I’ll start this post out like this: no, I don’t really cry in the driveway. Okay, sometimes I do, but I just happen to be there. Secondly, this isn’t focused on my emotional sanity. And thirdly, we do have Viasat at our house. But it drains the bandwidth like crazy when you have a lot of website editing and photo uploading to do! As some know, the bandwidth isn’t cheap, either. So when I have a lot of work to do on any of my sites, I pack up the 8 year old laptop and trek to the point of LTE on my driveway. From there, I connect my computer to my phone’s mobile hotspot that broadcasts the LTE to my computer like an outdated McDonald’s. I still have a monthly hotspot limit, but the network is even faster than the home network. Plus the limit is larger than the internet’s is, too. I always listen to my trusty YouTube music playlist while working on the site; often EDM or some sort of thumping rock. When you have a good set of headphones and a really nice song list to listen to, you’ll find the web editing goes a lot smoother than without it. I usually take farm dog, Logan with me when I go at night (it’s easier to see the computer screen), but the last time I did, he decided to take down an opossum, so he’s been in trouble since. There was a time that I walked the 1.2 miles 5 days in a row, the latter two days I walked the trip twice. I’ll admit the actual blog posts I write on Microsoft Word at home off the hotspot so I can spend more time on the site itself when I’m up there. My computer generally gives me 1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours of battery life, and if I go up later in the evening, I can catch my dad coming home from work and ride along with him instead of walking!
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Being an animal breeder is hard; we break our backs healing animals for them to die anyway, we try our best to find the best homes for them and the homes end up being less than stellar as we had hoped or the animal gets aggressive and it freaks it up for you (I.E, Chevelle I’m talking about you.); people give out false information about breeds and species and we find ourselves cleaning up their mess, ECT. If caring for your animals wasn’t enough, now FaceBook is making it next to impossible for us to find caring buyers and move on our stock. Now we practically have to babysit our own posts and groups to keep our information from being deleted by our own ex-ally. With the recent FaceBook regulations on animal sales, apparently they feel the need to manually go in and delete countless pages and groups of animal breeders because we’re all “puppy” millers and “unethical” because people declare to “adopt, don’t shop”. Adoption is the only way; breeders just enlarge the problem and sell animals when there are animals dying in shelters every day. Sure, animals are dying in shelters. Sure, some believe in only adoption. But they don’t need to run around and force their views on ethical breeders and everyone else to feel self righteous or whatever. With that being said, Facebook has adopted more than sad puppies and old cats (if they ever even had in their lives); they have recently gone overboard with some new policies. These policies include banning sales of animals, including livestock. I have even seen non-sales related post be removed, like cute memes and funny stories. When the system sees animal sales posts (or not sales posts at all) with certain phrases, it flags them—and you. Once flagged, the system patrols your pages and personal profile meticulously for any more posts remotely sales related; this is why it feels like every post you upload gets nixed. They are targeting all farms and rabbitries. Possibly thousands of pages and sales groups have been targeted and/or removed, and some users have even been banned from FaceBook. Some brave breeders have decided to stay and fight, BSAR included, but so far, our efforts seem to be futile. Sensing FaceBook may just be a lost cause to save, many are just up and moving their shops to alternative social media sites such as MeWe, Instagram, Google+, and more. Some are working sales 100% off their websites, using FaceBook as a mere attention getter and to share their sales posts directly from their sites. Many more are creating websites through Weebly and Wix to do just that. I’ve had this website for BSAR since the beginning, but anticipating the FaceBook ban-hammer to sweep our way, I have recently been very active revamping it and making it much easier to navigate, as it may eventually replace our page completely. I absolutely love my FaceBook rabbitry page; I really do! It’s so easy to figure out and it’s so easy to find buyers that way. Or at least it used to. Why they seriously believe (or maybe they’re just sick of PETA complaining and ranting and just doing this to us so they’ll finally shut the heck up) that this will stop animal sales, who knows? We can always post flyers and hand out business cards locally; I’ve ran into countless breeders who run their business off flyers alone and have never used any sort of virtual sales resources, after all. We’re in an age where sometimes, it takes a lot of intelligence to run things. We all just have to be smarter than Zuckerberg, simply enough. Here are some tips I have learned on surviving the purge from personal experience and watching others:
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