Sometimes a few numbers tell a lot: Ninety percent of the mammals and seventy percent of the birds that currently live on the planet are farm animals - there to provide food for humans. Conversely, only ten percent of mammals and thirty percent of birds are wild, and that too has to do with humans. Because he not only bred cattle, pigs and chickens and then drove their numbers to absurd heights, but also decimated those of the other animals: 83 percent of wild mammals have probably disappeared from the earth since the beginning of civilization. Even if you didn't know anything about factory farming, methane emissions from cows, species extinction and rainforests that are turning into fields with forage crops, the mere numbers could tellthat something is out of order in the relationship between this one species called humans and the others - or always has been.

Petra Ahne

Editor in the features section.

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This is the impression you get when reading Richard Girling's “Man and the Beast”, which aims to trace the human-animal relationship from the beginning until today.

The five hundred pages are teeming with animals, but mostly as an object of the human urge to check everything that is found in the world for its usability.

Horses are ridden in battles, panthers are harnessed to chariots, foxes are used as projectiles for amusement, geese have their heads torn off at public festivals, dogs' noses are bred, wolves hated, giraffes and elephants shipped to European zoos, rhinos hunted to the point of disappearing, pigs and Cattle fitted into the processes of meat-producing factories.

When unicorns jump onto virgins' laps

Again and again humans question their relationship to animals: Do they have feelings? Is it wrong to torment them? Should you eat them? Do you have any rights? How close are you to us? Like beacons of thoughtfulness, empathy and scientific knowledge, such considerations protrude from the overall dismaying inventory - but do not change the fact that this one animal, capable of upright gait, culture and foresight, is surprisingly free of scruples when it comes to dealing with everyone else Animals.

Richard Girling has collected such impressive material - a plea for vegetarianism from the seventeenth century, for example, or the discussions in the British Parliament about the first animal welfare law - that the narrative trick with which he apparently made his chronology more vivid was not necessary wants: He resolves to stay in the consciousness horizon of the time he is talking about.

The narrator's voice, mostly an anonymous collective we, speaks out of the knowledge and reservations of an epoch.

Are you close to us?

very

This is sometimes appealing, for example when this voice, in a tone of conviction, quotes from medieval bestiaries, in which whales are so large that seafarers mistake them for islands and unicorns jump onto virgins' laps. In the long run, however, the same naive tone is too leveling out to be helpful. The central points in the history of the relationship between humans and animals become mere further episodes: for example, the momentous request in Genesis to rule “over all animals that crawl on earth”, the Cartesian conviction that animals have so much feeling like clockwork or Jeremy Bentham's so important contribution to moral theory, which makes not intelligence but the ability to suffer the decisive criterion when it comes to the question of which living beings are entitled to rights.

The approach of a time-bound narrator's voice, which fortunately has not been strictly adhered to, disappears when Girling, science writer and environmental activist, reaches the twentieth century in her chronology. One of the strongest chapters deals with the supposed fault line between humans and animals, which research increasingly recognizes as a difference of only degree. More recent ethology states that some animals have characteristics that also shape human interaction, such as the willingness to cooperate.

There are now a few answers to the questions humans have always asked about animals.

Are you close to us?

Very.

Now that climate change and the extinction of species are acute threats, this knowledge has other implications than a contemporary of the Renaissance, for example, could have foreseen.

Just for the sake of survival, people today have to admit that they have remained animals, depending on an intact environment.

Girling's relationship story is a good basis for understanding: The next chapter in the relationship between humans and animals will be the decisive one.

Richard Girling: "Man and the Beast".

A story of domination and oppression.

Translated from the English by Hainer Kober.

Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2021. 507 pp., Hardcover, € 26.