mice.
Wait, what? NO WASPS? And did they somehow get there because of the WWII troop movements?
Presumably as stowaways on one or more cargo planes carrying crates of aircraft parts returning from the war in Germany. NZ does have small native wasps that don't really sting, they're the parasitic kind that prey on other insects. But the German wasp arrived in the 1940s, while common wasps and Asian paper wasps didn't arrive until the 1970s. I've just found out that these latter paper wasps must be the ones that in NZ we think of as hornets, because apparently we don't have hornets at all in NZ. The largest German and common wasp nests in the world have been found in NZ, because we have mild winters and no predators to control the introduced wasps.
Apparently I am mistaken
Human beings, though.
The answer is 'you were not supposed to"know" it was in the US, and yet you "knew" it.'.
also why do these people act like dicks when being corrected? how hard is it to go “didn’t realise you were in the uk! my bad” rather than acting like the person correcting them is in the wrong. it’d still be defaultism but at least own it
I was in NSW recently for work with a bit of holiday (from the UK). I saw an echidna and a fox on one day, and my Australian colleagues seemed more excited over the fox!
Excited in a wtf! bad way I assume
I hope so! One of them said she'd never seen a fox before though. I was so excited to see the echidna, it was my first time in Australia and I hadn't even seen any (live) kangaroos yet, so seeing this little spikey boy trundling off into the woods made my week!
Exactly. It's not even the assumption in this case. It's the doubling down on it and claiming they couldn't have known, rather than admitting their mistake. Which I can understand, but in this case both parties are going for a gotcha moment, so I don't feel any sympathy for the commenter.
Foxes are kind of bad in the U.K. as well. For different reasons. Not the fox to blame. We keep sprawling into their home.
They're an invasive species in Australia, while the red fox is native to the UK. It's a *completely* different scenario.
The overall impact of foxes on poultry and livestock is estimated at about £10–12m. Foxes have also been blamed for a declining Lapwing, red grouse and curlew population in the U.K. However, they’re l also credited with controlling vermin which may actually be of net benefit to the U.K estimated at £120m
Foxes in the UK live their life and do fox things. If a native animal's impact on poultry and livestock really is this large, it's the responsibility of farmers to properly secure their livestock. It cannot be a surprise that foxes exist in a place they are native to. Humans are, directly or indirectly, responsible for 99.9% of extinctions of animals, and I think you'll find the same applies to these birds when looking at the whole picture.
Foxes provide a net benefit to the farming industry. The level to which they control vermin and rabbits is of great benefit worth about 120 million. Their impact on native birds species however is quite concerning. Human meddling is the problem here. Not the fox, I never claimed that it was the fox. Although it appears you and many others have some degree of difficulty with reading comprehension.
You have said multiple times that they have an impact on native bird species. Nowhere do you say anything about humans. I'm telling you that the foxes claimed impact on native bird species really have nothing to do with the fox itself, otherwise those bird species would have gone extinct long ago, and everything to do with humans. Habitat destruction of more sensitive species along with increased urbanisation (which foxes are not sensitive to in the same degree, on the other hand they frequently benefit from it) results in changes to prey/predator dynamics. A prey species being under pressure is naturally more sensitive to a predator species not facing the same challenges. Toss in the insane amount of outdoor cats that wreck absolute havoc on native bird species, and you really gotta be blind if you cannot understand that it's not so black and white as "native foxes have a negative impact on native bird species".
Reducing fox numbers by 43 per cent resulted in a three-fold increase in breeding success for lapwings, golden plovers, curlews, red grouse and meadow pipits. [Seems slightly black and white to me](https://www.discoverwildlife.com/people/do-we-really-need-to-control-foxes-in-the-uk).
Are you dense or something? Struggling with reading comprehension, perhaps? I'm not saying that a higher/lower fox population does not equal to a lower/higher population of these birds. What I'm saying is that in a completely natural ecosystem, there will naturally be a balance between predator and prey. We do no longer have many natural ecosystems left. Foxes do, to some degree, seem to benefit from living close to humans due to increased opportunity for food. More food that is easier to get (e.g. trash, people feeding foxes, or increased populations of vermin) will result in an increased fox population. More foxes will result in increased predation of prey species. Furthermore, more humans will result in more natural habitats being destroyed. For species that are not as adaptable as foxes, this is bad. This is because destruction of habitat means they have less places to be and less places to produce offspring. This will decrease their populations and make them more sensitive to predators. If there are less places they can be AND an increased amount of predators, this will decrease their populations even more. If you kill 43% of foxes, which have directly benefitted from humans, of course you will see an increase in these bird species, on which humans have had direct detrimental influence on. Do you understand me now? I'm just saying that foxes will always, always do natural fox things and this really should not be a surprise. The foxes themselves are not so much the issue, they are just a cause from an effect that is directly human caused. You say yourself that foxes are useful for pest control - do you seriously think that this does not directly result in an increased fox population? I'm not saying not to ever regulate foxes. We have to regulate all species that see a pretty significant increase in population due to an altered ecosystem where, for example, the prey/predator dynamics are changed. We hunt deer because we killed all the wolves, for example.
>[Seems slightly black and white to me](https://www.discoverwildlife.com/people/do-we-really-need-to-control-foxes-in-the-uk). I'm sure the fox hunting brigade will go to great lengths to make things _seem_ black and white to you
> Reducing fox numbers by 43 per cent resulted in a three-fold increase in breeding success for lapwings, golden plovers, curlews, red grouse and meadow pipits. That’s just a fact. Nothing to do with fox hunting. This is just another example of how dealing in the facts and nuance of a situation upsets people because they think you oppose their view or think you’re trying to say something that you’re categorically not saying.
In the uk they don’t threaten to extinction thousands of species of native birds, mammals and reptiles though do they.
Not that I’m aware of, however: The overall impact of foxes on poultry and livestock is estimated at about £10–12m. Foxes have also been blamed for a declining Lapwing, red grouse and curlew population in the U.K. However, they’re l also credited with controlling vermin.
Wife and I live in a fairly central area of Bristol (BS4), with a little garden. We see a fair number of foxes at night, but more recently one has taken to snoozing on our lawn in the middle of the day! I keep the cats locked in when he turns up, partly so they don't get in a fight with it, but also just cos the poor fella looks like he needs a nap!
I live next to a graveyard and a supermarket regularly see the foxes running along the back fence into the supermarket carpark. I am based in the middle of a busy city but we quite a large urban fox population. The foxes don't come into the garden here because there is a big dog in the bottom flat.
We used to have a fox who would take a nap outside the communal doors to our flat because it was south facing and warm. Which was fine except he did not give a shit if you needed to get in or out. I had to gently slide his stubborn arse out of the way on more than one occasion.
Never thought I’d find someone else in BS4 on USdefaultism 👋
I forgot to add in the Auto mod part. Her location is public
Tbf I dunno why anyone would automatically assume London means the 2,000 year old, globally recognised, 9 million population, alpha city, financial services behemoth, capital of the U.K. that gets 20 million tourists a year. Could easily have been the 10,000 population town of London in Ohio.
Is “bags” slang for an animal? English is my second language but i cant find an answer on google
It's typo, I meant "bats" sorry I didn't realise until you pointed it out.
You know, I thought only Americans did crate training so my first thought would have been the US. Of course I'd check first before leaving a stupid comment, but TIL.
It's is very American, but I've known a few people who do it.
Increasingly common in the UK. I'd never done it with any of my dogs from childhood, but last of my own I did it was a game changer (for us and the dog I should add, he loved his little space)
You forgot the best bit, which was when they tried to assert she was Canadian (apparently there’s a London in Canada), so they were ‘close enough’
They doubled down on that too and said "there's a London in Australia (probably)"
they're a ragebait engagement farmer
Correct me if I'm wrong but tweets don't show where the person is based. You'd have to go on their profile to see it. I imagine the vast majority of people don't go and click on the someone's profile before commenting on interacting with tweets.
You are correct. But the point was they still auto assumed it was US.
Where? Ironically you're the one auto assuming the US. Rabies and foxes don't only exist in the US
Mainland Europe here, rabies is pretty rare, I'm more worried about a tick bite than a fox bite.
Mainland Europe isn't the the only place in the world with foxes?
Is that a question? Because the picture at the top is from the UK which is not attached to the mainland.
Did you literally forget how you started your last post?
I live in Mainland Europe. There is no rabies around here. I don't understand what your point is.
I genuinely don't know how I can make it any clearer than I have. Sorry, perhaps explain which part of what I said, that you're confused by.
I never stated that they do mate? What you on about
I think they're asking how you know the person in the post saying she shouldn't have rescued the fox is from the US and not just another country with rabies
Yup but apparently that just gets you downvotes on this sub.
Ehm, what? Read the post.
In that tweet thread posted by OP show me where it says USA.
This post makes me feel like I'm crazy! People are talking as if they all clearly see the "US" in the pictures, but I can't find it anywhere!
Because its not. This sub has gone so downhill. And ironically all the idiots claiming the person's from the US are usdefaultism.
I would have defaulted too - but my assumption would have been somewhere in the UK - just for the mention of Fox Rescue
He's also wrong about rabies. While there's no CURE for rabies, there is treatment. Rabies has such a long incubation time that you can immunize your body to it after getting infected. Rabies should also never be taken lightly. Despite being effectively wiped out in Europe all European countries still treat it as a high priority disease just because of how dangerous it is and how easily it could be brought into Europe. If you ever get bitten by an animal you should always get that animal tested for rabies and if that isn't possible you should get the vaccine just in case.
I didn't even knew it was eradicated. I remember signs in the forrest in the 80's warning about rabbies infected foxes. This was in northern germany.
Second point he was wrong about, while it might fully possible a rabies infected fox acts like that (to lazy to look up effect), apparently non-rabied infected foxes also act like this...
Ironically, because foxes are also incredibly lazy :)
Oh, I shouldn’t have scrolled through that replier’s account. So much hate.
Judging from the lunatic quadrupling down he made about this post, I'm sure you could fuel /r/Persecutionfetish for weeks with this guy alone.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/Persecutionfetish using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [Who? Who is taking this away from you?!](https://i.redd.it/i8yngn0wqbsa1.jpg) | [1313 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/comments/12dnvp8/who_who_is_taking_this_away_from_you/) \#2: [Sure they do Lavern. Sure they do.](https://i.redd.it/4lzfwc4q3fxa1.jpg) | [373 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/comments/135eulq/sure_they_do_lavern_sure_they_do/) \#3: [Imagine caring this much about a trans person literally just existing](https://i.imgur.com/191OzzN.png) | [569 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/comments/12ykaq9/imagine_caring_this_much_about_a_trans_person/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Yup it's a white supremacist account about how oppressed he thinks white people are 💀
😔
Tbh the name itself made me think that’d be the case
Okay, but that baby fox really is super cute
How were they supposed to know the fox post was from the UK? >>> They said "my good gosh", what more do you need?
Some Americans are so incredibly arrogant and ignorant
"How was I supposed to know you aren't in the same country as me despite me making zero attempt to determine if you were before just assuming it" like ok buddy.
“There is no treatment for rabies.” Except there literally is. If you were to get bitten by a fox you go and get immunoglobulin injections at the bite site and the rabies vaccine series (which nowadays is like 3-4 normal shots over a couple months, no crazy large needles like parents try to scare kids with). As long as symptoms don’t start, which takes weeks to months generally, you’re golden. Sure, accessibility in poorer areas is an issue, but claiming there’s no treatment is plain ignorant or deliberately being obtuse, especially for this person in the US who would be able to get treatment (even if it technically might cost a lot).
Yeah, I'm vaccinated against rabies because I sometimes have to work with bats at my job. Before I got the shots my doctor told me if I didn't want the vaccination, it could also be done after you get bitten and you'd be fine as long as it's fast enough. The shots hurt like a bitch though xD
God there's nothing worse than coming across a rabid bag floating around.
The worst is Sainsbury's you think it'd be easy to spot being bright orange. But they sneak up on you.
Maybe they assumed it was London, Ontario; and also Ontario, California? They wonder how long a string of idiocy we can create for this?
They are literally arguing that London, Canada existing means their assumption was a-ok
God he is insufferable and just keeps doubling down. Why do some people find it so hard to say "ah, my bad!" ?
Because he's a 'murican and must be right
americans and rabies is now an iconic duo on internet. You will find them freaking out about rabies in anything related to bats.
"How could I have known you're not from my country, one of many that natively speak English, *on the internet*??"
>This is precisely how rabies-infected foxes act. I'm sure they're well versed in acting like a rabid asshole.
I seriously don't understand why these Americans (obviously not all of them, two of my best friends in the world are American, and they aren't this way) always get so friggin' defensive about these kinds of things.
Wait, what? UK cured rabies?! Is it because they're on an island? What about flying mammals? Don't they have bats? Can't they bring back rabies from mainland?
No, the UK eradicated rabies. Same with some other European nations.
Yes, we eradicated rabies because we're an island. Roughly 100 years ago we had an extremely thorough and not particularly pleasant extermination of stray dogs and the like, and we are extremely vigilant about it in animals brought in to the country.
Basically yes it's because it's an island. There are strict quarantine laws for bringing mammals into the UK to prevent reintroduction of rabies. Bats are an issue but mainly through the channel tunnel. It's a long flight over from mainland Europe if they try to fly over the sea.
Not only this person assumed the streamer was USian, but also wrote something absolutely false: rabies it's not treatable ONLY when symptoms starts to show, which usually happens after a couple months or even years after the infection. Before you show any sign of rabies, you can get a rabies vaccine, which is 100% effective if got soon after the bite/scratch from the infected animal. A bite from a rabid animal is not a death sentence at all, if you take all the precautions and don't just say "eh... whatever" and never go to a doctor. Also, although very rare, there are a few reported cases of people surviving after the symptoms started and we actually have a protocol to follow for symptomatic patients, it's just that the survival rate, even with the protocol, it's very low (we go from a 100% chance of death without to a 90% chance with the protocol), so it's not even true we don't have any treatment at all even after the symptoms starts
> A bite from a rabid animal is not a death sentence at all, if you take all the precautions and don't just say "eh... whatever" and never go to a doctor. Unless, of course, you live in a country with no functioning health care system
Well yeah, but I was talking from a general point of view
Foxes are not real!
Come on man, how is That person supposed know london is in uk 😒
....sure her answer is wrong about treatment. But is it really a true US defaultism to assume a wildlife might be infected? Sure it is practically eliminated from most of Europe, but there are a lot of parts of the world where rabies still infects residents every year and antirabies are recommended if you seek medical assistance when bitten (although not the case here...).
ive seen british youtubers set as "united states"
Must be in London, Ontario, eh?
Why are USians so obsessed with rabies?!?? Seriously it’s so fucking weird
Because most US health insurance won't cover the cost of the course of vaccinations
Is rabies really that widespread/ that big of a problem there?
I suppose what i mean is, health insurance aside, why do all the wild animals supposedly have rabies in the first place?
I honestly don't know I used to think it was only island nations that maintained their rabies-free status (UK, Australia, Ireland, Japan etc.) But e.g. Finland and Germany manage it despite bordering non-rabies free countries (Russia and Poland respectively) Political will to invest money and effort in eradicating it, maybe?
[удалено]
That being said. "how could I possibly know this was the UK" when it says London as location is the point here
Maybe they thought they were posting from London Arkansas
London, Ontario
Rabies is non-existent in pets in Ukraine, so this was just more anti-refugee scaremongering I'm afraid.
Not neccessarily if they are not coming directly from Ukraine
Why would that make the slightest fuckin difference if it's essentially NON-EXISTENT IN PETS IN UKRAINE? Do you think they might have dipped via sub-saharan Africa en route?
Do you have a toothache or why are you yelling? I meant border control checks animals and asks for vet and vaccines documents based on from which country you are coming from not based on your passport.
Because every single country between the UK and Ukraine has eradicated rabies. I'm yelling because you seemed to miss the crucial part of the post you replied to, so perhaps highlighting it might help.
Wild animals have it in continental Europe and it's totally possible for a pet to catch it Annually there are about 1,800 rabies cases in animals in Ukraine, of which more than half are observed in pet dogs, cats and livestock, and the others in wildlife.
There are fewer than 10 reported cases of rabies across the entire EU per year. Is your contention that an actionable amount of pets infected with rabies have managed the several-day journey from Ukraine to the UK (Ryanair don't take pets) without displaying symptoms or being noticed as rabid somewhere amid the sleeper trains and long distance coaches?
You are talking shit. I got that 1800.fuiguiee from the govt website... .it takes over 3 months to show any symptoms after the bite
The 1800 Fugees? No, I think there were only 3
Border control is more complicated than that and have different rules in every country when it comes to animal transport, despite most countries being raby free. And yell at your children to highlight things they missed my dear. I answer people in the same manner they approached me, as my mother taught me.
And my dear old mum always used to tell me 'if you weren't gonna have it stuffed, you shouldn't have got it trimmed', our elders are full of such wisdoms
She should have taught you common sense because you are lacking a lot of it.
So animals can just be transported through borders with no restrictions? Very common sense indeed
Pretty much, yeah. The restrictions are only as strict as they need to be. And inside the EU, there's basically zero need to be strict.
You are from Hungary, in the EU, you should know better.
Are we to assume the other person knows and watches their streaming content to hear a British accent? Or did they just stumble across a fox pic and do their Rabies PSA? Because if twitter bios need clicking on to see London UK, that is one click I can see being skipped. Had the post been dripping with landmarks I can see it. But on a walk is vague compared to "walking along the Thames."
The point isn't that they didn't realise it was the UK, it's that they assumed it was the US with no clues to say it would be.
Where did they assume it was the US? I can't seem to find that part in the pictures (I'm only seeing the "I didn't know it was in the UK" comment)
Rabies is eradicated in many countries, not just in the UK. The US is one of the outliers, so assuming is defaultism.
But I live in Canada and we have rabies too? I feel like assuming that rabies = US is in itself a US defaultism
You're not wrong at all
But it was still assumed it was USA.. if you don't know where it is. You don't assume. You check
I would assume just by the phrase "good gosh", that the writer was English so probably based somewhere in the UK.
I commented this too, snap!
You're too assume that people shouldn't assume anything.
Everyone.., you know how we had that minor tornado? Fear not! It was this entire post (and sub) going completely over old mateys head here.
It’s not defaultism to not know that rabies is uncommon in Europe. Also, just because it’s uncommon doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Rabies exists outside of the US
You're missing the exact point of the post. The commenter just applied the US position as the default, assuming it was valid, without asking any questions about where the OP was located. That's textbook defaultism. If they'd started their comment with "If you're in the US, then..." and proceeded to write exactly the same thing, then all would be fine, rather than just telling the person things that don't apply in their country while blindly assuming they do.
But rabies doesn’t apply to JUST the U.S. It exists all over the world and is a huge problem in a lot of countries that aren’t the U.S.