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All these animals were alive once

@vintagewildlife / vintagewildlife.tumblr.com

About this blog: Animal photos from 1999 or earlier. Might post the occasional newer photo if it still has that grainy or nostalgic look. I mostly find photos on archive.org and in various online libraries, though I will occasionally share something from my own collection. Current queue is at 6 posts a day.

About me: Poppy, 27, he/she, Danish, obsessed with animals and folklore, casual collector of old animal books and postcards, actually an ungulate pretending to be human. I also run @horsefigureoftheday :)

I don't usually take requests but if you send me $5 on kofi, I'll post 5 animals of your choice!

I love mass reblogs/likes/comments!

Please do not follow if you're a radfem, conservative, "traditionalist," or discourse blog, or you support Israel's colonization of Palestine. This blog is my hobby, not a public service. Please respect my boundaries and understand that no means no. If you're wondering why you've been blocked, it's either because you're one of the above, or because you've blocked my main blog.

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Hey, my source for Wildlife Fact-file scans has shut down, and none of the scans on ebay or scribd are of good enough quality. So if any of you got the 90s run of Wildlife Fact-File (not the 2000s run) and would be willing to scan them and put them on a file sharing site (google drive, imgur, archive.org, dropbox, anything) I'd be SO grateful. I got the bats, xenarthrans, canines, felines, bears, bovids, cervids, camelids, birds from A-H (I think? Might have more birds), and most invertebrates. I'm missing everything else.

To clarify, I'm looking for the mail-order fact sheets, not the Wildlife Fact-File Yearbook. These are what I'm after:

I downloaded the one on Anna's Archive, which does seem to have most/all fact sheets, but unfortunately the scan is too grainy. I don't find it worth the effort to label and sort hundreds of photos like this :(

Seeing a lot of posts like "umm why does everyone love bees and hate wasps, bees are bastards and they sting you why are they the only insect anyone actually cares about, why does everyone hate wasps when they're the same as bees"

Well you see, everyone ALSO used to hate bees. Like. You guys are just too young to remember when everyone who wasn't an apiarist or a gardener or an ecologist was militantly aggressive towards bees Because They Sting You. People would burn their hives and kill them all when they were found, not call a bee guy to relocate them, they'd stomp bees in the clover if they saw them. They actively hunted down and destroyed hives.

The reason "everyone loves bees" isnt an arbitrary whimsical choice because they're cuter than wasps. It's because bee lovers made a HUGE effort to encourage people to see bees as valuable pollinators and friendly little guys that just want to defend their hive. They taught people to see bees as cute and fluffy! There were awareness campaigns about the value of bees, there were advertisements, there were little documentaries and articles teaching people how to readjust their views on bees so that the hatred of them didn't cause complete ecological and agricultural collapse.

Bee lovers used to be in the exact same position that everyone who loves other insects is - you say that you like this creature and everyone in a 10km radius comes crawling over to tell you all the ways they personally would kill them.

The fact that it's so common now for people to think bees are cute fun little guys doing an important job is a fucking monumental victory and it was hard won, and it's as recent as in the last 20 years. When I was a kid in the 90s, everyone hated bees except ecologists and bug guys.

If you want this for wasps too (which i also want) you gotta put the work in to change people's perceptions.

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