The Cry of Nature reveals how humans engaged in the struggle for animal emancipation and examines for the first time the role of visual art in the growth of animal rights. Artists from Hogarth to Soutine, and Gericault to Picasso, represented animals' suffering and death, as well as their pleasure and individuality. Embracing the lessons of Montaigne, Rousseau, Blake, Darwin, Freud and many others, they proposed that humans and animals have a shared evolutionary heritage of sentience, intelligence and empathy, and deserve equal access to the domain of moral rights.