'Over the last few decades, it has fallen increasingly to novelists, like J.M. Coetzee, and poets, like David Brooks - artists whose language has slipped the leash of 'pure reason' - to awaken us to the possibility of moral encounter with non-human animals. Brooks's Turin meditations are truly a startling achievement. They startle us from an impoverished slumber, leaving us wondering how we could have been so blind to the gentle presence, the insistent...