“Doubt Not an Affectionate Host”: Cowper’s Hares and the Hospitality of Eighteenth-Century Pet Keeping
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sharing decadent meals and living space with humans, eighteenth-century pets were often compared to guests who were lavishly treated by their hosts. This article examines the intersections between eighteenth-century pet keeping and hospitality in the writings of William Cowper. In The Task and several other works, Cowper depicts himself as a benevolent caretaker who generously provides shelter, food, and protection for his apparently grateful pet hares, but this representation of pet keeping coexists uneasily with the more skeptical and impartial accounts of interspecies hospitality found elsewhere in his poems and letters. Conveying his culture’s ambivalence about pet keeping and hospitality, Cowper’s writings raise questions about the motivations behind each practice, about the benefits and dangers of close interspecies relationships, and about the nature and implication of humans’ and animals’ responsibility and responsiveness to each other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".