There is a clear disconnect between today’s skeptical philosophy and the increasingly dynamic knowledge gained from animal sciences and practices. Although they grant animals unprecedented ontological proximity, philosophers such as Agamben, Derrida and Bailly, are still grappling with a post-Kantian view of nature which keeps animals apart. They see natural creatures as close but far: lost in a kind of epistemological no-man’s land. It is important, however, to question the influence of such modern view of nature and to challenge its separation from the entanglements of human culture and politics. Taking Bailly’s 2007 text, The Animal Side, as a test study, I examine some strategies as well as consequences of this “equal but separate” picture of the animal world. I also suggest reconnecting the sublime nature of the “animal side” with a more mundane, and hybrid, reality. As recent pragmatic rethinking of animal science and epistemology have clearly shown, it is possible to bridge the epistemological divide and to propose a “middle” knowledge: a knowledge that operates in the natural-cultural space of interspecies relations. Bringing Latour’s relational epistemology and Despret’s pragmatic ethology into dialog with Bailly’s own science and aesthetics, I show how such dialog allows us to get closer to and re-politicize Bailly’s natural side.