The focus on animals (and animality), as well as the idea that humans have duties towards them and that it is intolerable to treat them as ‘things’ and deny them the faculty of feeling and suffering, has become one of the great issues of our time. It is present not only in civic movements that are highly active in the public sphere, but also in the social and human sciences, where an important field dealing with animals has emerged. Ethics, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy: today these disciplines are mobilised in an extensive operation that rescues animals from the silence to which philosophical thought – but not literature or art – has condemned them. The articles presented here deal with this type of reflection, in an interdisciplinary approach.