How to Love Animals
In a Human-Shaped World
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
A personal journey into our evolving relationships with animals, and a thought-provoking look at how those bonds are being challenged and reformed across disciplines
We love animals, but does that make the animals' lives any happier? With factory farms, climate change and deforestation, this might be the worst time in history to be an animal. If we took animals' experiences seriously, how could we eat, think and live differently?
How to Love Animals is a lively and important portrait of our evolving relationship with animals, and how we can share our planet fairly. Mance works in a slaughterhouse and on a pig farm to explore the reality of eating meat and dairy. He explores our dilemmas over hunting wild animals, over-fishing the seas, visiting zoos and saving wild spaces. What might happen if we extended the love we show to our pets to other sentient beings? In an age of extinction and pandemics, our relationship with animals has become unsustainable. Mance argues that there has never been a better time to become vegetarian or vegan, and that the conservation movement can flourish, if people in wealthy countries shrink their footprint.
Mance seeks answers from chefs, farmers, activists, philosophers, politicians and tech visionaries who are redefining how we think about animals. Inspired by the author's young daughters, his book is a story of discovery and hope that outlines how we can find a balance with animals that fits with our basic love for them.
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.
