Rainer Hagencord, born in Ahlen/Westphalia, studied theology in Münster and Fribourg (Switzerland) and biology in Münster. After his ordination in 1987, he established, as university chaplain in Münster, an interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and biology. He completed his doctorate in theology in 2004 with a dissertation entitled “Das Tier: Eine Herausforderung für die christliche Anthropologie. Theologische und verhaltensbiologische Argumente für einen Perspektivenwechsel” (The Beast: A Challenge for Christian Anthropology – Theological and Behavioral Arguments for a Change in Perspective). Since 2009, Dr. Rainer Hagencord has been director of the Institute of Theological Zoology at the Philosophical-Theological University of Münster.

Ursula Wolf was born in 1951 in Karlsruhe. After studying philosophy and classics, she completed her dissertation at the University of Heidelberg (under the supervision of Ernst Tugend) and her habilitation at the Freie Universität Berlin. After working at the FU Berlin and the University of Frankfurt, she was appointed Chair of Philosophy at the University of Mannheim in 1998, where she has been teaching ever since – from summer 2019, as senior professor. In philosophy, she is particularly interested in ancient Greece as well as in action theory and theory of ethics. In her book Das Tier in der Moral (The Animal in Ethics, 1990), which was reissued in a much revised version in 2012 under the title Ethik der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung (The Ethics of Human-Animal Relations), she was one of the first to introduce a German reading public to the Anglo-Saxon debate on animal ethics.