When the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp began tickling laboratory rats in the late 1990s and discovered they produced ultrasonic chirps functionally analogous to laughter, the scientific establishment recoiled. For three centuries, Western science had followed Descartes in treating animals as elaborate clockwork, their cries no more significant than the squeak of an ungreased hinge. The suggestion that a rat could experience something like joy was not merely surprising. It was, by the standards of Cartesian orthodoxy, incoherent.

Judaism shrugged. It had known this all along.

The principle of tza’ar ba’alei chayim, the prohibition against causing unnecessary suffering to animals, is not a modern ethical addition to Jewish thought. It is woven into the fabric of Torah legislation with a specificity that reads, in retrospect, like a protocol for affective neuroscience. Deuteronomy 22:10 prohibits yoking an ox and donkey together, a ruling understood by the commentators as recognising that differential physical capacity produces differential distress. Deuteronomy 22:6-7 mandates sending away the mother bird before taking her eggs, acknowledging that attachment bonds in animals are real and that their rupture constitutes genuine suffering. Exodus 23:12 extends Shabbat rest to working animals, presupposing that fatigue and the relief from it are experienced states, not mechanical outputs. In Numbers, the Torah went further still, giving a beaten donkey a voice to reproach its owner, as though to say that the animal’s protest required........

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