Readers may notice that there is an unusually heavy amount of animal-related art and writing in this magazine compared to many others. From our famous “Smoking Cat” cover to our extensive coverage of factory farming, this is a publication overflowing with animals. I’d like to briefly explain why.

Here, we love animals in a very deep and sincere sense. There is a serious message underneath even frivolous CA features like “Planet of the Manatees.” We think that too often, human beings move through the world oblivious to all the non-human lives being lived around them. The sentience of other creatures simply doesn’t register. They are given the moral status of rocks or lumps of wood. They are ignored at best, and exploited or killed at worst.

But animals are alive. They are sentient. They have minds and emotions. They matter. Our magazine is committed to continuously reminding us of this. It is easy, with so many problems afflicting human society (poverty, war, climate catastrophe, patriarchy, racism, etc.) to see animals’ concerns as secondary, or to forget them entirely. But they are so numerous, their minds so sophisticated, that to do this is morally indefensible.

Current Affairs is proud of its record on animal welfare issues over the past ten years. We’ve published moving interviews with animal rights activists and powerful articles about the destruction of habitats, the horror of factory farming, and the pragmatic strategies needed to achieve humane conditions for our fellow creatures. The issue remains a neglected one, however. It’s hard to get attention for it. That’s why we’re devoting a full issue to animals. Thanks to a generous grant from the Craigslist Charitable Fund, we have been able to engage some of the country’s best writers and activists to shift the focus away from people for once. We hope this issue will make you think about some questions you don’t usually ask, and even encourage you to join the movement to improve the lives of the animals around us.

One thing this issue proves is that “animal welfare” is not a simple topic. We worried when we started assembling the edition, that there might be too little to say. We deplore factory farming, extinction, exploitation, etc., but how much could we write? Quite a lot, it turns out. In this issue you’ll find discussions of rat infestations, the sentience of slugs, the lives of pigeons, the role of meat in our nightmares, the history of socialist animal rights activists, and more. We could have commissioned much, much more, and there will be plenty more on the topic in future editions.

John Sanbonmatsu, author of The Omnivore’s Deception, says that “the animal economy today is the greatest system of mass violence and injustice in the history of the world." Although I spend more of my own time writing about human genocides, human oppression, and human suffering, I cannot argue with his conclusion. Once we accept the reality of animals’ sentience and suffering, and peel back the curtain on our brutal system of mass killing, it is hard to escape the conclusion that what we do to other animals is a moral outrage of the highest order. I hope that even if you are a meat-eater, or someone who finds it difficult to care about animal rights, you will thoughtfully consider the pieces in this issue. Current Affairs readers are distinguished by their open mindedness, moral commitment, and intelligence (yes, we’re buttering you up!). It is my hope and expectation that our audience will respond well to this attempt to ensure that the issues of animals do not slip from our attention.