Animals in the looking glasses of Europe and India. The changing bonds between humans and animals in the course of the 19th and 20th century

This paper deals with various aspects of human- animal relationship: biological, psychological and sociological; but also with the fact how deep and thorough impact can political events have on the paradigma pointed towards animals. Here, these are depicted on significant fields of human - animal interactions of modern times, for example zoological gardens, petkeeping, changing ways of hunting, and also within some more obscure phenomena, such as animal abuse in laboratory research and in "meat plants". I also try to trace the roots of the approach that people of modern time Europe perform towards animals, and I do the same for India. The writing is divided into two parts, each one containing four chapters. The part No. I. - The man and the animal in Euro-American cultural context - describes the turbulent changes the human - animal relationship underwent during the era of Enlightenment, and tries to explain why it was so. Animals have enjoyed a widespread interest since times immemorial, but have hardly ever been perceived from the tabula rasa point of view. On the contrary, they have often been seen through the prisma of human sociology, serving as the immense field of manifold human projections. As such, they have figured in copious kinds of modern "myths", being it myths of ritual or otherwise "fictive"..