Copyright © 2012 by Environmental Philosophy. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. Environmental Philosophy <vol #> (<iss #>), <ARTICLE PAGE RANGE #-#.>. Love Bites! Or Taking Ethics to Heart: Response to Critics on Animal Lessons Kelly Oliver [**AUTHOR: PLEASE PROVIDE INSTITUTIONAL MAILING ADDRESS AND EMAIL ADDRESS**] My heartfelt thanks goes to my critics, who have thoughtfully engaged with my book, taken it in new directions, and enriched conversations in animal philosophy both here and in their own work, to which, and for which, I am indebted. It is a privilege to respond to colleagues whose work I admire, the authors of important books in animal studies such as Brett’s excellent Onto-Ethologies: e Animal Environments of Üexkill, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze and Kalpana’s recent stunner HumAnimals: Race, Law, Language. Of course, it is an honor to have my colleague David Wood comment on my book. David’s work on Nietzsche was my north star when I wrote my dissertation at Northwestern decades ago. And he has been on the vanguard of animal studies in Continental philosophy from its inception. I am also grateful that while challenging us to think with, and beyond, the project of Animal Lessons, Kalpana, David, and Brett have approached the book with generosity and kindness. Mostly, I am relieved that, in Brett’s terms, none of them ate the book for lunch, tore it to shreds, or, worse, used it for kitty litter. Before attempting to respond to the ethical questions raised by all three commentators, I want to touch upon the ticklish question of animal biters in the hopes of addressing some of their more specic concerns. I do not elicit gures of animals biting back in order to justify restraining or controlling them. Rather, in the context of philosophy, I use the metaphor of biting back as a type of deconstructive gesture that coaxes a text to bite its own tail. However, biting back has positive, as well as negative, valences. e notion of biting back returns agency to those we dominate. Moreover, and more importantly for my project, it exposes the idea of absolute mastery of animals, whether metaphorical animals or actual animals, as an illusion. In other words, it challenges human sovereignty, mastery, and dominion over animals. Perhaps biting back is an appropriate, even political, response to man, who literally bites rst the hand—or paw, claw, talon, hoof—that feeds him.