Animal Rights

A Very Short Introduction

De: David DeGrazia

Narrado por: L. J. Ganser

Do animals have moral rights? If so, what does this mean? What sorts of mental lives do animals have, and how should we understand welfare? By presenting models for understanding animals' moral status and rights, and examining their mental lives and welfare, David DeGrazia explores the implications for how we should treat animals in connection with our diet, zoos, and research. Animal Rights distinguishes itself by combining intellectual rigor with accessibility, offering a distinct moral voice with a non-polemical tone.

©2002 David DeGrazia (P)2021 Tantor

Confronting But Neccesary

Although roughly 20 years old and perhaps read with a little too much American glee (the content is often highly confronting, but the narrator sounds like he is selling you a car), this book is a great introduction to animal rights, especially the philosophical underpinnings that govern our use of rhetoric, the reason, logic, and emotion in our arguments made about animal rights, and the laws that govern animal rights discourse. If you've ever had one of those frustrating arguments with someone about animal rights, this book will point out where the right exists.

The history of animal rights, along with the status of animals in different countries, is handled perhaps a little too brusquely, and given the legal cases, developments in legislation, and new science that has occurred since the early 2000s, this book could be revised, but it felt like it was still a great starting place. Key figures like Peter Singer and Henry Spira are introduced, and further reading is suggested. Most certainly more women activists could have be discussed, as they were and continue to be very pivotal in the history of animal rights.

I ,personally, found chapter 7 on animal experimentation, which details some seriously twisted and meaningless and abusive experiments on cats by some seriously demented scientists, to be highly disturbing, and this brings me to a final point. This audiobook is very hard to read while doing something else. It demands your full listening attention.