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Eddie Clutton makes excellent points in condemning "fur babyism", which reduces a dog or cat to a toy, accessory or infant. They aren't any of these things – they are individuals of a species different from our own, in ways that we ignore to their detriment, e.g. crating them for our convenience, flattening their faces …

Am I alone in finding highly distressing the report into how to achieve successful pup delivery in oxytocin-deprived mice? Many of these mice and their pups are reported to have died without the assistance of an experienced mouse midwife. Pain and distress must have accompanied these deaths ( 29 November, p 13 ). While experiments …

Working towards more than one goal usually means missing both. A better formula is: your major goal is what you really want to be, and be remembered for. Periodically rededicating yourself to that lifetime goal often pulls you through tough times. That goal is your own, private matter ( 15 November, p 28 ). As …

I accept that ancient peoples may have selected sites for social and spiritual purposes because of unique soundscapes, but, for cave art, what if sound was mostly important to help find the right place? For an artist, tall ceilings would be good so smoke from a large light-giving fire would gather high up, allowing clear …

I very much enjoyed Miriam Frankel's article "Do we live in a simulation?". But she inadvertently hints at an interesting theory and then ignores it. Just assume, as others have, that this is a simulation designed entirely as a time machine to study humanity. After setting the "internal" clock of the simulation to run many …

Andrea Halpern is a professor of psychology at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania (6 December, p 46)

The question of whether we live in a simulation is of intellectual interest, but is ultimately irrelevant. Whether we live in the "real" universe or a simulation, we exist solely on account of its laws, and so we cannot ever leave. Communicating with any programmer, however (I imagine an acne-prone teenager with a universe simulator), …

One of the most common forms of simulation is a video game. The entities within that are bit patterns. What happens to the bit patterns has been programmed and all that can happen is only that which has been programmed. If we are in a simulation, remember that not only are we in it, but …

Your article made me wonder who would be running our simulation. If the advanced civilisation discovered how to do simulations when it was 1,000,000 years ahead of us, it is just as likely they've had this technology for 50 years or more, and the know-how and ability to create a simulation has spread widely throughout …

Hans Jenks is certainly correct in identifying how remarkably successful we are as a species relative to chimpanzees, who are still "slinging poop at each other". But Hans does not appear to recognise that 35,000 years ago, early modern humans – genetically indistinguishable from us today – had produced little of note after tens of …