Now and again, if we scan the trivial news items on the second and third pages of a newspaper — the front pages are filled with men’s frightful deeds of glory — we may come across a few lines about a circus fire or poisoned elephants. Animals are only remembered when the few remaining specimens, the counterparts of the medieval jester, perish in excruciating pain, as a capital loss for the owner who neglected to afford them adequate fire protection in an age of concrete and steel. The tall giraffe and the elephant are oddities of which now even the shrewdest schoolboy would hardly feel the loss.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the section, “Man and Animal” (p. 251), published in 1944.
