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You don’t know if you like animals but you’re desperate to have one, you want a creature. This is one of the first indications of your desire, a desire that’s all the fiercer for remaining unfulfilled.

Tigon, leopon, pumapard, jaglion, tiguar, jagulep, leoger, tigoness, lipard, jagress aren’t only rare words, these are also creatures of flesh and blood, born in breeding centres under the observation and with the assistance of researchers dedicated to ensuring the survival of our great predators. These strange animals can’t be considered truly wild for, strictly speaking, they don’t exist in the natural world and belong to no recorded species. It follows that we must be legally permitted to acquire them. We have to understand nonetheless that to invite one of these specimens into our home is to put ourselves in danger, especially as scientific studies have shown that interspecies offspring frequently demonstrate severe mental problems.

You have been told that you didn’t want to leave your mother’s belly. There are even photos of you sitting proudly between your parent’s legs, head in the air. Your breech position was the first inkling of your wilfulness.

We may wonder what ‘mental problems’ means for an individual resulting from the coupling of a tiger and a lioness, or a tigress and a lion, or a lioness and a leopard, or a leopard and a puma, or a jaguar and a leopardess, or of any other of the multiple combinations for which we can invent new names as required. Observers in daily contact with these creatures may have noted an abnormal tendency to docility among them, which would explain why they are classed with domestic animals and why we can, therefore, welcome them into our homes. With hybrids, everything is possible.

You’ve also been told that you were a magnificent baby, with a smooth head and a round, smiling face, due no doubt to your having been born by Caesarean, which spared you any physical exertion. According to family legend, your natural docility is actually born of indolence.

To find out which animal we have the right to own or tame, we must consult the laws, by-laws, statutes and decrees that differentiate the species, races and subspecies of domestic animals, the wild species, the species under threat of extinction, the wild species threatened with extinction, the protected species, species considered dangerous, and species both dangerous and protected.

You don’t like wild animals. You prefer household animals, ones that live with humans as part of their families: it’s those you want.

Anyone may refer to the statutory documentation to find out if they are violating the law by keeping at home a boa constrictor, a flea, a poison dart frog of the Rivan 92 cross-breed, a yellow-tailed woolly monkey, a Tibetan blue bear or a cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), so charming a companion in its early years that it will jump onto your bed and lick your face before curling up at your feet. Charm is not the decisive criterion for distinguishing the wild from the domestic.

For a long time, you believed that your mother saw Rosemary’s Baby, the Roman Polanski film, while she was pregnant with you. When, years later, you saw the film, you imagined the awful distress she must have experienced awaiting a baby that could have been human or animal.

Can we love what we don’t know, can’t go near, can’t see, can’t touch, what we imagine? Could imagination be the substrate of love?

During the very earliest years of your life, despite your docility and the perfect smoothness of your head, you showed a tendency to risk your life by rocking your cot violently or by bouts of impassioned yelling. Of this period, in which you made your presence felt with an abandon that was not to last, you have no memory.

Some wolveries, in which the trained wolves live behind bars and howl at the smallest incursion by an unfamiliar creature, may contain both wolves and ‘hybrids’. The word ‘hybrid’, used by the trainers to reassure visitors and temper the animals’ apparent ferocity, doesn’t always have the intended effect.

From the age of three, you wanted a pet that would give you a break from human company. You realised that your teddy bear was not a living thing. Kissing him, yanking his ears or pulling out his fur therefore offered only moderate satisfaction.

Everyone loves teddy bears. Many people also love animals. Only, those who use them, live off them, breed them, capture them, sell them, hunt them, kill them, do not speak of love. When it comes to animals, love is a luxury that we may or may not be able to indulge. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to love animals.

You wish you could be lucky, you wish you could be like everyone else, you wish you could say I love animals. Because when you say that, there’s no need to explain, love itself is enough and exonerates us from the rest. You love animals.