You can't see it but...

...there is a little muntjac deer in this photo.

I saw him as I ran down the hill and thought he'd run but he watched me and went back to eating and as I climbed the path in the field adjacent to him, he saw me, but decided I posed no threat.

He was right of course. Crows can recognise guns and muntjac maybe are more worried about dogs...

Anyway, the deer did his own thing.

As well as the madness talks, I went to a few on animal ethics. They were awful. Really. Just all this crazy stuff... I'd go into it but I am too tired. The conclusion I came to is that morality, as we conceive it, is too anthropogenic to be well adapted to detailed considerations of non-humans. Beyond 'do no harm', I wish we'd just let them be. All this talk of wild animal suffering and aggregations of happiness is all just flim flam when we are killing millions a day without even thinking about it.

The madness folk, it seems, thought, ok, this is madness, how can morality be stretched to encompass different types of needs? The animal people seem to think, how can our concepts of animals be manipulated so they fit into the craziest most absurd philosophical thought experiments.

Plus, the animal people are sanctimonious. The mad ones were mad and therefore humble. Instead of being the sublime creation adjudicating for innocent creatures, they were the wounded trying, humbly, to consider how they fit in.

So. Maybe this alters my dissertation plans.