Children in the 17th century played different games than we do now. They played tipcat, for instance, which is not at all related to cowtipping. Nor did it involve cats--a game of tipcat involved placing a six inch wooden oval on the ground and then hitting it with a bat--done right the wood piece bounced up, and the child hit the wooden piece with a bat, called by them, a cat. This game, played on a Sunday in 1644, made the young John Bunyan feel guilty, since game playing was prohibited by the Puritans, on Sundays. Bunyan, author of spiritual classics, died on August 31, 1688. His books reveal his view that a game of cat was the beginning of his spiritual growth.
Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she accepted the post of Principal of N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely argument in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world. A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper. We have this picture of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne
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