Bryan Appleyard
They May Have an Emotional Hole
Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think
By Marc Hauser
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 336pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
The Lives of Animals
By J M Coetzee
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.
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