Fans of animation might recognise the headline, a quote from Wes Anderson’s 2009 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. The eponymous hero, having grappled with the familiar midlife struggle to resist impulse and accept his domestic condition, looks up at the distant wolf and marvels at how he remains wild. The irony is that these two canine cousins can’t communicate. We’re left wondering whether this is because the wolf lacks an education in language, or because the anthropomorphised Mr Fox has lost his feral faculties.

This is of course part of the age-old story of our separation from nature. In Abrahamic tradition, the Fall followed a conversation with a serpent that led to us being chucked out of Eden, where such exchanges had been possible. The Francis Bacon “Man and Beast” exhibition in London earlier this year – a collection of paintings where the boundaries between humans and other species are constantly blurred – showed just how exercised we remain by the depth of our primal instincts.

By reducing animals to automata, Descartes paved the way for their commoditisation

For many, a sense of connection prevails, and some of us even identify with a particular creature (see The Animal Within, where some of our writers speak of theirs). Others, such as our lead writer on this issue Tom Mustill (Talking to animals), spend their lives listening and trying to understand them. But in the main, our relationship with animals has become a tragic tale. The latest WWF Living Planet Report paints a frightening picture of species decline at the hands of humans: an estimated 69 per cent of wildlife populations have been wiped out since 1970. Read that sentence again. How can we allow this to happen? It is as if – for all our religious wisdom and traditions, and for all our scientific understanding – humankind has learned nothing of hubris and embarked on a Kamikaze mission of cosmic proportions, intent on taking the whole Ark down with us.

But even these crimes against wildlife hardly compare to those against “livestock” (see Gavin Esler’s interview with George Monbiot, The Interview). After often short and degrading lives, up to 80 billion animals are slaughtered annually to feed us. That’s something like ten for every human, although in the West the average is far greater. In the UK approximately three million cattle, ten million pigs, fifteen million sheep and lambs, 80 million fish and 950 million birds make their way to our sanitised supermarket shelves each year. And of course this broadscale butchery is directly linked to the destruction of wildlife populations, as ever-increasing natural resources are turned over to food production, and the refuse from it contaminates remaining habitats. Imagine what the punishment would have been in Genesis if this is what we’d gone down for, rather than nicking an apple.

In Western thought it was from the writings of Descartes that the final rupture of our fraternal bonds with other creatures came. His famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) was not extended to soulless animals, who were accorded only the laws of mechanics. By reducing them to automata, Descartes paved the way for their commoditisation, resulting in everything from zoos to mass-produced meat. The late essayist and cultural thinker John Berger pointed out in his essay “Why Look at Animals”, first published in About Looking (1980), that this “approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man”. He highlighted the mass subjugation of workers as part of the machinery of production after the industrial revolution, and the eradication of the peasant class, who alone had remained connected with the land and other creatures (on this, see Tim Ecott, If you really love it, kill it).

Now, as we approach the end of 2022, we read daily of continuing atrocities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and of fracturing international relationships more generally (see Michael Burleigh, The age of disintegration), and are experiencing for ourselves the all-too-real implications of the emergent financial crisis and rampant inflation. It seems clear that in the name of power, balancing the books and appeasing the market gods, we face a bitter winter ahead. Millions in this country alone, including hundreds of thousands of children, are expected to go cold and hungry. These are not natural disasters, but the result of human artifice. And yet in both cause and effect, they are intricately linked to our ever-deepening disconnection from, and disruption of, the earth system.

As Dominic Dyer suggests (see Jonathan Lis’ interview with him, In conversation with Dominic Dyer), there’s an unavoidable connection between human and animal rights. If humans wish to survive far into the future, then, as many of the thought-provoking essays and interviews in this issue of Perspective suggest, reconfiguring our relationship with our closest biological kin, the other members of the Animal Kingdom, would be a good place to start. Perhaps if we can find our way back to them, we might also begin the journey back to ourselves.

Peter Phelps Editor