W. H. Auden was born on February 21, 1907. His cats were many, and we now highlight just this domestic scene regarding the father of his lover, Chester Kallman. Auden and the elder Kallman parted ways after the old man, deaf by then, accidentally banged a door. The door was not the one Auden was trying to coax a homeless kitten through, but the sound made the kitten run away. Auden lost his temper, and this incident seems to have been a major one in the annals of his in-laws. The way the story is told by one participant is that "it was just an alley cat."
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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