This book provides a critical and innovative reassessment of contemporary debate on the human-animal relationship. Starting with a critique of the  official philosophical narration  of animal studies, and then a reassessment of Descartes  animal-machine paradigm, Simone Ghelli tracks down the conceptual coordinates of what he calls  the paradigm of the suffering animal.  The suffering animal is a materialist thesis on the condition of the living, which, while contesting the metaphysical and anthropocentric structure of western axiology, eventually redefines and re-establishes ethics on the experience of suffering, that is on the mutual compassion sentient beings feel before the unjust sight of their finitude. The suffering animal paradigm shows how, within our philosophical tradition, the animal question has been always intertwined with the questions of atheism and of materialism.