"In a 1977 essay titled "Why Look at Animals?", art critic and novelist John Berger recounts a myth about the origin of life and the importance of seeing and being seen by creatures different from us. To summarize a complex story: long ago, before humans domesticated animals, an animal looked at a person and the person looked at the animal, and the person saw that the animal was different and that they could not understand each other. And yet, the person recognized a similar being with its own power, "comparable to human power but never equal to it", and understood that being seen by the animal was to become oneself fully. We felt less alone as a species. But then, Berger writes, industrial capitalism reduced animals to things".

One should add: Also people. But, as this article tells us, humans will find themselves, as painting shows us from the Neolithic to Freud passing through Goya, through the gaze of the other, the dog, a non-human being with whom, strangely, we have co-evolved in a non-Darwinian, but cultural, framework.