Engaging our moment of climate crisis and the ongoing extinction of large numbers of animal species, this course examines the place and plight of animals in contemporary literature. Opening with an examination of our current philosophical discourse on the lives of animals, the class begins with the question of a possible relation between the industrialized slaughter of animals and human genocide. After taking up a number of crucial philosophical and poetical questions brought to the fore by the recent turn to animal studies, the class proceeds to more specific and personal engagements with a cat and the sacred; a woman’s confrontation of self and mourning through the life of a hawk; the poignant love between a man and a dog in the face of death; ecology and the killing of animals on the Channel Islands; race, gender, and the lives of animals in post-apartheid South Africa; and the interwoven fate of a family and dogs in the face of an oncoming hurricane in the American South.