Abstract

Animals are “in” – since prehistoric times when humans were hunting animals, and when they fabricated the Paleolithic dog as well as the Paleolithic cat. In less general terms, animals are “in” since they received names and were listed, observed, mummified, turned into totems, and, later on, dissected, tortured under laboratory conditions, trained as experimental subjects or “purified” as model organisms. And they are massively “in” again, but now from overtly legal and moral points of view, at least since the last two decades of the twentieth century. This is to say that modern members of the species Homo sapiens have always been connected to animals of the most various kinds – from the human flea and the cat flea to marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, from horses to parrots, from scallops to worms, and so on.