The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2008), "The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 7, pp. 552-553. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810894086

For all the interest in animals over the centuries, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (Singer, 1975) is often identified as the book that sparked off the modern debate about animal rights and the constellation of ideas – moral and ethical, anthropological and scientific – surrounding animal rights and speciesism. Literature on both experimentation and ethics has grown substantially in recent decades, animated by cloning and genetic engineering, by biodiversity and environmentalism, by animal rights and anti‐vivisection lobbies, and by revisionism about anthropomorphism in literature like children's fantasy. Ethical issues about the means justifying the ends in experimentation and agribusiness, about opposing ideas on whether animals feel and fear and are not distinct from humans, whether to breed and eat meat, whether to hunt foxes and watch blood‐sports and close down zoos – all these have unavoidable political, social and moral implications today.

For these many reasons, then, Kalof (Michigan State University) and Fitzgerald (University of Windsor in Ontario) have edited a very topical and interesting book with The Animals Reader. It is available also in hardback (at £60.00 US$105.00) and is part of a wider publishing initiative from Berg that includes the six‐volume set A Cultural History of Animals (to be published October 2007 at £350.00 US$650.00) with the same editors. One of the main issues, ethically, in animal rights, is caught well by R.G. Frey in his contribution on animals to The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics (2003) when he suggests that the central problems in animal ethics is the humans rather than the animals.

The view that animals lack reason and intelligence and self‐directedness, and therefore rights, is used expediently to justify many forms of human‐directed activity from hunting and bull‐fighting to zoo‐keeping, agribusiness and cloning. Much of the discussion has asked whether human and non‐human actants are in fact much closer: Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, arguing from a postmodern position, tease out sameness and affinity, while Whatmore, applying relational ethics to human geography, creates a problematic about “the wild”. Haraway's work on cyborgs takes us rightly into identity and differentiation, philosophically underpinning more pragmatic work on biodiversity and conservation, and asking us all to step back and confront difficult questions about human and animal rights.

Kalof and Fitzgerald are alert to the literature on animals that has appeared over a long time. This compilation extends back to Aristotle and Montaigne and comes forward to current books and articles by writers like Martha Nussbaum, Tom Regan, Marc Bekoff, David Nibert, and Randy Malamud. Some sources are rather elusive specialist journals, while others are books and monographs. Each excerpt is introduced by the editors, setting it in a critical context. There are five sections, all very convincing and distinct from each other – animals as philosophical and ethical subjects (do they reason, can they have rights, are they sentient slaves, are experiments immoral?), animals as reflexive thinkers (does language and play suggest intelligence, do they have emotions, do the great apes have a culture, do humans exploit animals in the social relationships they have with them?), animals as domesticated creatures, pets and food (agribusiness and breeding, eating meet, pets as play‐things, “brave new farm” issues of capitalism and masculine exploitation), animals as spectacle and sport (bull‐fights and dog‐fights, animal‐watching and zoos, hunting), animals as symbols (totemism and myth, frog princes and sly foxes and Animal Farm), and animals as scientific objects (vivisection, cloning, species differentiation).

Material is reproduced in double‐columns but page layout is generous and so text is clear. Original references, where appropriate, are retained, and each section has a list of further reading. The level is higher reaches of secondary school, college and university wherever animal rights and related issues are studied and taught. This is a useful source‐book for tutors and lecturers. For librarians the range of sources cited will prove very useful for collection building: several relevant sources are noted in the references to this review.

Kalof and Fitzgerald are knowledgeable about current issues and have contributed to it with works on environmentalism and animal abuse. They are alert, too, to issues about anthropomorphism and sentimentality, and to arguments about commodification and rights. I would have liked more reflection of cross‐cultural issues, although the further readings address that, and less polemic from feminism – it is fair anthropologically to accept class and male‐ness in dog‐fighting but the extent to which meat‐eating and capitalist agribusiness is intrinsically male are far more debateable and contentious. Nevertheless, animal rights has never been a field for passive thinkers, and The Animals Reader comes out fighting.