Quarterly Essay 45: Us And Them: The Importance Of Animals

For the first time in history, humans sit unchallenged at the top of the food chain. As we encroach on the wild and a vast wave of extinctions gathers force, how has our relationship to animals changed?

In this dazzling piece of reportage, Anna Krien investigates the contemporary animal kingdom and our place in it. From pets to food, from wildness to science experiments, Krien also reveals how animals are faring in this new world order. Examples range from the joyful to the deeply unsettling.

As Krien delves deeper, she finds that animals can trigger primal emotions in us, which we are often not willing to acknowledge. Us and Them is a clear-eyed look at how we do – and should – treat animals, and an original look at everything from animal lawyers to Indonesian abattoirs. It is also a meditation on humanness and animalness, sameness and otherness, that sheds new light on our contemporary obsession with animals.

Anna Krien is the author of Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests, which won the Literary or Media Work Advancing Public Debate Award in the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and also the People’s Choice Award in the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Anna’s work has been published in the Monthly, the Age, the Big Issue, The Best Australian Essays, The Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review, Voiceworks, Going Down Swinging, Colors, Frankie and Dazed & Confused.