Nobel prize winning author J.M. Coetzee denounced animal cruelty in a rare public reading, calling for humans to treat them with "justice."
The 76-year-old novelist read an unpublished piece on the subject to a packed hall in Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum, where he was invited to speak by an animal rights group.
"I am not an animal lover," he told his audience.
"Animals don't need my love. I don't care about love. I care about justice."
South African Coetzee is a vegetarian and he has been promoting animal rights for decades.
The winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature has written about the topic in the past, including a novel called "The Lives of Animals."
The text he read was framed as a discussion between an Australian author and her son, in which she said, "people tolerate the slaughter of animals only because they see none of it."
“Humans think they are much more important than animals" and "deny themselves of animal consciousness," Coetzee read, adding it is up to the people to "cultivate" their sympathy.
Asked at the end of the talk why bullfighting still exists in Spain, the novelist simply spread his arms in a sign of total incomprehension.