When JC's children David and Rebecca were about seven and eight years old, the family had many pets including cats, a tokay gecko, a corn snake, hooded rats, and several tanks of tropical fish. JC fed mice, baby rats, and cockroaches to the gecko and the snake, and large wriggly worms to the larger fish. The children invented a rationale for this, a tiny morality: some animals (worms, cockroaches, most fish) ‘don't have minds’; some (geckoes, snakes, mature rats and mice, cichlid fish) have ‘minds for themselves’; and a few (cats and people) have ‘minds for others’. Rebecca was very worried when she was about thirteen, because she felt that most of the time she didn't have a mind for others, and was therefore not a real person. She stopped worrying only when she was told that she was not, as she thought, the only person with that problem. Indeed, most of the time people have no minds, sometimes they have minds for themselves, and only rarely does anybody have a mind for others.