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Deconstructing Slate's "Pepper" Series

Animal Person

Beloved family pet Dalmatian, Pepper, is stolen, and after several weeks of searching is discovered to have been experimented on at a hospital and died on the table when researchers tried to implant her with an experimental cardiac pacemaker. By the end of my time as researcher, I was performing behavioral experiments on humans.

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On "Pets" and "Its"

Animal Person

All animals except the dog are called "it" (I did a little experiment to see what would happen). Nobody stopped me" brings me to the parents, who were all omnivores (though there were two ex-vegetarians) and who were all thoroughly unaware of the language the children were using to refer to animals. I'm a terrible fiction writer.

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