Animal ethics in The Dialogue of the Dogs

Abstract

Ecological awareness against the maltreatment of animals gives form to a horizon of expectations that allows Coloquio de los perros to acquire pedagogical relevance as a text in defense of animal rights. Nothing is obvious, Cervantes´ Horatian poetics seems to say, neither the intelligence and rationality of human animals, nor thoughtlessness and mechanistic behaviour of non-human animals. In the context of  the Anthropocene era and from an ecocritical perspective, Coloquio de los perros shows itself as a critical reading of the foundings of the human exceptionality, and as a crude reflection on the relations of power between human beings and between them and nature and its inhabitants.