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Topic 1) [Editorial] Stray cat problem
TNR program is an effective solution
Debate is raging online over how to deal with street cats following the recent death of a “cat mom” in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province.
A cat mom refers to a person who provides food to stray cats. The police at first suspected that the Yongin woman was killed by one of her neighbors who hated people taking care of stray cats, given that she was hit by a brick while setting up a shelter for feral cats in a garden at the apartment building.
But the suspect identified by the police on Friday was a 10-year-old boy who confessed he dropped the brick from the rooftop of the apartment building while playing with his friends.
While the cat mom was found to have been killed for reasons having nothing to do with stray cats, her death nevertheless highlighted the escalating tension between cat moms and residents.
These days we hear more frequently about people going to court due to conflicts over street cats.
Cat moms say there is nothing wrong with looking after alley cats. They even argue that feeding them contributes to keeping the neighborhood clean, as no trash bags would be dug into by hungry cats.
But they turn a blind eye to the problems that street cats can cause. Among other things, they pose health risks for residents as they can carry diseases.
Although stray cats present risks, getting rid of them in a merciless method is totally inappropriate in ethical terms.
But it is also problematic to let them proliferate without taking action. Seoul alone is believed to have more than 250,000 street cats.
The most effective method to stabilize stray cat populations is known to be the Trap-Neuter-Return program, which involves humanely trapping stray cats and having them spayed or neutered before returning them to their outdoor home.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government launched a TNR program in 2008, leaving its implementation to the 25 ward offices.
The Gangdong District ward office has been operating the TNR program successfully. The office set up community cat feeding stations as part of the program and managed to stabilize the feline population in the district.
The office says the feeding stations are also effective in reducing conflicts between residents over stray cats as they themselves play the role of cat moms.
The problem with feeding stations is that it takes money to operate them. Neutering also costs more than 100,000 won ($88) per cat. This is one reason other ward offices have difficulty maintaining the TNR program. But if conflicts over stray cats worsen, it would be worth the expense.
reference: koreaherald
humanely 자비롭게, 인도적으로
spay (임신을 막기 위해 동물 암컷의) 난소를 제거하다
nueter 중성의
feline 고양잇과의
stray cat
Feral cat describes a domestic cat which has been born in the wild, or the descendants of such an animal, which has had little or no contact with humans, and thus is not socialized. It is distinguished from a stray cat, which has been kept as a pet and lost or abandoned. The offspring of a stray cat can be considered feral if born in the wild.
Trap-neuter-return (TNR) involves trapping feral cats, spaying or neutering them, and then returning them to the place where there were originally trapped, where ongoing care is provided by caregivers. When neutered, the cats receive vaccinations against rabies, and attention to other medical needs, such as dental care and flea treatments. TNR programs are prevalent in several countries, including England, Italy, Canada and the United States, supported by many local and state governments. Various long-term studies have shown that TNR is effective in stopping reproduction and reducing the population over time. TNR results in fewer complaints, as nuisance behaviors diminish following neutering, and the quality of life of the cats is improved. The practice is reported to save money and garner more public support and better morale than efforts that involve killing cats.
For thousands of years, cats have been known for their ability to hunt mice and rats and keep their populations under control. This ability is understood as the reason cats became domesticated. The relationship was more of convenience (or mutualistic) than dependence: "Cats killed mice and rats, and humans provided lots of mice and rats to kill since mice and rats lived in human settlements." A 2014 study examining 5,300 years of cat remains in an agricultural village of Quanhucun, China, provides early evidence of this dynamic, where cats protected grain stores by eating rodents
referebce: wikipedia
rodent:설치류(쥐・토끼처럼 앞니가 날카로운 동물)
Q.
1. What penalty should we give to the kid who dropped the bricks to cat mom?
2. Do you like animals? Do you have it now?
3. Have you give any food to stray cat? What do you think about those who take care stray cat?
4. Do you know why poeple started to raise cat as a pet?
5. Do you know what is the Trap-neuter-return (TNR) program? What do think about this?
Topic 2) Why some of us don't have one true calling
Raise your hand if you've ever been asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Now if you had to guess, how old would you say you were when you were first asked this question? You can just hold up fingers. Three. Five. Three. Five. Five. OK. Now, raise your hand if the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" has ever caused you any anxiety.
Any anxiety at all.
I'm someone who's never been able to answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
See, the problem wasn't that I didn't have any interests -- it's that I had too many. In high school, I liked English and math and art and I built websites and I played guitar in a punk band called Frustrated Telephone Operator. Maybe you've heard of us.
This continued after high school, and at a certain point, I began to notice this pattern in myself where I would become interested in an area and I would dive in, become all-consumed, and I'd get to be pretty good at whatever it was, and then I would hit this point where I'd start to get bored. And usually I would try and persist anyway, because I had already devoted so much time and energy and sometimes money into this field. But eventually this sense of boredom, this feeling of, like, yeah, I got this, this isn't challenging anymore -- it would get to be too much. And I would have to let it go.
But then I would become interested in something else, something totally unrelated, and I would dive into that, and become all-consumed, and I'd be like, "Yes! I found my thing," and then I would hit this point again where I'd start to get bored. And eventually, I would let it go. But then I would discover something new and totally different, and I would dive into that.
This pattern caused me a lot of anxiety, for two reasons. The first was that I wasn't sure how I was going to turn any of this into a career. I thought that I would eventually have to pick one thing, deny all of my other passions, and just resign myself to being bored. The other reason it caused me so much anxiety was a little bit more personal. I worried that there was something wrong with this, and something wrong with me for being unable to stick with anything. I worried that I was afraid of commitment, or that I was scattered, or that I was self-sabotaging, afraid of my own success.
If you can relate to my story and to these feelings, I'd like you to ask yourself a question that I wish I had asked myself back then. Ask yourself where you learned to assign the meaning of wrong or abnormal to doing many things. I'll tell you where you learned it: you learned it from the culture.
We are first asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" when we're about five years old. And the truth is that no one really cares what you say when you're that age.
It's considered an innocuous question, posed to little kids to elicit cute replies, like, "I want to be an astronaut," or "I want to be a ballerina," or "I want to be a pirate." Insert Halloween costume here.
But this question gets asked of us again and again as we get older in various forms -- for instance, high school students might get asked what major they're going to pick in college. And at some point, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" goes from being the cute exercise it once was to the thing that keeps us up at night. Why?
See, while this question inspires kids to dream about what they could be, it does not inspire them to dream about all that they could be. In fact, it does just the opposite, because when someone asks you what you want to be, you can't reply with 20 different things, though well-meaning adults will likely chuckle and be like, "Oh, how cute, but you can't be a violin maker and a psychologist. You have to choose."
This is Dr. Bob Childs -- and he's a luthier and psychotherapist. And this is Amy Ng, a magazine editor turned illustrator, entrepreneur, teacher and creative director. But most kids don't hear about people like this. All they hear is that they're going to have to choose. But it's more than that. The notion of the narrowly focused life is highly romanticized in our culture. It's this idea of destiny or the one true calling, the idea that we each have one great thing we are meant to do during our time on this earth, and you need to figure out what that thing is and devote your life to it.
But what if you're someone who isn't wired this way? What if there are a lot of different subjects that you're curious about, and many different things you want to do? Well, there is no room for someone like you in this framework. And so you might feel alone. You might feel like you don't have a purpose. And you might feel like there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. What you are is a multipotentialite.
A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. It's a mouthful to say. It might help if you break it up into three parts: multi, potential, and ite. You can also use one of the other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, the Renaissance person. Actually, during the Renaissance period, it was considered the ideal to be well-versed in multiple disciplines. Barbara Sher refers to us as "scanners." Use whichever term you like, or invent your own. I have to say I find it sort of fitting that as a community, we cannot agree on a single identity.
It's easy to see your multipotentiality as a limitation or an affliction that you need to overcome. But what I've learned through speaking with people and writing about these ideas on my website, is that there are some tremendous strengths to being this way. Here are three multipotentialite super powers.
One: idea synthesis. That is, combining two or more fields and creating something new at the intersection. Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx drew from their shared interests in cartography, data visualization, travel, mathematics and design, when they founded Meshu. Meshu is a company that creates custom geographically-inspired jewelry. Sha and Rachel came up with this unique idea not despite, but because of their eclectic mix of skills and experiences. Innovation happens at the intersections. That's where the new ideas come from. And multipotentialites, with all of their backgrounds, are able to access a lot of these points of intersection.
The second multipotentialite superpower is rapid learning. When multipotentialites become interested in something, we go hard. We observe everything we can get our hands on. We're also used to being beginners, because we've been beginners so many times in the past, and this means that we're less afraid of trying new things and stepping out of our comfort zones. What's more, many skills are transferable across disciplines, and we bring everything we've learned to every new area we pursue, so we're rarely starting from scratch.
Nora Dunn is a full-time traveler and freelance writer. As a child concert pianist, she honed an incredible ability to develop muscle memory. Now, she's the fastest typist she knows.
Before becoming a writer, Nora was a financial planner. She had to learn the finer mechanics of sales when she was starting her practice, and this skill now helps her write compelling pitches to editors. It is rarely a waste of time to pursue something you're drawn to, even if you end up quitting. You might apply that knowledge in a different field entirely, in a way that you couldn't have anticipated.
The third multipotentialite superpower is adaptability; that is, the ability to morph into whatever you need to be in a given situation. Abe Cajudo is sometimes a video director, sometimes a web designer, sometimes a Kickstarter consultant, sometimes a teacher, and sometimes, apparently, James Bond.
He's valuable because he does good work. He's even more valuable because he can take on various roles, depending on his clients' needs. Fast Company magazine identified adaptability as the single most important skill to develop in order to thrive in the 21st century. The economic world is changing so quickly and unpredictably that it is the individuals and organizations that can pivot in order to meet the needs of the market that are really going to thrive.
Idea synthesis, rapid learning and adaptability: three skills that multipotentialites are very adept at, and three skills that they might lose if pressured to narrow their focus. As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them.
Now, let's say that you are, in your heart, a specialist. You came out of the womb knowing you wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon. Don't worry -- there's nothing wrong with you, either.
In fact, some of the best teams are comprised of a specialist and multipotentialite paired together. The specialist can dive in deep and implement ideas, while the multipotentialite brings a breadth of knowledge to the project. It's a beautiful partnership. But we should all be designing lives and careers that are aligned with how we're wired. And sadly, multipotentialites are largely being encouraged simply to be more like their specialist peers.
So with that said, if there is one thing you take away from this talk, I hope that it is this: embrace your inner wiring, whatever that may be. If you're a specialist at heart, then by all means, specialize. That is where you'll do your best work. But to the multipotentialites in the room, including those of you who may have just realized in the last 12 minutes that you are one --
to you I say: embrace your many passions. Follow your curiosity down those rabbit holes. Explore your intersections. Embracing our inner wiring leads to a happier, more authentic life. And perhaps more importantly -- multipotentialites, the world needs us.
Thank you.
Questions:
1. Do you think you are a multipotentialite, someone with many interests and creative pursuits, or are you a type of person who commits yourself to one thing?
2. Do you think you have a special talent? What is it?
3. What is your top priority or interest now?
토픽 제공: 수잔나, 시에나 감사합니다.:)
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