By the second half of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals became much less concerned with the traditional debate regarding the capacity of animals for cognition on the one hand, or for suffering on the other. This did not mean a lack of concern with animal pain; quite the contrary. Yet particularly in the late Enlightenment, such ethical sensitivity customarily took a back seat to a growing awareness that cultural progress necessitated the utilization of animals. The debate about animal pain seemed a moot point. The animals’ capacity for suffering was commonly recognized, as was the need to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on them. Such pain, however, often seemed all too necessary. The discarding of the beast-machine theory notwithstanding, eighteenth-century intellectuals still faced the problem of the incongruity between the ethical consideration of animal suffering and the general overriding preponderance of human interests.

Nowhere was this outlook more evident than in late eighteenth-century historical discourses. A historical element was common to many contemporaneous discussions, not all of them belonging strictly to historical literature in the modern sense. Key to such debates was the rise, in the second half of the century, of the early type of nascent theoretical anthropology termed “conjectural history,” which attempted to surmise the origins of human material and social culture. We have already seen how conjectural history served the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon in his praise of the human mastery of nature, and the constitutive place this had in the historical progress of humanity. It remains to see how this anthropocentric outlook interacted with his ethical view of animals. As with other scientists, the fact that Buffon was fascinated with the animal world does not immediately mean that his moral treatment of animals was necessarily benign. In fact, scientific praxis, even when it was not directly concerned with vivisection, often entailed cruel treatment of animals. No obvious ethical view of them can be inferred either from Buffon's fascination with them or from his anthropocentric cosmology.

On the one hand, Buffon indeed emphasized human superiority and the right of human beings to utilize animals.