I want to share two changes in the blog. The first is about credit card donations.

The credit card security and transactional fees are staggering and increasing monthly. I can’t afford them without endangering the blog itself. The money from the blog and the Army Of Good should be used for its intended purposes, not for credit card companies.

Credit card donors will soon receive an email from the card transaction company serving us canceling credit card donations. I hope you find alternative ways to support the blog and our work. The blog will always be free, but I need donations to help the Mansion residents, refugee children, and the Cambridge Food Pantry.

So that you know, you don’t need to wait for the emails. You can cancel credit card donations anytime and switch to PayPal, Venmo, or mail donations.

Monthly donations can easily be shifted to Paypal, which offers monthly contributions. Venmo can also be used to send individual or one-time contributions. Most donations now come from PayPal, and Venmo is becoming more popular, especially among the young. We’ll provide a link that makes donating in simple (and inexpensive) ways easy.

This is a heads-up that it’s getting close. Thanks for your help. Please consider keeping your contributions coming. They are needed.

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Secondly, many of you followed the week-long arguments on the blog about Zip and whether or not he should be allowed in the farmhouse.  It might surprise you (probably not), but I am a street fighter, and street fighters fight back; this is perhaps the only thing I have in common with Mr. Trump.

I had a lot of fun this week, and I was proud of my position and what I wrote about it. But something troubled me. I don’t need to argue at all, especially with people who are clearly troubled.

The messages I was getting were so unhinged and extreme that they gave me an easy path to ridicule and laugh at the people who sent them.

We did manage an honest discussion, but none of the nasty messengers participated.

The week allowed me to vent my spleen against elements of the animal rights movement I believe are harming, even killing, working animals and harassing good people.

And they were so loopy-  accusations of corruption, dishonesty, sadism, and abuse – that they also inspired me to take out my natural side and have some fun. I had fun the whole week, poking my harassers and being ironic.

If I’m an animal abuser, I hate to think about what the real ones are getting away with.

However, the fact that broken people took the animal rights position doesn’t make them animal rights advocates or spokespeople for the movement.

These assaults have been good for me; they made me stronger and helped me to stop publishing things for the sake of argument or as an outlet for the residual anger I have carried in my head for most of my life. I strengthened my identity by defending myself, and most of the anger melted away.

One thing that bothered me was the assaults I printed and wrote about.

They come from someplace other than official animal rights officials or the many animal rights people who are sometimes mature and conscientious but have different ideas and values than me. The movement has fostered and enabled a culture of anger and even hatred toward animal owners, and for the sake of animals, I would hope they would do better than that.

While many are obsessed with where barn cats sleep, thousands of animal species are vanishing. Their priorities seem warped.

I realized belatedly, and this week especially (you should have seen the messages I didn’t post!) that I was unconsciously ridiculing and enabling people who are not healthy or rational and exploiting them by using them as targets to make a point I believe in. I don’t want to do that anymore; while I feel proud of everything I wrote and about our decisions involving Zip, I don’t think it’s quite right to be quoting people I know who are suffering from various forms of mental illness.

So, I’m instituting some new rules about messaging.

I won’t publish any comments from people who are not respectful of me and my work or who can’t rationally and civilly argue their positions without calling anyone names, me or my readers.

These people represent nothing but illness.  I doubt they can help themselves, and I don’t wish to laugh at them or at their expense—there are plenty of sane targets to talk to, discuss, and argue with. There are at least two sides to everything, but these people do not need to be given an audience on my blog.

This is part of an evolution for me.

I’ve been writing online for a half-century and seen the spiraling of hostility there and on social media.

A psychiatrist I know and trust tells me that many people with mental issues go online these days to express themselves freely and target people they don’t know. It is, he said, a virulent form of mental illness and should be treated in that way.

People sometimes accuse me of not tolerating disagreement, but anyone who reads the blog regularly knows otherwise.

I love to argue, but I’m not comfortable with hate and cruelty.

People who disagree with me straightforwardly and respectfully have nothing to fear from me. I enjoy people like that, and I grow with challenges and questioning.

So, I will expand my new program of deleting messages from people who don’t seem healthy or rational or openly express hatred. And I will continue to permit commits that disagree with me purposefully, practically, and courteously.

If you don’t believe me, try.

I want my blog to be consistent with my spiritual direction and good for me.

I can’t imagine why people who hate what I stand for expect me to do their dirty work and publish their venom. I thank the many good people who read my blog and have thoughtful things to say. They will always be welcome here.

The last straw was a person who called me a dozen names in her first post and said my dogs smelled—a reason Zip might suffer, she said, even if he came in the house. This woke me up. She said Zip was crying piteously to be let in from the cold. (Zip was out every night looking for mice and found quite a few  under the snow.)

I spent time at the University of Kentucky program on human-animal attachment, and here it was: a sad, unfortunate person transferring her sickness onto a barn cat she had never seen or met and projecting her brokenness.

What was I doing arguing with that?

Since she was not even close to being civil or rational, I deleted this message, blocked her from posting again, and deleted my second message of response.

Any actual or sane animal rights advocate is welcome on my blog anytime, as long as they learn to utter a civil sentence without calling me or anyone else names.

I should never have posted her first message; it was all venom and hysteria, with no rational reasoning. . I thought it might spark a genuine conversation, and it did. But it bothered me.

I want this blog to be a safe and meaningful place, and I will continue working until it is. It is close.

I thank my flowers for helping to set me on a good path. I thank my good readers for supporting my work and sticking with me.

This place is my work and passion, and I’ll keep at it until I get it right.