Independent reflections on animals, society, and the realities in between

Animals have always been entangled with human life. Long before laws, farms, or written history, humans relied on animals for survival, meaning, and identity. What has never been consistent is the value placed on animal lives, a value that has shifted across time, cultures, and species.

It is comforting to believe that human concern for animals followed a simple moral trajectory. That we began indifferent, developed empathy over time, and gradually became more humane. History tells a more complicated story. Humans have long been capable of reverence without protection, affection without regulation, and care that ends when it becomes inconvenient. Some animals were honoured and loved, while others were eaten or worked to exhaustion, often within the same society and sometimes within the same household.

This series traces the uneven history of human concern for animals, from early hunter- gatherer societies to the modern world, with particular attention to South Africa. It examines how proximity, usefulness, scale, and power shaped which animals receive care and which are treated as commodities.

Rather than asking whether humans care about animals, these articles ask a more uncomfortable question: Which animals have ever been allowed to count, and why? The answer is not a story of steady moral progress, but of selective compassion, repeated across time, culture, and species.