We just found out that there was a fire today in the duplex that my daughter, my grand daughter, and my grand daughter's boyfriend were renting in Petoskey. No one was hurt, but the house is unlivable and everybody is settled into temporary quarters. They were going to have to vacate next month anyway because their lease will be up and the place is going condo. They are in the process of buying a house in the nearby town of Ironton, but that won't be finalized for awhile yet.
Speaking of houses, our place in Beaglesonia is the third house we have owned. Before that, we were living in a rented trailer. We were married in February, 1969, and moved into out first house in January, 1970. Jenny was born in July of the same year.
I don't think I ever decided that I disapproved of homosexuality. As near as I can remember, I have always been that way, and I don't think the Bible had anything to do with it. To me it was just common sense. Why should I have to defend that position? It seems to me that the burden of proof should be on you. Like the old saying goes, "When there is no reason to change, there is reason not to change."
The lions are not to blame for anything that happens to them because they are just animals. They operate on their instincts, and so do we, but we have the ability to over ride our instincts and they don't. I understand that lions are endangered in some parts of Africa, but I don't think they are endangered all over. I'll have to look that up this weekend. There are places where it's just not practical for lions and humans to live side by side, so the humans have provided sanctuaries where the lions and humans can be safe from each other. That the boundaries of these sanctuaries are violated by both species is unfortunate, and they've got people working on that. If people weren't working on it, it wouldn't be worked on, because the lions don't know how.
Part of almost all game management plans is the culling of surplus animals, the exception being truly endangered species like the whooping crane or the California condor. The habitat will only support so many individuals, and then their living conditions start to degrade. That's true of humans too, but humans have displayed a remarkable ability to adjust their lifestyles so as to increase the carrying capacity of their habitat. There may be a practical limit on this, but we haven't reached it yet. Overcrowding has historically led to wars, famine and disease, and it still does in some parts of the world. There is no need for space aliens to cull our species, we are perfectly capable of doing that to ourselves.
8/9/15 - If left to their own devices, the lions will cull themselves too, so I suppose there is no need to hunt them except where they are causing damage to livestock. I looked it up on Wiki, and lions are considered endangered by U.S. and international agencies, but I don't know how the Africans feel about that. There are an estimated 20,000 lions spread out over a dozen or so African countries, and I doubt that they all collaborate on lion management plans. Zimbabwe allows limited sport hunting by special permit. The guide who set Cecil up claims that he obtained such a permit, but the Zimbabwe government denies this. They have suspended issuing lion permits in the wake of the scandal, but I don't know for how long. The American hunter says that he paid the guide $50,000 for the hunt, and that was supposed to include any required permits. Zimbabwe officials say that the permit would have cost $45,000, which sounds like a lot of money, but they say that Cecil was worth more to them alive than dead because tourists were paying more than that collectively in any given year just to observe him. There is also an American university doing a long term study of the lions in that park, and I'm sure that's doing something for the local economy as well. Cecil was supposed to have a GPS tracking collar on him, but nobody knows what happened to it. It appears that the hunting party took Cecil's head but left the body for the scavengers. I'm pretty sure that they eat lions in Africa, and that somebody would have salvaged the meat if they had known about it. The only good news is that Cecil's brother Jericho seems to have adopted his cubs and is protecting them and their mothers from the other males in the area, at least for now.
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