How to Love Animals
In a Human-Shaped World
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A far-reaching, urgent, and thoroughly engaging exploration of our relationship with animals - from the acclaimed Financial Times journalist.
This might be the worst time in history to be an animal. But is there a happier way?
Factory farms, climate change, deforestation and pandemics have made our relationship with the other species unsustainable. In response, Henry Mance sets out on a personal quest to see if there is a fairer way to live alongside the animals we love. He goes to work in an abattoir and on a farm to investigate the reality of eating meat and dairy. He explores our dilemmas around over-fishing the seas, visiting zoos and owning pets, and he meets the chefs, activists, scientists and tech visionaries who are redefining how we think about animals.
A Times Book of the Year
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Why is it okay to kill 1.5 billion pigs this year, but an outrage to slaughter a dog?" asks Financial Times journalist Mance in his thought-provoking debut. A love of animals and rational thinking are "western society's core values," he writes, and yet the way humans treat animals is full of contradictions. To help readers understand animals' place in the world, he follows the development of the RSPCA in England, created by a lawyer in response to the typical practice of horses being "flogged to death, so that travelers could take unnecessary journeys." He covers other animal welfare and environmental conservation movements, too, pointing out their historically clashing ideals: proponents of animal rights would state that an individual deer is equally important as its herd, while environmentalists would argue the opposite. Considerable attention is given to the morality of eating animals, as well as how they are "degraded" before slaughter, and Mance discusses his own turn to veganism as the logical outcome of his concern for animal welfare. Throughout, the author is sensible and evenhanded, offering straightforward encouragement over contentious judgment: "We can work out what animals can offer us and what responsibilities we owe to them." Mance's plea for better treatment of animals will open eyes.