I didn't mean to say that animals don't enjoy anything, just that they don't enjoy anything the same way we do. I have heard and read that a well trained adult German shepherd dog is about as smart as a two year old human. Two year olds certainly enjoy things, but not the same way that adults do. The significant difference between human behavior, including thoughts and emotions, and animal behavior, is that human behavior is more complex. Some of that has to do with self awareness. When one of your kitties is playing, they must be having fun. But do they know they're having fun, or are they just doing it because it feels good at the moment? Then again, a lot of humans don't look into things any deeper than one of your cats does, so maybe you're right about this one.
I have had pets that weren't very useful, but I loved them just the same. The thing is, you have to recognize their limitations. You can't expect a pet to replace your wife or girlfriend. Well, maybe you can, but I don't want to, thank you very much. You can only teach an animal so much, and then you either accept them as they are or get rid of them. Come to think of it, people are like that too, so maybe you're right about this one.
The problem with your sci-fi story about animals developing civilizations is that lots of animals in the real world are fed and cared for like that, and they don't develop civilizations. I think you would need to do more for them than feed and protect them. You would need to do some selective breeding and spend a lot of time educating your charges. Even then, I don't think you would live long enough to see any significant progress made. You said that the guy in your story wasn't exactly human, some sort of computer generated facsimile. In that case, he could theoretically live forever, so maybe he could do it.
I didn't say that saltpeter doesn't work, just that the amount of it you would have to ingest would probably make you sick. The fact that it is used as a food preservative in trace amounts might be the origin of the myth. The college students you describe don't sound like any college students I have ever heard of. Is it possible you are putting me on? As far as the military, we gave the subject some thought when I was in basic training. The consensus was that the reason you don't get a hard on in basic training is that there are no women around, and frequent shake down inspections quickly relieved us of any girlie magazines we had managed to smuggle in. Sure enough, when we graduated and went on to our permanent assignments, where they let us go downtown on pass occasionally and didn't care about our literary pursuits, we all were back to our old selves again. Now that they let gays into the military, there might be a valid reason to feed saltpeter to the troops but, back in my day, there wasn't. I don't know if they feed it to men in prison but, from what I've heard about prison, maybe they should.
I just heard about those "freedom of religion" laws on the news today, and they didn't give a lot of details. They did say that, although only two states have passed them so far, several other states, including Michigan, are considering something similar. I have heard before that Michigan does not have a law prohibiting discrimination against gays, at least not yet. We must have something like that about abortions, though, because no doctor around here will perform one. If a woman in God's Country wants an abortion, she has to go Down Below to get it, just like they did before abortion was legalized. Maybe that's what they were shooting for with those "freedom of religion" laws, but I don't know that for a fact. At any rate, they have certainly kicked the hornet's nest. It's like that old paper mill proverb: "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original intention was merely to drain the swamp."
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