As human beings, what is our true relation to the animals on earth? What is our responsibility to our fellow creatures? Douglas Sloan explores these and other questions in this important book on the human–animal connection. His explorations are based on personal experience and wide-ranging research into the work of Rudolf Steiner and others, including scientist students of the inner life of animals and committed defenders of animal wellbeing.

Rudolf Steiner describes how from the beginning of creation humans and animals have been united in deep kinship. A loss of the sense of this human–animal connection has resulted in an immense animal suffering the world over. Many questions arise: are animals conscious? Do they have a spiritual reality, souls and selves? Do they have emotional empathy, language and memory? Are we justified in eating them, hunting them, experimenting on them?

This book argues that we must start to relate to animals in a completely new way -- a relationship that understands and respects animals’ inner spiritual being, and one that requires a deep grasp of our own spiritual being in relation to theirs – and offers help to do so, both in concept and in everyday action.