Midgley is referred to in The Lives of Animals (1999), an unusual fictional work by the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee.
The main character, who also appears in Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, is concerned with the moral status of animals, a subject Midgley addressed in Animals and Why They Matter, and discusses at length the idea of sympathy as an ethical concept, a subject Midgley wrote about in Beast and Man.