Oxana Timofeeva's The History of Animals: A Philosophy is an original and ambitious treatment of the "animal question". While philosophers have always made distinctions between human beings and animals, Timofeeva imagines a world free of such walls and borders. Timofeeva shows the way towards the full acceptance of our animality; an acceptance which does not mean the return to our animal roots, or anything similar. The freedom generated by this acceptance operates through negativity; is an effect of the rejection of the very core of metaphysical philosophy and Christian culture, traditionally opposed to our 'animal' nature and seemingly detached from it. With a foreword by Slavoj Zizek, this book is accessible, jargon-free and ideal for students and all those interested in re-imagining how we engage with animals and the environment. This is a tour de force of originality and scholarship. Neither affirming the ethical or metaphysical equivalence of animals with humans, nor restoring an essential divide, her powerful genealogy of the animal in modern thought destroys any sense of purity or simplicity. What has come to be known as 'the human' has configured itself through a series of impossible relations to species that are at one and the same time enigmatic, proximate, anthropomorphized, alien and companionable. This book is a must read for anyone working in posthumanism or animal studies.