After that first session came lunch, which I mention because it was a bit of a muddle. They set up the buffet line in a small room that served as seating for the building's snack counter, with a seating capacity of easily dozen of people, when there were closer to a hundred people attending. We happened to be among the first people in line --- they were running late setting up, and we were worried we were late, and it worked out that we ran off from someone needlessly --- and had absolutely no guidance where to sit. So we took one of the few seats on the three-person tables inside there and worried we were doing it wrong.
Readers with long memories might recall that we got seated next to Peter Singer an improbable number of times at the Animal Liberation 40 Years On conference in 2015. It looked like we might repeat that, as we saw him making a plate for himself and looking around awkwardly and wondered if we should wave him over. But he got one of the other few seats there, along with a woman he'd been talking with before, and that moment passed. We ended up getting a different pair of guys, grad students one of whom was about to start his postdoc position, and who sat on the sloped floor beside us since we were out of seats.
Most people, we would learn after finishing and getting out of the way, had taken their plates and gone out into the common area of the building. And the next day lunch would not make particular use of the snack counter room, but instead set the buffet up in the common area and let people use the much more generous space. The dinner that Wednesday and the other snack breaks were similarly organized, whether from foresight or from rapidly adapting to the problems of that first lunch I'll never know.
After lunch came more sessions, the first one being the longest with four presentations in a row. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger went to --- and I accompanied her --- the English-language one, with talks that among other things introduced me to the thought experiment of would it be acceptable to breed an animal that was happy to be kept in industrial-agriculture conditions of misery? This is apparently an old chestnut among philosophers but there I was going with my meager instinctive ``wait, that can't be right'' unconsidered feeling.
Here, I'm shamed to admit, I started nodding off, which I blame on the combination of time zones (even after all my sleeping), maybe too much lunch, hours of sitting still in a darkened classroom, and that I've generally lost the sitting-at-a-lecture skills I had as a grad student. (Mind, I was pretty rotten as an undergrad.) bunnyhugger did her best, kicking me a couple times when I threatened to snore, but I was not presenting myself well.
At the coffee break I promised her I'd do better, and the next panel, the last session of the day, made that easy with some drama. The first speaker had been scheduled to talk on ``Care and Empathy of Dairy Cows as Tools of Biopower'' and then in the sort of move you never expect to see, said universities were failing their moral duty to speak against Israel's genocide against Palestinians. And so she talked about that for her half-hour, with a couple of mentions about the common threads between human disregard for animals and human disregard for humans. And, in an elegant throwaway moment, flashed through all the slides she had prepared for the dairy-cows presentation so folks could see what she had been planning to talk about before.
It's a bold move, and one I must admit so overwhelms my memory of the sessions that I couldn't swear I know what the point of ``Fairness Judgements About Animals'', the next paper, was. I think the final keynote of the day --- ``Psychological approaches to moral consideration for non-human animals'' --- had some interesting revelations about how people's attitudes toward animals change as they grow. If I remember right it included experiments done where young kids were challenged to save a boat with one human versus one dog, or one human versus ten dogs, or ten humans versus one dog, or so on. An attempted control question --- one human versus ten worms --- turned out to be more difficult than the experimenter imagined, because one of the kids found a moral dimension to that choice. Worms, after all, do good stuff for the soil. I may have attached this anecdote to the wrong lecture, but that's all right. There were several talks with fascinating psychological experiment results that show, if not what is moral, at least what people think they prefer in experiments.
Anyway fascinating stuff. After a dinner described in adequate detail above --- bunnyhugger got the chance to talk briefly with Peter Singer, though not to sit by him --- we left campus, in the early evening. And I had an idea for something we just might do.
More, now, of the Calhoun County Fair. We're into the really fun stuff here, by which I mean rabbits.
Here's some classic multi-level rabbiteering.
And one bunny doing their deadest bunny flop.
Here's the challenging Synchronized Rabbit competition.
Rabbit getting ready to lift up into the air, seen from above.
Albino rabbit with some resemblance to Roger in negotiations with bunnyhugger for a picture.
The white rabbit's turned up their chin at this while the rabbit's neighbor signals it's already five minutes to three o'clock.
Trivia: In accepting a French government prize of 12,000 francs for his development of canned (and, originally, bottled) food, Nicholas Appert agreed in 1809 not to patent his method in France. In London, Peter Durand gained a British patent for a very similar technique and it appears Appert communicated his ideas to Durand in order to get some patent fees from the work. Source: An Edible History of Humanity Tom Standage. If so the scheme failed; while Appert went to London in 1814 apparently to collect his proceeds he left empty-handed.
Currently Reading: Mission to Jupiter: A History of the Galileo Project, Michael Meltzer. NASA SP-2007-4231.
PS: What's Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Is Rex Morgan still in Rex Morgan, M.D.? March - June 2025, and yeah technically there's a guy murdered but it's all been gentle, like you expect.
