The article examines some of the essential features of the Western humanist paradigm that have outlined binary and speciesist relationships in the contemporary world and that have denied the animal in search of the “properly human”. The work makes a brief tour of some of the hypotheses that have addressed, from different positions, the problem of animals: Berger, Descarte, Sloterdijk, Agamben, Derrida and Bailly are some of those mentioned. In this sense, the article then explores certain theoretical topics: the Cartesian animal-machine, civilizations as anthropogenic greenhouses, the anthropocentric machine and the richness of the animal world, among others.