For his latest monthly essay at New English Review, Dalrymple reflects on our uneasy relationship with animal life, beauty, mortality, and the limits of compassion, arguing that aesthetic judgment plays as large a role as ethical principle or utilitarian considerations in the preservation (or neglect) of life.

My notion of the sanctity of animal life has its limits and is as much aesthetic as ethical or philosophical, or rather it is more so. My concern that creatures should survive as species depends on one of two criteria: that they should be beautiful, or that they should be large and dramatic. Thus, I should be more upset by the disappearance from the face of the earth of the hippopotami than of some tiny mouse-like marsupial in the Australian outback.