‘Playing animal’ reflects back our yearnings and repulsions | Aeon Essays

Not only are we failing to consider other species, we are flailing in our connection with one another.

Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves. ‘The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal,’ writes the natural philosopher Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal (2021) . ‘ And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.’