It is all but impossible to make any statement about human attitudes to animals that is both a generalisation and true. There are few areas of our lives where our attitudes to anything are as confused and tangled as they are in the way we think about and treat animals.

This is perhaps not surprising. We are confused enough in our attitudes to just one kind of animal – members of our own species. Just think what humans do to other humans: love them, nurture them, defend them with our lives, kill them, torture them, let them die of neglect, use them as slave labour, admire, revere, despise and so on. Attitudes to other species of animal include all this variety as well as an even greater range of attitudes brought about by the even greater range of roles that animals can play in our lives: they can be food, companions, entertainment, sport, deities or dangerous nuisances. No wonder that our attitudes towards animals vary between extremes.

To quote Albert Schweitzer: