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Shell Plans to Drill in the Arctic This Summer and It's Already Failed a Coast Guard Inspection

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Shell Plans to Drill in the Arctic This Summer and It's Already Failed a Coast Guard Inspection

CUPE Failing Sexual Assault Victims After Toronto Incident, Group Says

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A barricade at the recent York strike held by CUPE Local 3903. Photo via Flickr user OFL Communications

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) is failing to prevent and address sexual violence between members, creating a culture where female members are marginalized and "a culture in which gendered violence is quietly accepted," a group of students and teaching staff at York University says.

The group, which calls itself Silence is Violence, made the allegations in a letter sent to CUPE National President Paul Moist on Wednesday.

In the letter, the group expresses its "utter dismay" over what it calls "the inadequate response to ongoing instances of violence taking place in myriad forms within our local, CUPE 3903 and CUPE national."

The letter comes just a few months after a York PhD student and teaching assistant named Mandi Gray, a member of Silence is Violence, alleges she was raped by an executive member of local 3903, the chapter that represents the school's TAs and other staff.

According to Silence is Violence, the union lacks formal procedures for dealing with allegations of sexual or gendered violence within union spaces, leaving victims marginalized and abandoned.

"CUPE National has failed to provide safety for its marginalized members by refusing to address sexual violence and harassment as a legitimate workplace issue in a systematic manner," the letter says.

"We therefore urge CUPE National to move beyond its existing parochial physical-health conception of workplace and union-space safety towards one that ensures workplaces and the union are free from sexual harassment and violence in all manifestations and forms."

The letter contains seven demands to overhaul the union's approach to sexual and gendered violence and end "the ongoing culture of silence that allows violence to continue."

They include overhauling CUPE's National Constitution to specifically address sexual violence; the creation of a "comprehensive policy and procedure" to deal with allegations "in a survivor-centric framework"; mandatory sexual violence and harassment training for all local and national CUPE officials; and the immediate suspension of staff and executive members facing allegations of sexual violence pending a full investigation.

The letter asks for a response from the union within 10 business days.

In response to detailed questions about the allegations and recommendations contained in the letter, CUPE National media relations representative Greg Taylor issued a brief statement.

"CUPE National has just received the letter today. Our union takes the concerns raised in it very seriously, and CUPE will be reviewing it carefully to ensure it's given the proper attention," Taylor said.

"CUPE will be responding to the group issuing this open letter directly. Until then, CUPE cannot make further comments to the media."

Gray says she had just joined the union's strike committee, her first involvement with union organizing, on Jan. 15, as York TAs prepared to walk off the job amidst contentious contract negotiations.

On Jan. 31, local 3903 held a party following the vote to strike. That night, she alleges she was assaulted by the local's chief steward, Mustafa Ururyar. Toronto Police confirm that Ururyar is currently facing a sexual assault charge.

At the urging of another union member, Ururyar voluntarily resigned his post, Gray says. His next court appearance is scheduled for May 11, she says.

Gray told VICE she assumed that once a charge was laid, the union would remove Ururyar from his post. However, she learned that there is no formal process at the union for suspending an executive member who is facing allegations of assault against another member.

She also says that at first, the executive of local 3903 offered no support. That changed after a swap in leadership, but "CUPE National, to my surprise, hasn't been there at all."

Gray says she sent an email to the national office providing details of the alleged assault, including a letter from her therapist saying her trauma was exacerbated by the union's lukewarm response.

She only received an email reply thanking her for her note.

"I was surprised. I was also hurt," she says. "But it became apparent to me just how blatant these issues are in my union."

Taylor would not say whether anyone from the national office will be contacting Gray separately.

The letter does say that the group's concerns are not just about an individual case, but is "an ongoing issue" at the local and national level. The group is careful to express its continued "support and solidarity" with the union and the labour movement in Canada.

But, the letter says, "the systemic silencing of rape and harassment survivors within our union sends the message that involvement within their local carries with it the risk of victimization; a victimization that will leave them largely neglected, if not entirely abandoned in times of crisis.

"The symbolic violence of silencing these members, the strategy of choice of our employer and evidently, our union, not only marginalizes woman-identified individuals, but also works to perpetuate a culture in which gendered violence is quietly accepted."

Follow Andrea Janus on Twitter.

Comics: Fashion Cat - 'Hey America, Wake the Fuck Up'

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Check out Ron Regé, Jr.'s Tumblr.

Meet the Irish Catholic Priest Who Ministers to Inmates on Indonesia's Death Row

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Photos by Ardiles Rante

Father Charlie Burrows is often the last man people on Indonesia's death row ever speak to. The 72-year-old Irish Catholic priest works in Cilacap near the notorious Prison Island that hosts the country's regular executions. He was there when Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, along with six other inmates, were shot by a firing squad last month.

Since 2007, Burrows has spent his days speaking prisoners in the lead-up to their executions, an experience that has led to his dedicating his life to abolishing the death penalty. I recently spoke to him about what it's like to be at an execution and how it has impacted on his own faith.

VICE: When did you first become involved with the prison?
Father Charlie Burrows: Twelve years ago, from the start. There were a lot of foreigners and they needed people who spoke English. Shortly after I started they executed two Nigerians. I was with one of them for weeks beforehand. I was with him, and his family, his wife, and his little kid. I was there at the execution. When they shot them it took them about seven or eight minutes to die. They were moaning in pain.

A lady there could I see I was not happy with the death penalty. She got me connected as a factual witness when the Bali Bombers made an application to the Indonesian Constitutional Court to say death by firing squad is torture. That's how I got involved in doing away with the death penalty.

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What is the process for you on the night of an execution?
You make a deal with the prosecutors, if you sign their documents they'll let you see the people beforehand and be with them right before it happens. I accompany them from their cell to the car, and then later to the execution site. I just talk and listen to them for an hour or so. The guards are all very upset, and the prisoners thank the guards.

Then the prisoners are taken to the gates of the prison where they're handed over to the police. The police take off the handcuffs and tie them with that white stuff you see on television. One of the harrowing things is they put the bloody chains on their legs.

Once they put them on the cross, I get three or four minutes with them. Then the guards tell me to move away.

You really are there right to the end.
With the latest executions [that included Chan and Sukumaran] they wouldn't let us see because I had been a factual witness. They didn't want me to see the actual execution in case it took a while for them to die.

Who else is there?
There were two Salvation Army ministers, two Catholic priests, two Protestant Ministers, and two Islamic priests. Mary Jane [Veloso] got off so she wasn't there. There was a cross for her but she wasn't on it. We sang a few hymns. We were trying to sing together. And then shots went off.

They take the bodies to a makeshift morgue and we go back to the port to be with the families.

Have you seen people's attitudes towards the death penalty change over time?
There has been an evolution. This time so many people were against the death penalty and could empathize with the families. Even though some would say, "Oh, they're drug addicts, shoot them all," most people are compassionate. People ring me all the time asking what they can do and we work together. I'm very happy with the response of so many people.

Has spending time with people in their final moments taught you much about human nature?
People are the same. There are no bad people in this world. There are just people making mistakes. We were friends with them. We tried to listen to them. People use the word "go" to heaven, but I don't believe they go anywhere. Their spirit is released from place and time. The big thing is the people left behind, getting them through their grief process.

Anybody can make a mistake—we're all sinners. I'm a strong believer that there are only sinners in this world, that's it. None of us are perfect.

You hear, "Oh but they all died happy," that's bullshit. Everybody is angry, they don't agree with being executed. That's the reality. But they try to be strong for the families. It's just wrong, it's a big mistake, it shouldn't happen.

Related: Watch a Priest for Gangbangers

How have these experiences impacted your own faith?
I have times when I can't talk, when emotions take over. I'm not worried about that. I don't usually cry but I get choked up when I see people are suffering. But that's all part of the brief as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not worried about dying, I never was. We just move to another dimension. I'm very happy to be making this world a better place. I believe we should forget about going to heaven, just start working on this world.

But this must take an emotional toll on you.
Forget about me—don't be interested in me. Be interested in them, and more so for the family. Everybody is trying to be strong in order to lessen the suffering of the person being executed. But at some stage the family can't put on a good face anymore. The whole reality comes in and emotions take over.

To understand and fight the death penalty, the more experiences I have with it the better.

Follow Denham on Twitter.

Photos of the People in the Path of the Keystone XL Pipeline

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At 6 PM we took the turn onto Highway 12 toward Gascoyne, North Dakota. We'd been driving across the Midwest for a week.

"Do you think we'll make it?"

"We'll make it."

The sun faded into the kind of gold prairie sunset you see in Marlboro ads or Reagan fan fiction. We would have found it beautiful if we weren't worried about not seeing the Keystone XL Pipeline that day. Our phone signals died. I was hopeful; Pete was determined.

We drove through the town center and over the ridge.

"Should we turn around?"

"After the next hill."

Our 12-passenger van was empty except for Pete and me and the ghosts of rowdy rock tours past.

And suddenly there it was, below the rise of the highway: miles and miles of pale-green pipes 36 inches in diameter, stacked four high and spreading out for hundreds of yards. The tranquility of it was both striking and underwhelming. For something so expensive and intensely debated, you'd think there'd be protesters, propaganda, even a small sign. But the lack of pomp was fitting. So much of the conversation and hand-wringing is dominated by those who speak loudest, eliminating any middle ground. Up close and in person, the pipeline was less frightening.

It wasn't the metal stacked there that would tell the story of the Keystone. Instead, it was the farmers and workers we met on our trip. For people like Bill Scheele, the mayor of Steele City (population 61), where the pipeline links up to other pipes that will take the Canadian tar-sand oil to the refineries and ports of America's Gulf Coast, it means work, food on the table, tax revenue, easement payments from TransCanada, and ultimately the survival of their towns.

In York County, Rick Hammond and his family of Nebraskan steppe farmers have fought the pipeline every step of the way for six years. The risk of a spill, which would contaminate the Ogallala aquifer that provides water for his family and the crops that are their livelihood, weighs on his mind. Like those on the other side of the debate, Hammond views the pipeline in terms of survival.

Farther north, in Stuart, Nebraska, the streets were empty because the local girls' basketball team was competing in the state playoffs. The players' names appeared on big placards as we rolled into town. Main Street's Central Bar didn't seem like the kind of place where one would find people who agree on anything with our current president. Playful signs hung behind the bar: welcome to america, now speak english and we don't dial 911, with two revolvers painted beneath. "You wouldn't happen to know Lloyd Hipke?" I asked the bartender as I finished my catfish lunch and Budweiser with tomato juice. Patrons spoke up immediately, denouncing the pipeline and giving me phone numbers to call.

Half an hour later we pulled into a farm belonging to Wynn Hipke, Lloyd's brother. The Hipkes are farmers who have united against TransCanada's pipeline. Wynne, in his Stetson hat and pickup truck, drove us across his land, exasperated. "It's so political, so money-driven. There's no common sense to it," he said. Down the road at his brother's place we met his sister-in-law, Vencille. She pointed to her well, which the pipeline will go through. "They said that this is gonna have insignificant impact. Well, we're the insignificant."

In the news, the pipeline was dead. Vetoing a point of pride in the Republican-held Congress was a victory for the Obama administration. But in the farms of Nebraska, reservations of South Dakota, and oil towns of Montana—in the communities that view the pipe as both their demise and their savior—there was a rare consensus from both sides. Administrations change and leaders come and go, but there's too much money, too much pride, too much politics wrapped up in the pipe in Gascoyne, the oil in Fort McMurray, and the water in the Ogallala for this to be over.

-Gabriel Luis Manga

How Five Years of Coalition Rule Have Totally Fucked the Young in the UK

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People protesting at Tower Bridge on May Day. Photo by Chris Bethell.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

After five years of austerity that has reduced 13 million people to poverty, the coalition government have presided over a social disaster that shows no signs of abating. Against this backdrop, commentators have chattered about a "lost generation" who stand to be some of the biggest losers from the austerity agenda. By "generation" they mean you and me, and "lost" is a euphemism for "completely fucked." As the election looms we would do well to look back on how we have got here to see where we should go now.

The coalition limped into power in 2010 promising to eradicate the budget deficit—apparently brought about by welfare largesse—in a single parliament, through eye-watering cuts to public services. Austerity, it was claimed, would return the economy to growth, with the "long-term plan" touted as the only viable corrective. Yet for all the talk about the numbers, the coalition were mainly being economical with the truth: it was a global financial crisis—so severe the world economy was just hours away from total collapse—that had torpedoed the UK's finances. The UK had incurred huge debts not due to Labour's budget deficit—which was small in historical terms—but the handover of £1.4 trillion ($2.1 trillion) to the banks.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist and blue chip of Keynesian stock, recently remarked that the entire fundamental basis of the austerity push has been discredited; stating that at its core "results were based on highly dubious assumptions and procedures—plus a few outright mistakes—and evaporated under closer scrutiny." Krugman isn't alone in his criticism. Even the hawkish IMF has acknowledged austerity is doing more harm than good, so it's little wonder he describes it as an economic strategy akin to "repeatedly punching yourself in the face."

Unsurprisingly, given both their analysis and solution to the problem is so woefully, perhaps willingly flawed, the coalition have categorically failed on each of their own terms. Presiding over the slowest recovery in over 100 years, austerity has suffocated the economy and stripped it of the AAA credit rating it set out to retain. Osborne's much vaunted plan to "eliminate the deficit" was abandoned after just two years as negligible growth flatlined, forcing him to borrow more money in three years than Labour did in 13, leaving public finances almost exactly the same as when the coalition came to power.

Despite this catalogue of failure, with the spin machine running at full speed the only thing more stagnant than the economy is the discourse around it. Thanks to the economy ranking as one of the all-time most boring conversation topics, complexity mixed with apathy has turned disaster into success. But beneath the bullshit, the magic numbers and pretty graphs translate into a pretty vicious lived experience. Let's see how that's working out for you.

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A protester enjoying a riot at the Conservative Party HQ at Millbank in 2010. It's all downhill from here. Photo by Henry Langston

Perhaps the easiest way of understanding government policy is to completely reverse whatever lie they're claiming is truth. Take education: The Lib Dems came to power promising free education, but one of the first acts of the coalition was to treble tuition fees, slash funding, and abolish the Educational Maintenance Allowance—a lifeline for disadvantaged students. Without it, over 60 percent said they would be unable to attend college. Naturally students weren't so keen on this idea, warning the proposals would devastate education and registering their disaffection by smashing up the offices of the Conservative Party. The coalition responded in kind, meeting the outrage of hundreds of thousands of students by repeatedly dispatching the police to smash their skulls in.

The reason? The economy, stupid. Except the only stupid thing is the policy itself. By saddling graduates with up to £48,000 [$73,000] of debt many will never afford to pay back, the new policy of £9,000 [$14,000] fees will cost more money than it's saved and has created a time bomb in university finances. As universities and schools increasingly resemble businesses focusing on worthwhile endeavors such as property speculation or the arms industry, pay for senior managers has skyrocketed whilst wages for academics and cleaners has been savagely degraded. The promise of increased choice in the newly commercialized system has proven equally elusive, with 75 percent cuts to teaching budgets leading to sweeping course closures and a shortage of places that has locked tens of thousands out of education.

University or not, sooner or later you'll need to get a job—perhaps because you're one in every four young people with debts of over £10,000 [$15,000]. Luckily, you can do whatever you like, as long as it's in the service sector and atrociously paid. Despite Cameron's celebration of the creation of 1.8 million jobs, the coalition's desire to lure in foreign investment by "competing in the global race" essentially means we're trying to vie with low wage economies such as China, with obvious results for pay and conditions.

Under the coalition, casualization of employment has accelerated markedly: over 1.5 million people, at least 70 percent of whom are women, are under-employed, or on zero-hour contracts. Struggling from one week to the next with no idea how much they can expect to earn, the precariously employed are beset by significantly lower wages and can't risk complaining for fear of not getting any more work.

Here's another way of looking at things as the government pats itself for creating jobs: Your derisory pay packet and bullying boss are the result of coalition policies.

With sclerotic growth and low investment, wages are still well below their pre-crash levels. Meanwhile, skilled jobs evaporate: For each graduate job last year there were 75 applicants, fueling the meteoric rise in unpaid internships as people struggle to escape the dead-end jobs market for something more fulfilling. The closure of careers services and loss of youth centers have further curtailed the assistance available to those who haven't gone to university, predictably hitting the most disadvantaged hardest. Increasingly trapped in jobs we hate, we're all working harder, longer, and for less.

Still, those are the lucky ones. If you're unemployed—and if you're young that's more likely to be the case, doubly so if you're not white—then the coalition's sanctions regime, workfare, will cut your meagre benefits if you refuse to work for free. The Conservatives claim this "helps people get back to work." How a choice between involuntary servitude or starvation is "helping" anyone get back to anything except feudalism is unclear. This mobilization of reserve labor through welfare payments amounts to a huge state subsidy for corporate behemoths like Tesco, further undermining wages—and, conveniently, those annoying unemployment figures.

Vicious cuts to housing support have expelled the financially defenseless from city centers, devastating support networks, employment opportunities, and communities. In the past three years over 50,000 people have been forced out of London alone, whilst the destruction of social housing only exacerbates a housing crisis that's locking young and old alike out of basic access to shelter.

With housing benefits for the under-25s cut, people seeking to move out of their family homes for the first time while struggling to keep a low paid job have found the housing crisis is particularly acute. Record numbers of young people are still living with their parents. It's a strangely infantilizing situation to come about given the government's emphasis on standing on one's own feet.

There's no respite either. Leaked proposals show the Conservatives' plan to strip under-25s of access to unemployment and housing benefits, condemning those whose families don't have much money stashed away to destitution if they get unlucky. Single mothers will be forced into any job they can find, whilst sick pay will be made even harder to attain—this is at a time when cancer patients are already being deemed "fit to work."

With cuts to support payments ranging from the disabled to the terminally ill, the merciless assault on the destitute is eviscerating the lives of millions of people. A recent LSE investigation into the effects of Welfare "reform" in the South West lays bare the horror being inflicted: pensioners are being reduced to eating dog food to survive, whilst relentless harassment and sanctions have induced several suicides—far from isolated incidents.

Related: Watch our related documentary 'Shy Bairns Get Nowt: Inside Britain's Busiest Food Bank'

Little wonder that under the coalition, homelessness has surged, nearly a million people are reliant on food banks, and that last winter alone, 15,000 people froze to death unable to afford heating. Despite such degrading treatment of the most vulnerable in society, leading Tories such as Iain Duncan-Smith celebrate the success of their policies as if the human cost was incidental.

Writing in the 1980s, Antonio Negri suggested that the neoliberal hegemony that was emerging at that time came as a response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. In a desperate attempt to revive growth and profits, Western governments began developing the austerity approach. The full range of governmental policy tools would be brought to bear to drive down wages, whilst privatisation asset-stripped the public sector for the benefit of speculators. The shrinking of the state through monumental cuts to welfare provisions would be used to fund massive tax cuts for the wealthy, while the force of the state would be used to crush opposition. The effect has been a massive upwards transfer of wealth, creating inequality on a scale not seen in decades and an elite of unsurpassed financial power that dominates the global political landscape.

Since taking power, the coalition have presided over the exact same process in Britain. The worst-off in society have seen income drops of over 15 percent, whilst the super rich have doubled in value. Britain's five wealthiest families now control more wealth than 14 million of the poorest combined. In total, the top one percent monopolize more wealth than 55 percent of the entire population.

Negri's prescient writing suggested that austerity was a permanent state rather than a temporary measure. In November 2013, at a dinner for millionaires, the pretense that we are enduring pain now to enjoy a brighter tomorrow was dropped. David Cameron stood behind a golden lectern and made an appeal for "permanent austerity." The writing is there, in gilded lettering, on the wall of a banquet hall.

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The recent reclaim Brixton protest. Photo by Chris Bethell.

For decades, the government has demonstrably orchestrated the continued pillaging of the poor to satisfy the insatiable greed of the rich. Thatcher claimed her greatest success was Tony Blair, whilst Cameron came into Parliament stating that he was the "Heir to Blair." In this context, the coalition claim that "we're all in this together" more accurately fits the political class rather than any social program.

The difference between parties this election has never looked more paltry: Cameron has pledged to extend austerity and slash welfare in plans hidden from the electorate. Ed Miliband has promised to extend austerity and slash welfare in plans etched into a rock. Both parties have promised to deal with UKIP's "Schrödinger's immigrant," who lives off unemployment benefits whilst simultaneously stealing all the jobs. Neither party has a viable proposition to address the housing crisis, social emergency, or impending climate catastrophe.

In an election conducted almost exclusively through carefully choreographed spectacles and mediated largely through screens, a cross on a ballot does little more than alienate us from our own political agency. The future on offer is no future at all: We can pay to learn to work, but the work doesn't pay. There is nothing to stop us falling. If things go on like this, what will life be like at 40? To retake control of our dreams and our lives we must end the permissive passivity which enables the present situation.

As a generation whose lives are being dictated by an age of austerity, we cannot afford to allow our politics to stop at the ballot box. Whoever wins on May 7, it will take a vibrant and concerted street movement to achieve political redress. Successive governments have sold our future: We must steal it back.

Follow Ben on Twitter.

​You Might Be Able to Take a Ferry from Florida to Cuba Next Fall

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Malecón, Havana. Photo by Flickr user Neiljs

Yesterday, the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, the agency responsible for regulating business with countries under American sanctions, approved licenses for at least four Florida-based ferry companies to begin operating direct passenger lines to Cuba. So far, Airline Brokers Co., Baja Ferries, Havana Ferry Lines, and the United Caribbean Lines have all announced that they received licenses, while CubaKat believes it will be licensed soon. One of the first major, concrete developments in the nascent normalization of US-Cuban relations, these ferry routes have the potential to radically accelerate travel and trade between the two countries.

"I'm very excited," said Havana Ferry Lines managing partner Leonard Moecklin, Sr., as quoted in the Sun Sentinel, "because this is a historical event in US-Cuba relations."

Before the 1959 revolution in Cuba, daily ferries ran frequently across the Florida Straits, a waterway just 90 miles wide at its narrowest points. But the initiation of a US embargo against Cuba in 1960 effectively killed these routes. Although the embargo never fully eliminated business or transit between the two nations, the progressively tightening sanctions created a series of hurdles that made regular ferry routes functionally impossible.

The new ferry lines follow January's easing on travel restrictions and President Obama's December announcement of his intentions to normalize US-Cuban relations. Although only Congress can fully lift the embargo on Cuba, Obama and his team have initiated a series of high-level talks with Cuban President Raúl Castro, outlining a series of mostly abstract and theoretical points for cooperation and discussion (ranging from how to open mutual embassies to disaster preparedness collaborations). But over April, this thaw has yielded increasingly concrete results.

Members of Congress proposed legislation to ease agricultural imports, allow US banks to issue credit to Cuban companies to buy American goods, and end financial restrictions on business deals between the two nations. Raúl Castro and Obama met at an international summit—the first two Cuban and American heads of state to meet in over five decades—and soon after, the US announced its intention to remove Cuba from its State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Numerous business delegations have worked out deals on future collaboration or, like Air B&B, even launched operations in Cuba. One New York trade delegation even resulted in yesterday's announcement of the first regular flights by a major air carrier, JetBlue, between the US and Cuba starting on July 3.

Related: Motherboard looks into the science of Diana Nyad's swim from Cuba to Florida.

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Although new ferry lines may seem minor compared to regular flights and potential trade deals, these routes will be a major boon to the ease and scale of transit and informal trade. Existing charter flights run at least $400 per round trip, and baggage overages for those bringing goods back to Cuba bump up the price substantially. The ferries promise to reduce those costs, increase transit regularity and scale, and build a 200-plus-pound-per-person cargo capacity into ticket prices. This could make the ferry lines functionally the largest everyday development in normalization to date—and it certainly sends a clear signal that, no matter the attempts in Congress to retighten travel restrictions and stymie legislation easing trade and travel, real change between the two nations is coming.

None of these ferry routes are open as of yet. Operators still need permission from Cuba, which they're currently seeking and optimistic about. Yet operators are already discussing deals with Florida ports all the way from Port Canaveral in central Florida to Key West at the southern tip of the peninsula. Most lines seem to believe that they will be able to charge between $250 to just over $300 for round trips, carrying up to 2,000 to 3,000 passengers per week in boats able to accommodate between 200 to 1,000 people. Ferry operators are hopeful that they'll be able to have their lines operational in a matter of months. Joseph Hinson, the vice president of Baja Ferries, estimates that if everything goes perfectly in Cuba and with the ports we could see lines operational by September or October.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Twenty-One Hours at a Truck Stop

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Castaic, California, is one of those places you drive through on your way to someplace else. It sits just north of LA's sprawl, a town of fewer than 20,000 that sprouted up along I-5 under a sky that stretches out endlessly in all directions. Most businesses here cater to truckers shuttling up and down the interstate: 24-hour restaurants and stores along Castaic Road, truck stop after truck stop, a shack of a bar called the Country Girl Saloon—places to make pit stops at before moving on.

I was not moving on. I was staying here with my friend Michelle for an entire day. This was an assignment I took on for myself precisely because it made me uncomfortable. My emotions are unpredictable enough that I seek stability and consistency in almost all other aspects of my life. Thus, the idea of life on the road has never appealed to me—I don't even like driving, and it's hard for me to imagine why anyone, no matter how lonely, would actively seek out a lifestyle that involves spending hour after hour behind the wheel. But I'm fascinated by people who are different from me, so here I am, trying to figure out the appeal of a place like this.

This is how it went:

9:00 AM

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We pulled up to the Castaic Pilot Travel Center and started walking around, acquainting ourselves with the space in which we'd be spending the next 24 hours. The truck stop consisted of a store, a Wendy's, and a lounge, which was decorated with a sign that read, "Enter as Strangers, Leave as Friends." We sat down outside for awhile, watching people file in and out. They appeared to remain strangers.

1:00 PM

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We took a walk to admire the beautiful scenery and even in the short time we spent inside Pilot, Castaic was getting busier. The truck stops were filling up and the immense vehicles were moving on and off Castaic Road like lumbering animals maneuvering around each other. We treated ourselves to a mediocre lunch of pancakes and pastrami, which didn't do wonders for our stomachs.

4:00 PM

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We went back to the lounge, where The Day After Tomorrow was playing to an audience of about four men, the only interesting one of whom was Benny. I was attracted to Benny because of his T-shirt that said, "Stay Back, I'm Allergic to Stupid." I'm a sucker for graphic tees and this one had a mantra I could stand behind. He was also shoveling ambitiously large spoonfuls of Panda Express into his mouth, which I undoubtedly respected.

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I was well-aware that Michelle and I did not look like the typical clientele of a truck stop so when Benny asked us if we were truckers, I had no idea what to say. A proud citizen of the "United States of Texas," Benny was not pleased to learn I was from New York, which he described as "raggedy as hell." It was difficult to hear his locker-room insults of my hometown over the sound of Dennis Quaid screaming, so when he invited us to get a beer, we gladly accepted.

6:00 PM

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Benny treated us to the Country Girl Saloon's finest Miller Lite and continued telling us about himself. Benny's been a trucker for nearly 30 years and also owns two liquor stores in Houston. He told us about chasing a couple kids down the street with a .38 after they stole a $500 bottle of cognac from his store and he chased them down the street with his .38. He told us, proudly, that he was his wife's first blowjob recipient—though she hid the fact that she had lost her oral virginity to her friends. After that, we decided we had learned enough about Benny and went back to Pilot to recuperate.

8:00 PM

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Last night's hangover was catching up with me and I desperately needed some chemical assistance. We browsed through the caffeine pills and narrowed it down to two options, Stay Awake and Vivarin. Stay Awake ($2.99) was advertised as an "Effective Alternative to Coffee" while Vivarin ($4.99) claimed to be "A Safe and Effective Alternative." We decided that safety, of course, was our number-one priority so I treated myself to Vivarin.

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Michelle was still recovering from her 3 PM pastrami-induced "surprisearrhea" and we decided that out of our options, Wendy's would be the most calming form of nourishment. Then we wandered back over to the Country Girl Saloon, which in addition to be one of the most charming freeway-adjacent shacks in town, also had $3 Miller Lites.

Related: Watch Every Woman: life as a truck stop stripper.

10:00 PM

I grabbed another round of Miller Lites and started chatting with a truck driver named Johnny. Johnny was cute, a Castaic 10 (which roughly translates to a Los Angeles 5 or a Boise 8.5) with a thick Alabama accent. I found his teeth extremely distracting because every other one looked like it could belong to an eight-year-old. He served in the Army for four years and now drives trucks for the military, delivering everything from ammo to armor to tanks. Johnny stopped overnight in Castaic on his way to pick up a cannon to take across the country to Virginia. I liked Johnny: He was articulate, funny, and not at all shy about his affection for the Second Amendment.

I left Johnny and Michelle to duke it out over global warming and struck up a conversation with Dennis. I watched him gargle down a shot of Fireball and he asked, "Do you know Fireball?" I did, and that was enough for Dennis to take a liking to me. He called over his friend who had just finished winning another game of pool. I noticed "Lefty" earlier because I had never seen a man with one hand kick so much ass at pool. He introduced himself, sat down on the stool next to me, and we started talking.

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Lefty exuded a fatherly energy that I was drawn to. His age was somewhere between an unfortunate 60 and a very sexy 75. It was evident that Lefty and I had a connection. He oozed a level of honesty that was just as intimidating as it was admirable. I was comforted by Lefty; I wanted to talk to him about myself and I wanted to learn more about him. We bonded over the premature death of our fathers and he told me he was a widower twice over. We were both becoming emotional from the conversation so to lighten the mood, I challenged him to a game of darts, which he obviously won.

Lefty and I celebrated my near-bullseye until someone asked him to a game of pool. I sat next to Dennis who downed another shot of Fireball.

"Do you know Fireball?"

"Yes, Dennis. I know Fireball."

12:00 AM

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Dennis ordered me a beer. After I promised him for the ninth time that I wasn't going to drive, his mood suddenly shifted. He looked at me, his eyes were glazed over, his hands were trembling as he began to say, "Zoë, I have to tell you something."

My mind started exploding with absurd hypothetical situations but despite my increasingly noisy mental chatter, I managed to mutter out, "What's up?"

Dennis took a deep breath and started to talk.

He told me he got out of prison two years ago after being incarcerated for 37 years. He had never been to California before but was placed in a transitional home in Los Angeles after he was paroled. He lives in Downtown LA with 14 other paroled "lifers." Trying my hardest not to pry, I asked what the past two years have been like. Through his tears, he looked at me and said, "Zoë, you have no idea." Just like that, Dennis got up and walked back to the bar.

Lefty came and sat with me in silence as I mulled over all of this new information. He brought over some popcorn, put his arm around me, and told me I had to get out of my head. "Worrying," he said, "isn't gonna get you nowhere." He got up to put a song on the jukebox, came back to the table smiling and assured me the song would make me laugh. It did. It was "Fat Bottomed Girls" by Queen.

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Lefty and I talked for about another hour. Of course we had our differences; Lefty was old enough to be my grandfather, had a hook for a hand, and was significantly better than me at pool. He told me he's won multiple car titles on the pool table, which solidified him as the coolest guy ever. Lefty thinks it's the similarities, not the differences, that bring people together and our similarities became more apparent the more we talked. We shared stories about growing up and gave each other relationship advice. We exchanged tips on how to handle stress, though his primarily involved riding a Harley and drinking Corona.

2:00 AM

I was exhausted and mistakenly took another Vivarin as we were leaving. I said bye to Johnny, assured Dennis I wasn't going to drive one last time, and asked Lefty if he would walk us back. Castaic had become quiet during our hours inside the Country Girl. Traffic had nearly stopped except for the occasional truck pulling into one of the surrounding stops. When we got back, Lefty and I hugged goodbye. He told me he shared the paternal connection with me that I felt when we first met. I exclaimed, "Better an old dad than a dead dad!"—a joke that didn't land as well as I had hoped.

3:00 AM

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Michelle and I decided to head back to the car to decompress. We completely reclined the front seats and bundled up under dirty sheet that was in my trunk. I laid awake in my car. It was freezing. The Vivarin had waited to kick in until the beer started wearing off, a combination I would not recommend. The bright lights of the truck stop made me feel nauseous so I hibernated under the sheet, dozing in and out of unsatisfactory sleep for the next hour or so while sweating Miller Lite out of pores I didn't even know existed.

5:00 AM

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When we woke up, it was still dark outside and I felt disgusting. We joked on the way there about me taking a shower but in that moment, a shower was just what I needed. Benny said he never showers there because they "fuck ya on the prices" but I decided to spend the $12 to stay awake during the car ride home.

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I waited for my shower to be ready, punched in a passcode on a keypad next to the door, and walked in. I was pleasantly surprised: The shower had just been cleaned and there were fresh towels and a toilet. Goodbye Miller Lite–Vivarin combo sweats! I was clean and ready to take on the day, albeit very slowly.

6:00 AM

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Michelle and I went outside to watch the sunrise. We talked for a few hours in that circular, nonsensical way people do after they've been awake for too long. It felt like I was waking up from a strange dreams, the characters and events already stretching and fading in my mind. There was no way to make sense of a place like this, so we pulled out of the truck stop, got on the highway, and joined the cars flowing out of Castaic.

Zoé Klar is on Twitter.


American Obsessions: The Mystical Universe of Magic: The Gathering

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Since the trading card game debuted in 1993, Magic: The Gathering has gone from being a niche hobby to an international phenomenon. Today some of its 10 million–plus disciples are so besotted with MTG that they've nicknamed it "cardboard crack."

In this episode of American Obsessions, we follow a professional Magic player who dropped out of college to join the pro circuit, and we talk to two brothers as they wax nostalgic about the spells, creatures, and mana of old.

Conversations You Will Never Have Again After Graduating College

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[body_image width='1280' height='648' path='images/content-images/2015/05/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/02/' filename='the-10-conversations-graduating-college-students-are-about-to-never-have-again-522-body-image-1430527030.jpg' id='52010']Animal House screencap via Universal Pictures

College is a wonderful incubator of ideas. A 15-minute coffee break in the cafeteria can turn into an hour spent chatting about gender theory with that girl who never wears shoes. A quick trip to the dorm drug dealer can turn into a long, long discussion of the idea that—just think about it, man— we are all living inside a computer. The nation's universities are places of experimentation, where kids try on various adult skins to see which one fits. One week you're trying to get into scotch, the next you're attempting serious conversations about Kant and Foucault after half-listening to lectures about them.

As graduation season nears, many of these child/adult hybrids will be moving on from this comforting cocoon and entering the world of the workforce, where most conversations are about the weather, how you get to and from work, and how much you want to quit your job. So, class of 2015, stop for a second of reflection before you embark down the same road of toil your forefathers and foremothers trod down, and look back at the conversations that you only ever have when you have the naive confidence and enthusiasm of an undergrad.

The Argument Over Who Is More of an Alcoholic
"Did I get shitfaced every day since Minal's 'Why Is This in My Closet' Party? That was so long ago. I'm like officially an alcoholic."

"I'm drunk right now. And I haven't eaten anything this week except for Everclear and coconut yogurt. I'm way worse of an alcoholic."

"Yeah, but I woke up drunk from last night, then had a beer to get rid of my hangover. I just went to my professor's office hours, and I was drunk for the whole meeting."

"I was drunk for four of my finals."

Once you know someone who has done terrible shit while drinking and gone to rehab and made the AA-mandated apology rounds—or if you become that person yourself—jokes about alcoholism get a lot less funny. At a certain point, if someone says, "I'm an alcoholic," you get quiet instead of smirk-bragging about crushing a case of Busch.

That One About the Nature of Truth
"Um, actually, I don't think you can even make that assumption about Goddard's quote-unquote artistic intentions."

"Right? Like, what is art, even, until someone interprets it?"

"This couch could be art if I just said, 'Hey, this couch is art.'"

"As long as people believe you, that counts as art."

"As long as people believe in anything, it's true. Like, what is the world if not, like, a bunch of ideas people had that everyone goes along with?"

"If we all agree something is blue, it's blue, even if no one is seeing the same color."

"Totally. TOTALLY. Like, all words are just these empty signifiers, right? We just fill them in with whatever, our own bullshit."

This sort of thing is the undergrad-just-took-an-intro-to-philosophy-course-then-did-a-bong-hit version of that thing when three-year-olds ask "why" over and over again.

Bragging or Worrying About Your GPA
"I clearly did the research. I clearly put the works cited page in perfect MLA formatting, and she still gave me a fucking A minus!"

"Right, but she wrote on the front, 'unclear thesis.'"

"She clearly does not care about consistency in grading. In fact, she's probably sexist against men."

"Uh, OK. Well, I think you're gonna be fine. I'm getting a C minus in this class..."

"Yeah, well you don't know what it's like to have parents with high expectations."

Full-grown adults aren't dicks to each other about grades, because they have other things they can lord over one another, like marriages, children, jobs, and homes.

Your Close Readings of Hollywood Movies
"So, Rocky is obviously an anti-Nietzschian parable, with the strong man being overcome by the weak, but it gets really explicit in Rocky IV, with the blonde superman being knocked down by this avatar of conventional morality. It's total slave morality, this notion that the hero is this schmuck who is just this beaten-down nice guy. I mean, come on. Apollo Creed is so obviously the cooler one and the better fighter and just oozes charisma, why aren't we rooting for him? Doesn't he deserve to win? Why are our sympathies always attached to the so-called everyman?"

"OK."

"Also, Quentin Tarantino movies are racist."

Any Serious Conversation About Slavoj Žižek
"I like how Bernie Sanders sounds like a total Socialist."

"Bro, did you even read Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology?"

"Uh, most of it."

"Then you must know the fundamental theory error in Sanders's assumptions about Marxism."

"Maybe. But could you refresh my memory?"

"Žižek would say his brand of socialism doesn't explain why a commodity can affirm its social character, only the commodity-form of the product."

"Oh, totally."

Slavoj Žižek is a charming, goofy man, and probably the world's most famous Marxist intellectual—but unless you go on to a career in highbrow journals or academia, you'll probably never have to pretend you've read him again.

Related: Watch our own Alex Miller have a heart-to-heart with Žižek.

The Master Plan for Rebuilding Society
"I think I just figured out how to fix political corruption."

"Yeah?"

"Why is there a congress at all, or a president? We could vote with our phones, multiple times per day if there were direct democracy."

"Every decision would be in the hands of the people."

"No political offices to abuse, no officials to bribe. Government by the masses, for the masses."

"You'd still need some people in charge."

"How so?"

"To like, sign treaties, carry out orders. If people phone-voted to go to war, you'd have to have generals."

"One word, dude: robots."

The only place where this kind of conversation happens outside of college is Silicon Valley, where it happens every day.

The Fantasy About Never Needing to Make Money
"You know what? It may be 3 AM, and this vape made me higher than I've ever been in my life..."

"Me too."

"But this, right here? This is truer happiness than you can buy with a fucking American Express card."

"Money is a total trap. It's like Buddhism. A cycle of desire or whatever."

"All you need to do is start your own farm. Just on some abandoned land or whatever. Grow some carrots, lettuce, or just grow weed, barter for what you need. Hook a generator up to a bike..."

"Wait, what?"

"You can power things with your foot pedals. Just like Occupy Wall Street."

"I bet we could go to Detroit and set that up right now."

"Word."

Many people fantasize about building an autonomous growhouse-commune-farm in America's Rust Belt, but only a few have enough follow-through to make those plans come to fruition. Soon you'll be buying non-IKEA furniture and things for the kitchen, then eventually a car, and other tokens of responsibility. Pretty soon, you'll have a house, and probably kids and before you know it you feel completely justified complaining about how much it costs to build a deck.

How Society Disrespects the Young
"That cop only chased us out of that park because we're young, you know."

"Oh, I know. When our generation gets older, we're gonna end some of this discrimination."

"Yeah, it's bullshit that we have to buy a keg from a creepy guy in a parking lot instead of from a store, but we can legally go to war and kill people."

"You know what else is bullshit? We can't rent cars until we're 25."

"Also renting a car is like 50 bucks a day."

"That's bullshit."

In less than a decade, you will be physically uncomfortable when you realize that the bar you're in is mostly populated by kids in their early 20s on Tinder dates.

Reminiscing About Something and Slowly Realizing You Have Done Something Terrible
"Oh man, you were so wasted you went out in flip-flops when it was below zero!"

"I know man. And then we found that tarp, and that tent in the woods..."

"Yeah. That shit was filthy! And we lit it on fire!"

"Haha! That was probably someone's home!"

"Hah. Man. It was really cold that night."

"Yeah, dude."

The One About the President Being "Actually Worse than Hitler"
"Voting for Hillary? You would probably vote for a fascist like Obama too, right?"

"Obama is literally the only man who kept an out-and-out psychopath like Romney outside of the White House!"

"Whatever. Obama's a mass murderer. I read an article that said Obama deported more people, and arrested more journalists than any other president ever."

"He patched up the economy, didn't he?"

"They said the same thing about Hitler!"

You brain is sharpest when you're young and relatively unencumbered, but soon you'll have a job that wears you down to the point of dullness by the evenings. You'll also have seen enough politicians come and go not to get too excited over individual comings and goings. For most media consumers, the president just starts to feel like any other TV personality. Pretty soon, you can't seem to muster more emotion about him or her than you can about Mario Lopez.

Oh, and you'll start to really like Mario Lopez.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Mastermind: The Radio DJ Drake Flew to Calgary to Meet

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Mastermind: The Radio DJ Drake Flew to Calgary to Meet

Is '​​​The Underground Is Massive' the Dance Music History Lesson America's Been Waiting For?

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Is '​​​The Underground Is Massive' the Dance Music History Lesson America's Been Waiting For?

Hey, Toronto: Win Tickets to the Terroir Symposium

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Hey, Toronto: Win Tickets to the Terroir Symposium

Morgue Instagram

Behind the Scenes at Miss Nude Australia

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All photos by Ben McGee

It takes a lot of work to be an exotic dancer. You have to look good, dance well, conjure some amount of sexiness, and keep it up for hours on end. And sure, you get paid, but it's understandable you might sometimes want a bit more credit than what's offered from the dudes leering at you from two feet away.

This is the reasoning behind the Miss Nude Australia contest. Since 1991 it's been held across several venues, currently at Adelaide's Crazy Horse Revue, as a way for contestants to show off their skills. Think of it as Miss Universe, but with slightly more skin and way better dancing.

Ben's Miss Nude Australia photos are on show at Sydney's Tap Gallery from May 6 to 16.



VICE Premiere: VICE Exclusive: Relax and Listen to Valet's Dreamy Space Rock

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I don't smoke much weed, so I love bands that make me feel slowed-down and stoned—it's a great way to save money and avoid having dozens of unidentified bike messengers showing up at my home address. Valet is one of those bands. They combine the spaced out, slowcore vibes of Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, and Duster, with My Bloody Valentine or Swirlies's female-fronted shoegaze.

Valet is releasing a record on Kranky Records, an excellent label who championed Deerhunter, Low, and Stars of the Lid. The album is slow, psychedelic, and sure to inspire both spiritual feelings and a deep desire to go outside and look at trees, which is what the band is doing in their press photo. Their new record, Nature, which drops May 25, is fantastic.

Preorder it here.

The NSA's Bulk Collection of Your Telephone Data Is Illegal, Appeals Court Rules

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The NSA's Bulk Collection of Your Telephone Data Is Illegal, Appeals Court Rules

The Complex, Tragic Psychology Behind Animal Hoarding

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We all know someone who loves cats a bit too much. They have two of them—Molly and Oscar—and they're looking into adopting a third ("Smudge" because of that totally adorable birthmark). Their Tinder and Twitter bios proudly proclaim that they are "a crazy cat lady!" and they have a folder of Lolcats saved to their desktop. But, as of yet, they haven't been mummified in a mound of cat feces.

They haven't, like Terry, a cashier featured on the American TV show Hoarders, stored the bodies of nearly 100 cats in their kitchen freezer. They don't, like Terry, stroke the remains of dead kittens, tearfully apologizing to their corpses about how they didn't want them to die. Why? Because in reality, they're not "crazy cat ladies" (or men) at all.

[body_image width='1250' height='935' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='the-psychology-of-animal-hoarding-body-image-1430157572.jpg' id='50249']Photos from Louis* taken at an animal hoarder's house.

Animal hoarding is a real-world psychiatric problem. There are between 900 and 2,000 cases every year in the United States, with an estimated 250,000 animal victims. While cases in America seem more rife, here in the UK, stories of animal hoarders crop up in headlines all the time, like the couple who were found last year to be keeping 15 dogs in cramped conditions in their council house near Wigan.

Despite this, animal hoarding has not yet been recognized in the DSM as an official mental disorder. "It does not appear to be a single, simple disorder," says Dr. Randall Lockwood, a member of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and the senior vice president of their Forensic Sciences and Anti-Cruelty projects. "In the past it has been seen as an addictive behavior, and as a manifestation of OCD. We're also now seeing it as an attachment disorder where people have an impaired ability to form relationships with other people and animals fill that void."

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This doesn't mean that all animal hoarders are lonely old cat ladies. In fact, Dr. Lockwood calls this a "vast oversimplification." Animal hoarders come in all ages, sexes, orientations, and races, and their pets are just as varied. Whether it's keeping 400 snakes or owning more than 70 animals in a home "knee-deep in feces," these people are out there, both causing and experiencing suffering.

Autumn, a web developer in the US, grew up with an animal-hoarding mother. At one point, her mom owned 20 horses, five sheep, eight dogs, more than 20 cats, and an array of rats, mice, gerbils, birds, chickens, ducks, snakes, and, to round it all off, frogs. "I'm sure there were a few more things. I had a hard time keeping track," she says.

But it's not just about the numbers. You could have 600 cats and not be a hoarder, so long as they are all looked after. By definition, animal hoarding requires a person to be unable to properly house or care for their animals, leading to neglect, disease, and death.

"She has always considered herself an animal lover," says Autumn of her mother. "She definitely thought she was helping the animals, even though it's now clear to me that she was making many of their lives worse. There were many, many untimely deaths of animals. I still struggle with the fact that animals were killed because of neglect. We'd find dead animals weeks after they'd gone missing, hidden under a bed or dresser that hadn't been moved in years."

[body_image width='1250' height='935' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='the-psychology-of-animal-hoarding-body-image-1430157640.jpg' id='50252']

That someone could love animals but be so immeasurably cruel to them sounds paradoxical. This is due to a failure in recognizing that suffering is actually one of the characteristics of compulsive animal hoarding, says Dr. Lockwood.

"Denial is very common and also something we see with other addictive behaviors," he tells me. "A huge part of animal hoarding is related to how people define themselves, and one of the important things we have to do when confronting hoarders is recognize how important their feeling that they are somehow rescuing or helping animals is."

WATCH: Our video on Big Cats of the Gulf


Autumn's mother is still somewhat in denial. "I don't think she'll ever realize how bad things were," she says. "I still don't know why she did it, and I'm not sure I ever will. I know her childhood wasn't the greatest, but she never talked about it at length, so I don't know any details."

It's not just Autumn who is confused about why people act like this. Animal hoarding hasn't been firmly linked to any single disorder, and explanations range from delusional disorder, attachment disorder, OCD, zoophilia, addiction, and even dementia. Often, animal hoarders suffer with issues of self-neglect as well as issues linked to child abuse.

"A very common scenario I've encountered is that many hoarders are adult children of alcoholics or other substance abusers," says Dr. Lockwood. "Many of them have their own substance-abuse problems. Hoarders may have some kind of predisposition towards addictive behaviors."

[body_image width='1250' height='935' path='images/content-images/2015/04/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/27/' filename='the-psychology-of-animal-hoarding-body-image-1430158089.jpg' id='50256']

Louis,* a software developer in the United States, experienced the connections between such issues firsthand, when his father's girlfriend turned to alcohol and animal hoarding to cope after her struggle with breast cancer. During this time, she was renting a house from Louis. When she was hospitalized for sepsis, the family discovered the damage she was causing to herself, her animals, and the property.

"In the end there were maybe 14 dogs and five or six cats trapped in that house. My dad found a litter of dead kittens in the freezer, along with one or more dead cats. We found other dead animals when piles of stuff were moved," Louis tells me.

"Feces were everywhere. There was so much that it was fermenting into methane. The stench was incredible. A crew of four people in full hazmat gear with external oxygen tanks still had to take breaks every hour when removing everything."

Louis's photos speak for themselves. He ultimately spent $30,000 to $40,000 repairing the damage to the home, and an extra $50,000 remodeling it. The floors and drywall were removed because of the smell. All the fixtures were too disgusting to keep. But even more troubling was that his father's girlfriend could not accept what she had done.

"She was in full-on denial. When confronted with the pictures she actually told my father that someone else must have gone in there and done this. Until then, my father never understood what it was like to stare delusion in the face. He thinks in the end that she actually believed her own fiction because the horror of what she had done to herself and those animals was too much for her psyche to handle. She completely disassociated from reality."

READ: The VICE Guide to Mental Health

Dr. Lockwood says cases like this might be more complex than simple denial, though. "The question I'm often asked is. 'Can't they see or smell the problem?'" At one level, some of the neurophysiology of hoarders suggests that there is difficulty processing the emotional information along with the perceptual information.

"Caring for animals is part of their identity. There are physiological mechanisms to prevent the awareness that they are causing pain and suffering. So in a very simple sense, maybe they do not actually see what's going on."

Louis's story has a clear cut progression. Illness lead to alcoholism, leading his father's girlfriend to lose her job. When she developed diabetes symptoms, including loss of sensation in her hands and feet, she stopped cleaning up after herself. After she got a DUI, she stopped letting her friends into the house and withdrew further from society. Her animals, much like alcohol, were a comfort to her—something that helped her cope.

But what if the animals were the beginning of the story? What if they weren't the outcome, but the cause, of mental illness?

Czech biologist Jaroslav Flegr is just one of the many scientists who have linked the parasite Toxoplasma gondii to mental and behavioral disorders in humans. And where is this parasite commonly found? In cat shit.

"Crazy-cat-lady syndrome" is a term that describes the link between T. gondii and psychiatric conditions. The parasite causes toxoplasmosis, which has been shown to cause altered dopamine levels, which in turn may cause schizophrenia, OCD, ADHD, and mood disorders. Scientists have even linked it to increased risk of suicide. But Dr. Lockwood isn't too convinced. "I don't really put a lot of credence in the idea," he says. "Studies have shown rodents exposed to toxoplasma start food hoarding, but this can't be applied to humans. Animal hoarding has much more to do with definitions of self.

"I've seen no literature that suggests there are higher levels of toxoplasma antibodies in hoarders versus non-hoarders—so it's quite a stretch going from animal studies to thinking that somehow it's influencing human behavior.

"It's far more likely that being a hoarder exposes you to toxoplasma. It's not cause and effect—it's effect and cause." It seems there's no need to send Mr. Tibbles to sleep with the fishes just yet, then.

So if you love your cats and are worried it might spiral out of control, well, there's probably no need to worry. Not just anyone will become a hoarder. "There have to be other underlying components," says Dr. Lockwood. "There's a genetic component to compulsive disorders in general, and hoarding does seem to run in families. There seems to be both biological and developmental components. Often, a very disorganized childhood has impeded a person's ability to form strong and stable relationships with other people."

One thing is for sure, however: Dr. Lockwood says hoarding is on the rise. "The root of a lot of hoarding behavior is anxiety—and we're in anxious times. We live in a time of economic pressures, and these things can potentially exacerbate animal hoarding issues."

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

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