Performance practice should never make animals the exclusive object of the human gaze. Instead, sites of animal performance need to be ones of bodily experimentation in which animals and humans are simultaneously both performers and audience members. Human singers, for instance, listen to whales and then alter their song and, at the same time, whales listen to the humans and alter theirs.

In an essay in Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices (2015), Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca points to the possibility of spontaneous, emotive, and transformational mutual human-animal interaction. Interspecies collaboration as a performance model helps humans develop strategies for solving future environmental problems by becoming sensitive to nonhuman animals as companions, who, even before humans existed, adapted to the arrival of other living organisms and environmental disruption.

As in the last two chapters, the first half of the following chapter examines the lives of its two protagonists: Jarama, the bull, born on the banks of a river about thirty-six miles south of Madrid with other bulls bred for fighting, and Maghreb, the lion, born in a cave in the Atlas Mountains in northern Africa.