Now, at the turn of the millennium we are seeing animals, especially carnivores, from a perspective that is very different from the one we had before. Our views are changing, and this is a process that is going remarkably fast. Let me give an example.

In the late 1960s the magazine Life featured a set of spectacular photographs of a leopard catching and killing a baboon, in Africa. The pictures showed every detail of the sinewy predator in the African bush, the blurred, lightning-speed action, and the intensely frightened expression on the face of the baboon at the final moment. The photographs were stunning, almost literally so because they were so excellent that one identified totally with the victim. Later, it became known that the entire scene in those photographs was set up. The leopard was a tame animal, the pictures were taken on a ranch in Kenya, six baboons were bought from an enterprise that provided primates for medical experiments. The photographer sat in a vehicle that was being driven alongside the leopard, and the baboons were thrown in front of the leopard from the vehicle.

Such deliberate and horrible cruelty for the sake of a picture is unlikely to happen today, only 30 years later, because the western world just would not knowingly allow it. People now object strongly to such inhumane treatment, and in many countries there are laws to prevent it.