From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2008:
The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA
by Norm Phelps
Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, Suite 201,
New York, NY 10003), 2007. 367 pages,
paperback. $20.00.
If anyone wrote a history of animal
advocacy before Noah built the ark, it missed
the boat. Histories of animal advocacy have
mostly missed the boat ever since.
Many have been plagued by the usual
vexations of historians: lost sources, missing
pieces of contextual understanding, and partisan
ax-grinding, sometimes by the authors, more
often by surviving sources who take the
opportunity to posture over the achievements and
failures of the deceased.
A complicating factor, not afflicting
most histories, is that the subjects of animal
advocacy not only cannot speak for themselves
here and now, but never could and never did.
Some narratives survive even from slaves and
victims of genocide, but there are no
clandestinely scribbled memoirs to be found from
the Little Brown Dog, the Silver Spring monkeys,
or any Atlantic Canadian harp seals.
The frustrating aspect of The Longest
Struggle is that Norm Phelps covers so much, so
well, that the errors and omissions are
especially glaring–and, one suspects, could
have been corrected with some well-informed
proofreading.
To Phelps’ credit, he acknowledges and
adequately covers the influence on animal
advocacy of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism,
which have been glaringly overlooked in most
previous histories of animal advocacy–at least
in the west. Unfortunately, after summarizing
these sources of ideas, Pythagoreanism, and the
major pro-animal teachings originating out of
Judaism, Phelps leaps 1,200 years, from Jesus
to St. Francis, in a mere two pages, with only
one passing mention of Islam, none of Mohammed,
and none of the Cathari.
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