The only thing that separates pets from pests is an extra "s."

Charles Wilson Peale, American, 1741-1827. The Exhumation of the Mastadon, 1806-08. Oil on canvas, 50 x 62 1/2 in. Click photo for larger image. Carnegie Museum of Art Fierce Friends: Artists & Animals, 1750 - 1900 March 26 - August 27, 2006 Related articles Art Preview: 'Fierce Friends,' explores relationship between man and wildlife Transfusions not needed in bloodless surgeries 1892 painting illustrates odd links among animals, art & medicine Art Preview: Taxidermy exhibit shows science through the ages Slide show: The Art of Taxidermy

This curious thought enters one's mind -- consciously or subconsciously -- at the beginning of "Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900" at Carnegie Museum of Art, where the large painted words designate two exhibition groupings. It also sets the tone for this atypical and enjoyable show that takes a potentially banal subject -- animals -- and makes it stimulating.

The exhibition was curated by Louise Lippincott, chief curator and curator of fine arts at Carnegie Museum of Art, and Andreas Bluhm, director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, Germany. The same team organized the successful 2000-01 "Light! The Industrial Age, 1750-1900." At that time, Bluhm was head of exhibitions and display at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

It follows the model established in "Light!" of mixing objects of fine art with other artifacts to illuminate simultaneous developments in knowledge, cultural attitudes and aesthetic response. The apex of this is reached in two- and three-dimensional works that feature sentient apes created in the same era that produced Charles Darwin's 1859 "The Origin of Species."

In Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps' "The Experts" (1837), for example, a group of clothed apes stare intently at a landscape painting displayed on an easel, perhaps a critique of critics. By circa 1910-20, Paul Jouve sculpted a "Monkey [a baboon] Regarding an Egyptian Sculpture" of Thoth -- the Egyptian god of wisdom and learning who has a baboon head -- possibly as a commentary on whether apes had the capacity for contemplation.

"Fierce Friends" premiered at the Van Gogh Museum, where it was well received and garnered praise for its curators. The Carnegie is its only other venue.

The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore "Barn Owl," a hand-colored engraving by American artist John James Audubon, is from "The Birds of America." Click photo for larger image.

The exhibition is supplemented here by a generous number of items from Carnegie Museum of Natural History, an example of the unique cooperative opportunities possible when two major institutions share one roof.

So, for instance, complementing several pieces of 18th-century Meissen porcelain ware from the Museum of Art's extensive Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection are taxidermied specimens of the water and songbirds represented on the plates and bowls.

Elsewhere, full skeletons from Natural History stand near detailed comparative graphite drawings of animal and human skeletons, made by British artist George Stubbs at the turn of the 18th century, from the Yale Center for British Art. Small sculptures of extinct South American mammals, also from Natural History, look every bit as odd as the fantastical stoneware creations of Jean Carries, loaned by the Musee du Petit Palais, Paris, or the creepy creature of painter Elihu Vedder's 1864 "The Lair of the Sea Serpent."

Throughout the exhibition, fact and fancy meld, sometimes intentionally and at others because of the limitations of knowledge at the time.

One of the most transfixing paintings is Jules Adler's 1890 "The Transfusion of a Goat's Blood" into the arm of a woman who lies pale and shut-eyed on a stretcher surrounded by a gathering of doctors in dark suits. It's reminiscent of Thomas Eakins' "The Gross Clinic," but with more dire consequences since the woman certainly died. The painting represents not only contemporaneous medical thinking but also, more darkly, that women were considered to be developmentally inferior to men and thus more receptive to tolerating the blood of lower animals.

	British artist Edwin Landseer's 1863-64 painting "Man Proposes, God Disposes" is part of the exhibition "Fierce Friends: Artists & Animals, 1750-1900" at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Click photo for larger image.

Symbolism was much in vogue, as with Eugen Ransonnet-Villez's comment on mortality made by adding a human skull to his rare "Underwater Landscape" of 1864, or Gustave Courbet's probable allusion to the politics of privilege contained within his large 1861 painting, "Stag Going to Water," which may reference the democratization of hunting rights once reserved for aristocracy.

Beside names like Van Gogh, Turner and Charles Wilson Peale are lesser known artists, one of the bonuses of an exhibition that explores the road less taken. Briton Edwin Landseer paints, for example, an animal tamer as Daniel in the Lion's Den and weighs in on an ill-fated 1847 Canadian Arctic expedition in his 1863-64 "Man Proposes, God Disposes."

Among other unexpected delights are design-intensive plates from Ernst Haeckel's turn-of-the-19th-century publication, "Art Forms in Nature"; intriguing glass models of microscopic animals by German father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka; a 42-second 1895 film of fish, frogs and eels in a tank by early French moving-picture entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumiere; and a number of films by the Edison Manufacturing Co., ranging from a "Horse Parade at the Pan-American Exposition" of 1901 to the very funny 4 1/2-minute-long "The Dog Factory."

"Fierce Friends" is the kind of exhibition one goes to museums for. Such experiences are the reason societies establish and support institutions charged with making sense of cultural lineages and presenting observations in a way that encourages pondering and insight. When the package is as delectably endowed as is this one, it's icing on the cake.

The accompanying 160-page, color-illustrated book of the same title, by Lippincott and Bluhm, is fascinating reading. Included are page-length passages that accompany exhibition highlights, which are arranged chronologically to show aesthetic and cultural evolution, and a foreword by noted British animal behaviorist Desmond Morris ($29.95).

"Fierce" continues through Aug. 27. A related exhibition by Carnegie Museum of Natural History, "Stuffed Animals: The Art and Science of Taxidermy," remains through Oct. 1. Hours and admission: 412-622-3131 or www.cmoa.org.