What is the difference between a human being and an animal? That is a question to which almost every scientific discipline has tried to find an answer. Or rather, several answers. But these answers are not the ones that can be found in the book by Vinciane Despret and Jocelyne Porcher, Etre bête (Being an animal), which has been published by Actes Sud. Rather you will find the answers that are given by those who are in daily contact with animals, the people who raise animals. The reader will understand: the animals that we are talking about here are not the ones that are the privileged subjects in the works of philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists, the primates that are studied in order that they may provide clues to our origins, the dolphins, so intelligent and “sensitive”, etc. No, the animals that are “talking” to us in this context are cows, pigs, sheep, animals who, finally, live with human beings, in their barns and stables.

Reading these interviews, conducted in France, in Portugal and in Belgium, the reader may be disturbed: what if these influences are reciprocal? Certainly, human beings act upon their animals, but don’t animals influence human beings as well? “Each human being who raises an animal and each animal that is tamed becomes a “being for another” (…), these two authors conclude.