The trajectory of early modern conceptualizations of animals can be described, if in the broadest terms, as follows. Throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, philosophers and scientists were interested primarily in the physical and mental comparison of animal characteristics with human characteristics. The general consensus was that despite certain areas in which animals were superior to humans, the latter retained a categorical ascendancy due to their rationality and to divine directive. Theriophiles, who often also maintained a primitivistic philosophy, used those human shortcomings that did seem to exist compared with animals, not to deny human superiority, but rather to criticize and ameliorate certain human deficiencies. Among those who held different views, the Cartesian beast-machine theory of animal automatism achieved a certain popularity in the seventeenth century, but it was more notorious than famous, and modern scholars have given it disproportionate attention. By the early eighteenth century it was generally discredited. In the second half of the century, even though the traditional debate about animal characteristics periodically resurfaced, a totally new consideration emerged, which was to signal the rise of the modern debate about animals and their status vis-à-vis human beings. This consideration stemmed from the new Enlightenment discourse about conjectural history, with its emphasis on the utilization of nature and animals. It quickly played a part in the new science of political economy, with Adam Smith acting the leading role. This new economic consideration of animals, however, was a much wider phenomenon, and Smith in this, as in many other respects, not only invented the terms of the new economic approach but also, as a large part of this undertaking, gave new and definite shape to concepts and ideas which had already been developing for many years before. These ideas were not confined to the realm of economic thought per se but can also be detected in other fields, and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, already in the art of the previous century, specifically in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. To understand this we need first to broaden our understanding of what an “economic” conception of animals can mean.