The Animal Turn in literary and cultural studies has brought about a paradigm shift in the way human animals have started thinking about other-thanhuman animals and the many forms humanimal relationships take. Critical Animal Studies scholars meet animals as subjects gifted with agency, eloquence, independent existential narrative and who are owners of their own physical and emotional territories. The articles in this special issue look into some of the ways in which the human animal has looked at,  perceived, (mis)understood, and represented nonhuman animals in written and filmic texts. Their analyses challenge traditional anthropocentric perspectives and reveal the extraordinary potential of literature and other artistic discourses to affect humans’ treatment of animals. In the pages that follow, readers will encounter and be invited to think with cats, performing dogs and horses, captive orcas, rodents, insects, and imaginary dragons; question the ethics of animal suffering at the hands of humans in laboratories and slaughterhouses; and confront the moral implications of human actions towards nonhuman beings.