The Carnival of the Animals on 2 April at the home of Pauline Viardot with an audience including Franz Liszt, a friend of the composer, who had expressed a wish to hear the work. There were other private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image. He relented only for the famous cello solo "The Swan", which forms the penultimate movement of the work, and which was published in 1887 in an arrangement by the composer for cello and solo piano
Moral status of animals in the ancient world attempt the creation of a taxonomical categorization and hierarchy of animals. Aristotle perceived some similarities between humans and other species and developed a sort of "psychological continuum", recognising that human and non-human animals differ only by degree in possessing certain temperaments. Nevertheless, he denied animals rationality and moral equality. "Plants are created for the sake of animals," he wrote, "and animals for the sake of men." Aristotle argued that humans were the “masters” in his created hierarchical structure based upon their rational powers. One of Aristotle's pupils, Theophrastus, argued against eating meat on the grounds that it robbed animals of