Anguish, by August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck, c. 1878. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Animals

Volume VI, Number 2 | spring 2013

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Preamble

Man and Beast

By Lewis H. Lapham

Michel de Montaigne once considered, “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime for her more than she is to me?”

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Painting of cows resting in a landscape with two herdsmen at right.

One of Us

By John Jeremiah Sullivan

Can animals think or feel, experience joy or sadness? Can they know their own existence?

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Map

Working Relationships

Man and beast in collaboration.

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Miscellany

One out of every two million lobsters is blue. One out of every thirty million lobsters is yellow, the creature’s rarest coloration.

1896 | Bombay

Bird of Birds

Mark Twain honors the Indian Crow.More

c. 1871 | Paris

From Zoo to Table

Parisians eat a zoo during the Franco-Prussian War.More

1767 | Paris

Construction Site

Buffon marvels at the ingenuity of beavers.More

Charts & Graphs

Men’s Best Friends

Men’s Best Friends

Kings, politicians, authors—and their pets.

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Photograph of American novelist Mary Austin.

Black and white photograph of English writer Virginia Woolf.

Photograph of Native American poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko.

Photograph of Soviet playwright and writer Mikhail Bulgakov.

Photograph of Italian writer Italo Calvino.

Photograph of Danish writer Isak Dinesen.

Black and white photograph of French novelist, essayist, and playwright Albert Camus.

Portrait bust of Roman poet Virgil.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

—William Hazlitt, 1819

Black and white image of Greek biographer and writer Plutarch.

Henry David Thoreau

Plutarch & Henry David Thoreau

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