Posting guidelines for Serious Animals and Happy Animals sections - please read first

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This guidance post covers both the Serious Animals and Happy Animals sections. Please read in full before posting in either section.


Serious Animals

This section is for general animal discussion, including serious subjects like rescues, abuse, welfare work of charities, conservation projects, your pets etc. It's fine to include pictures and videos in your posts.

A few rules:

• No discussion of the so-called "merits" of hunting, or pro hunting views, including fishing, as this is specifically against the Forum Rules. This is the one subject that's banned on NerdZone, so do this on a different forum if you must discuss it; we love and respect all animals here and hence abhore this dreadful abuse. However, you can make posts about hunting in the context of the damage and harm that it causes etc, but see the next bullet point
• For anything that's distressing / shocking / graphic / extreme, message me first to get my approval, but don't hit me hard with a shocking picture or similar, ok? Just describe what you want to post and perhaps link to it. If it's posted, the distressing bits will have to be behind the spoiler button with a warning so that people aren't traumatised by stumbling upon it
• No videos or pictures of animals hunting, even though it's unfortunately the natural order of things in the wild: nature is a cruel mistress as we know all too well. These kinds of videos are usually created as a form of sensationalist entertainment to make money and I've seen them advertised on TV, but there's nothing "entertaining" in seeing some animal being killed by another. It's horrible and I wish it didn't happen
• Don't post stories where animals came to a sticky end or died in unpleasant circumstances due to abuse / cruelty or other reason, eg accident or sickness. This is very likely to get deleted. If not sure, run it by me first in a pm. However, it's ok to honour a pet who's crossed the rainbow bridge whom you no doubt miss very much
• No requests for medical help for your pets suffering ailments. We're not qualified to give out such advice, it wouldn't be timely anyway due to the nature of a non-realtime forum like this and one should always take their pet to a vet for expert help with such things. However, you can discuss things like health tips, diet, maintenance like grooming long haired animals, post links to handy websites etc
• If you want to post cute, feelgood, happy videos or stories about cats, hamsters being adorably cute running in their little exercise wheels etc, then please do so in Happy Animals as it exists specifically for this purpose

Finally, note that some animal "rescue" videos are anything but: the animals have been put into those situations by scammers who then "save" them to fleece donations from unsuspecting marks. They invariably show an animal initially in real, genuine great distress and danger, perhaps close to death, which gets "saved" by the scammer. It then looks happy and healthy afterwards to maximise the pull on heartstrings and the scammers often have YouTube channels full of these junk videos. If you're not sure whether a video is genuine or not, please run it past me in a pm first.



Happy Animals

This section is for us animal lovers to share the lighter side of animals: funny, cute, feelgood stories and videos about animals to make us smile, laugh and feel happy. Nothing showing distress, sadness or cruelty, even if the animal is saved and looks happy afterwards. Put that kind of stuff in Serious Animals, above.

If you're not sure of anything, then please run it by me in a pm first.

Happy Animals

Only feelgood animal stories, rescues, memes etc. Please see pinned post for guidance.

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