The fight for human rights is more relevant than ever — but what about the rights of our furry friends? This week, we’re considering the question of animal autonomy: what rights animals have, how that affects human rights and responsibilities, and what relationship we should have to the natural world.
The Omnivore’s Deception
What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves
by John Sanbonmatsu
The Omnivore’s Deception was lauded by author Angela Davis, who says that “John Sanbonmatsu offers the most compelling arguments yet for abolishing capitalist animal agriculture, urging us to question whether consuming animal products is an ethical way of inhabiting our worlds.” Sanbonmatsu challenges the millions of Americans that see themselves as “conflicted omnivores” and demands that they confront the ethical and environmental implications of their choice to eat animals. Davis recommends that “everyone who believes in justice for all should read this brilliant book.”
Big Farms Make Big Flu
Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science
Rob Wallace
Published by Monthly Review Press
Agribusiness has known for decades that packing thousands of birds or livestock together results in a monoculture that selects for disease. But market economics doesn’t punish the companies for growing Big Flu—it punishes animals, the environment, consumers, and contract farmers. Alongside growing profits, diseases are permitted to emerge, evolve, and spread with little check. “That is,” writes evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, “it pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people.” Big Farms Makes Big Flu continues to serve as a timely reminder to the current state of the world. According to Sam Belton in Socialist Party, the 2016 book “should have served as a forewarning for the current coronavirus outbreak.”
A Mouse in a Cage
Rethinking Humanitarianism and the Rights of Lab Animals
by Carrie Friese
Laboratory animals are often used to develop medical treatments: vaccines, antibiotics, and organ transplants have all relied upon animal testing to ensure safety and success for human benefit. Yet the relationship between the scientific community’s dependence on laboratory animals and the recognition of the need to treat these animals with respect and compassion has given rise to tension. Friese proposes a new approach to the treatment of these animals that recognizes the interconnectedness of all species and how human actions impact the welfare of the planet. Acclaimed by top scholars in the field of animal rights, A Mouse in a Cage is an essential contribution to the ongoing conversation about the ethical treatment of animals.
Dance of the Dung Beetles
Their Role in Our Changing World
by Marcus Byrne and Helen Lunn
Published by Wits University Press
In this sweeping history of more than 3,000 years, scientist and Nobel Prize winner Marcus Byrne and writer Helen Lunn capture the diversity of dung beetles and their unique behavior patterns. Choice calls the book “an entertaining and educational ‘tour’ incorporating both Egyptian mythology and 17th-century scientific discovery,” and Nature celebrates this “eye-catchingly illustrated… captivating compound of science, history and myth.”
Cry Wolf
Inquest into the True Nature of a Predator
By Harold R. Johnson
Published by University of Regina Press
In 2005, twenty-two-year-old Kenton Carnegie was killed in a wolf attack near his work camp. Part story, part forensic analysis, Cry Wolf examines this and other attacks. Author Harold R. Johnson incorporates traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous wisdom into our understanding of these animals. Ultimately, he shows that we fail to take this apex predator seriously at our own peril. According to Eden Robertson, Cry Wolf is “a crucial and timely examination of our shifting relationship to the land in general and the Canis lupus in particular.”
Jason Voorhees Does a Land Acknowledgement: Indigeneity Lurking in the Woods by Laura Hall