Anna Seward, the 18th century poet, and acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, is also a precursor of the Victorian animal protection movement. Her sensitivity to cats can be seen in her poem, "The Dying Cat's Soliloquy." Herein, the cat, Selima, imagines awaiting for her a paradise with fat mice moving slowly, wingless birds hopping haplessly, and gardens planted with lots of catnip. Selima realizes though that her human mistress will not be there, since this is a heaven for cats. This may be the first such imaginative rendering of a cat heaven; certainly it is not the last. The real author of this picture (Anna, not Selima) was born on December 12, 1747.
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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