The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics. Edited by Andrew Linzey
and Clair Linzey. Palgrave Macmillan. $180.
The shutdown of Ringling Brothers and Barnum
& Bailey Circus. The proliferation of no-kill animal shelters. The freeing
of chimpanzees used for medical research. The push to create more-humane living
conditions for laboratory mice and rats. A South Korean court ruling that
killing dogs for food is illegal. The burgeoning role of animal ethics in human
thinking, certainly in the developed world, is evidence of a fundamental
alteration in the way animals are viewed and the way humans – who are, after
all, animals – see themselves within the panoply of some eight million species
that collectively populate Earth.
Yet even in the developed world, nonhuman
animals are accorded no more status than that of property. Attempts to leave
funds for beloved companions’ care in a person’s will or trust always fail:
property cannot inherit, so funds must be left to a human caretaker who agrees
to use them for animal care – but the agreement is unenforceable. Horses have
their times of triumph in races – despite some misgivings about training them –
but in countries including China, Mexico,
Russia, Italy, and Kazakhstan, horse meat is a dietary staple; and 1986
Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand is believed to have been slaughtered for food,
most likely pet food.
These few examples – there are many more – serve to show the complexity
of trying to develop an ethical philosophy regarding the interrelationship of
humans and nonhuman animals. It is to explore this difficult and very
complicated subject that The Palgrave Handbook of
Practical Animal Ethics is designed. A thick (600-page), comprehensive, thoughtful reference
volume that is intended to stay on library, academic and veterinary bookshelves
for many years – hence its price – the book is subdivided into four sections
that, collectively, consider the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals
from a very large number of perspectives. “The Ethics of Control,” “The Ethics
of Captivity,” “The Ethics of Killing,” and “The Ethics of Causing Suffering” –
these are the broad section titles within which 30 international authors and
scholars of very high standing examine animal-ethics issues from a multitude of
perspectives.
For example, although ethics need not
require religion, there is certainly overlap, and this leads to an essay such
as “Killing Animals – Permitted by God?” Unsurprisingly in what is essentially
an academic approach to the subject – the author, Kurt Remele, D. Theol., is an
associate professor of ethics and social thought in the department of Catholic
theology at Karl-Franzens-University in Graz, Austria – the narrative voice is
a measured one that pays close attention to Scripture, as when discussing
Genesis 9:3: “[O]ne does justice to this text (‘Every moving thing that liveth
shall be meat for you’) only when it is seen as occasioned by specific
historical circumstances and experiences. It must be taken not as the
authoritative, final, eternal, and incontestable verdict of God for all times
and all places, but rather as a situational concession of God, both to human
frailty and to the apparent scarcity of edible vegetation after the Flood.”
Other essays raise situational questions
without direct regard to religious texts. For instance, Max Elder, a student of
philosophy and animal ethics at Oxford University, states in “Fishing for
Trouble: The Ethics of Recreational Angling,” that there “are obvious
differences between mammals and fish, even by their very definition. However,
the important question is whether these differences are morally relevant differences.” This neatly encapsulates the
underlying philosophical foundation on which The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics rests. Not
coincidentally, the handbook’s ties to the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics are
strong: Andrew Linzey, Ph.D., is its director, and Clair Linzey its deputy
director. But for all the intellectual heft that an Oxford University
association brings to the handbook, the work’s emphasis is intended to be
pragmatic – it is no coincidence that the book’s title includes the work practical. Thus, Faith Bjalobok, Ph.D.,
a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, writes of “Our Moral Duties to
Ill and Aging Companion Animals,” while Lori Marino, Ph.D., a neuroscientist
who is founder and executive director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy
in Utah, discusses “The Marine Mammal Captivity Issue: Time for a Paradigm
Shift.”
The
Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics is more important for laying
out a series of moral and ethical questions than for answering them in any
definitive way. The book is not easy reading, being intensely academic in its
proliferation of footnotes and being filled, even clogged, with bibliographical
material and references. It also contains some stylistic oddities, such as
removing standard impersonal references to animals through the pronouns “it”
and “that” and instead using “he,” “she,” “who” and “whom” – an unnecessary bit
of anthropomorphic alteration presumably intended to make the connection
between human and nonhuman animals clearer, but in practice a rather affected
and effete-sounding approach. Nevertheless, the importance of this book far
outweighs some inelegance in its presentation. Indeed, for the academic
community, the style will not be off-putting, but to the extent that
non-academics are to be influenced by the essays here, they will have to wade
through some authorial and/or editor-driven expressiveness that is not as
congenial or collegial as it could be.
The issues raised, though, are extremely
important. The section titled “The Ethics of Causing Suffering” is particularly
telling and its contents particularly well-argued. Kay Peggs, Ph.D., editor of
the section and a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, sets the tone
clearly with the simple essay title, “Animal Suffering Matters.” Within that
chapter, she notes that the “anthropocentric notion of suffering is not just a
matter of philosophical debate; it has very real consequences for the lives of
billions of nonhuman animals because these principles of moral worth are rooted
in and inform the law.” Darren Sean Calley, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the
School of Law at the University of Essex, then weighs in with “Human Duties,
Animal Suffering, and Animal Rights: A Legal Reevaluation,” discussing the
animals-as-property argument and the advantages of a duty-based rather than
rights-based approach to treatment of nonhumans. Mark J. Estren, Ph.D., a
psychologist, herpetologist and reptile educator, in “The Ethics of
Preservation: Where Psychology and Conservation Collide,” delves more deeply
into the motivations underlying both legal and everyday human responses to
nonhuman animals, showing the deep-seated human traits that drive our treatment
of other animals, both philosophically and experientially – and suggests ways
in which the barriers to empathy resulting from human perception can be
altered, if not overcome.
These and many other essays in The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal
Ethics have multiple concerns in common: the development of a more-ethical
approach to human-nonhuman interactions; the creation of a moral/ethical
framework within which decisions relating to those interactions may be made
more thoughtfully and less offhandedly; and the practical steps that
individuals and societies can take to produce a more ethical and thus more
satisfactory structure within which human and nonhuman animals alike can assume
their rightful places. The goal of societal transformation will not be
accomplished by The Palgrave Handbook of
Practical Animal Ethics: the sort of foundational rethinking called for in
the book, and the practical implementation of that rethinking, will take
considerable time and effort. But a social movement must start somewhere, and
that of a careful, logical and consistent form of improved animal ethics starts
with this book. The Palgrave Handbook of
Practical Animal Ethics deserves to be on the shelves of every individual
and every organization concerned with the way in which human beings and
nonhuman beings relate to each other on the planet that we all share.
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