From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

Animal Rights: Current Debates & New Directions
edited by Cass R. Sunstein & Martha C. Nussbaum
Oxford University Press, Inc.
(198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016), 2004.
Hard cover, 338 pages, $29.95.

Readers familiar with Charles Dickens’ Hard Times will
recognize in the rhetoric of opposition to animal rights many of the
same arguments used by Victorian capitalists in opposition to public
education, care for the destitute, and female emancipation.
Dickens published Hard Times, his 10th, shortest, and most
prescient novel, in 1854. In it he expressed his disillusionment
that decades of social reforming had chiefly enabled the privileged
classes to co-opt the rhetoric of change.
Charitable institutions created in response to the misery,
poverty, cruelty and ignorance that Dickens spent much of his life
exposing often appeared to be doing more to perpetuate social ills
than to eliminate them.
The attitudes that created bleak and harsh conditions had to
change, Dickens pointed out, before even the best-intentioned
reformers could actually reform anything.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2004:

Animal Voices: Telepathic Communication in the Web of Life
by Dawn Bauman Brunke
Bear & Company (1 Park Street, Rochester, VT 05767), 2004. 278
pages, paperback. $15.00.

All My Relations
by Susan Chernak McElroy
New World Library (14 Pamaron Way, Novato, CA 94949), 2004. 240
pages, paperback, $14.95.

“Oh no! Don’t put me in there! I’ve seen those things
before. They eat people and then spit them out. I’ve tried to talk
to them and there’s nobody there. They have no decent migratory
pattern, and they make no sense at all. Oh no, I’m not going to be
eaten by a plane!”
These thoughts Dawn Baumann Brunke attributes to a parrot.
Living in Wasila, Alaska, Brunke describes herself as “a freelance
writer and editor who specializes in the areas of bodywork, healing,
metaphysics, and spirituality.
I have worked and lived closely with birds and animals now
for many years. Rehabbing the orphaned, sick and injured. I feel
close to them. But I have never heard voices in my head or any other
form of telepathy.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2004:

Curious creatures, wonderous waifs: My life with Animals
by Ed Kostro
PublishAmerica, (www.publishamerica.com), 2004. 217 pages,
paperback. $16.95.

Kostro’s journey starts when he is a three-year-old living in
the inner city with his Polish immigrant parents and grandparents.
As a boy he often rescued animals; as a teenager he found summer
camp a place of untold discovery; and his relationships with
animals, especially his little dog Pepper, fared better than his
marriage, which ended in divorce.
“I truly believe that my encounters with all sorts of
animals have been an integral part of making me who I am today–an
avowed ‘animal person,'” Kostro writes.
There are plenty of amusing stories. For example, he finds a
baby robin who has fallen out of her nest. Up goes a huge ladder and
the baby is returned to a full nest of robin chicks. As one chick is
replaced and Kostro climbs down, another is pushed out and there
begins a procession of returning robin chicks to the rather
inadequate nest. A large crowd of neighbors gathers to watch.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2004:

The Great Compassion:
Buddhism & Animal Rights
by Norm Phelps

Holy Cow:
The Hare Krishna Contribution to Vegetarianism & Animal Rights
by Steven J. Rosen

Both from Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, Suite 201, New York,
NY 10003), 2004.
169 pages, paperback. $16.00.

Norm Phelps, spiritual outreach director for the Fund for
Animals, is an angry Buddhist and animal rights activist.
Phelps’s righteous anger is primarily directed at the many
Buddhists –he estimates about half–who eat meat. Phelps regards
meat eating by Buddhists as both hypocrisy and as much a heresy as
can be committed within a religion whose teachings emphasize
tolerance. Phelps contends that western Buddhists who continue to
eat meat, when they must know of the horrors of factory farming,
offend the fundamental principle of their ancient religion, which
requires compassion for all sentient beings and preparedness to make
personal sacrifices in order to reduce others’ suffering.

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