A Plea for the Animals
Ratings2
Average rating4
15
Ratings2
Average rating4
A powerful and wide-ranging indictment of the treatment of animals by humans--and an eloquent plea for animal rights. Every cow just wants to be happy. Every chicken just wants to be free. Every bear, dog, or mouse experiences sorrow and feels pain as intensely as any of us humans do. In a compelling appeal to reason and human kindness, Matthieu Ricard here takes the arguments from his best-sellers Altruism and Happiness to their logical conclusion: that compassion toward all beings, including our fellow animals, is a moral obligation and the direction toward which any enlightened society must aspire. He chronicles the appalling sufferings of the animals we eat, wear, and use for adornment or “entertainment,” and submits every traditional justification for their exploitation to scientific evidence and moral scrutiny. What arises is an unambiguous and powerful ethical imperative for treating all of the animals with whom we share this planet with respect and compassion.
Reviews with the most likes.
Preaching to the converted, but I always like to keep up on new animal discoveries in science and learn all I can about the other creatures we with whom we share the planet. I had to skip the chapter on factory farming. ‘Eating Animals' contained plenty of information, and my partner literally does not let me look at things she gets in the mail from animal rights/protection agencies because of some of the images. But I digress. I very much appreciated information from the p.o.v. of a scientist discussing the philosophical side of things. It's rough reading, insofar as one is reading about the horrible things that happen to animals, but it is a necessary read.
