Bryan Appleyard

They May Have an Emotional Hole

Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think

By

Allen Lane The Penguin Press 336pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

The Lives of Animals

By

Profile Books 125pp £4.99 order from our bookshop

Animals have become a problem, a zone of serious instability in our moral self-perception. On the one hand, we seem to be an unusually caring age – domestic pets are pampered as never before, people are upset about fox-hunting, they fear for the fate of whales and other endangered species and they demand the extension of legal personhood to the higher primates and domestic pets. On the other hand, we seem to be an unusually savage age – factory farming and animal experimentation impose unprecedented suffering on animals. When it comes to the non-human world, we seem to oscillate violently between sentimentality and nihilism, between an inability and a refusal to think clearly.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    • 'We read from left to right and from start to finish. Or do we?' Stuart Hannabus considers the merits of reading i… ,
    • Domestic scandal, sexual abuse and serial killers are on the menu in April's crime round-up. revie… ,
    • What did Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, James Boswell and Edmund Burke all have in common? Clare Bucknell reveal… ,
    • 'Behind Berlusconi’s greasepaint and his rictus grin, the performance of Toni Servillo suggests the affectless holl… ,
    Follow Us