In clever vertebrates, such as mammals and birds, it is thought that a corpse represents a real cognitive challenge: the dead body looks like a member of your species, even an individual you know well, but it does not react. It should be alive and moving, and yet it is still, inert. The conflicting stimuli provoke strong emotional responses, and

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Chris J. Cuomo critiques the animal rights stance that proceeds solely from the logic that some animals are sentient and can feel pain, because it privileges sentience in an ecology that relies on both sentient and non-sentient beings. This privileging, she writes, “comes out of the assumption that human beings are paradigmatic ethical objects, and

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