Daniel bit into the plastic bottleneck, mouth quirking with distaste as thick pills slid down his throat. It was pushing the limits of necessity, but he had promised Joel and he didn't want to become a source of worry for his younger brother. If the nutritionist figured 500 Mgs of Calcium and 500 Mgs of Magnesium was what he needed to stop being a grumpy old man, it didn't hurt to try. The worst that can happen would be the same muscle spasms that made life interesting a few years back.
Screwing the bottle cap back on, he pulled the keyboard closer to him, going through tabs on his browsers without need for the mouse. Hotkeys made scrolling through useless information a lot quicker - not that he had something specific to do with the rest of his time.
On the politico sites, he found the same old news he'd blogged about earlier. The outrage was still there, untainted by a few hours' passage, but other issues seemed more pressing. He checked the latest petition to free Tara Fields, a young woman in Colorado who had been accused of smothering her newborn baby, lips settling into a grim line when he saw the number of signatures and donations hadn't augmented all that much.
Disgruntled, he turned to another site, this time about the treatment of animals in American zoos. What with births and offspring being the number one attraction, more than one zoo had become a circus.
Daniel read through the posts, stumbling over the one about the female giraffe just as he was about to close the tab. Logging in, he decided to add to the conversation.
It's easy to assume that because there are no proper facilities in sub-Saharan Africa we are doing these animals a favor by protecting them from extinction. It's also very convenient. The reality is that the number of species in danger of extinction has diminished considerably in the past decades and real wildlife is returning to the region independently of man's (now much limited) presence. Survival of these animals is not incumbent upon our goodwill anymore and nor should our own be experienced vicariously through them. This isn't Disney.
He pressed 'post' and watched the reply be added to the queue. It seemed like a simple enough point to make.