Confronting the responses that animist hunter-gatherer peoples, animal defenders, and Western hunters provide to the moral questions posed by violence against living things, Charles Stépanoff questions the universality of the figure of the "empathic predator" and the evolution of the cognition of the human species from which it originates. If the trajectory of Western modernity appears from this singular angle, the relationship to the animal remains there, like other hierarchical societies, a powerful operator of distinction.