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Saturday, November 13, 2010 - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO

Suspended Animation, Spider Egg Sac, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, July 20, 2010
Suspended Animation, Spider Egg Sac, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, July 20, 2010

Time for a break

Spending so many hours traveling and thinking about traveling gets old after a few days. St Louis and the Mississippi are behind me. This is a nice park. It's quiet here. The sun is shining. The river is running. I think I'll stay an extra night and settle some mud.

Night camp

Site 45C - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO

Alex Can Think

Animal researchers are finally beginning to catch up to the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say Fifi the poodle can think. The fights are always between a big group of experts who think animals don't have a lot of feelings or aren't very smart, and a much smaller group of researchers who think there's a lot more going on inside an animal's head than we know. The really nasty fights always seem to go one way: it's always the animal "debunkers" who are on the attack. At least, I don't remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be dumber than people thought, and lots of studies like that have been done. Claiming that an animal can't do something isn't considered blasphemous.

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