Category: Reviews

BOOKS: Can Animals Be Moral?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  November/December 2012:

 

Can Animals Be Moral? by Mark Rowlands Oxford Univ. Press  (198 Madison Ave.,  New York,  NY 10016),  2012. 288 pages,  hardcover.  $29.95.

 

Responding to recent works by ethologists Marc Bekoff and Franz de Waal,  who work from direct observation of animals,  and have been accused of anthropomorphism for arguing that there are not distinctions but continuums between animal and human behavior, University of Miami philosophy professor Mark Rowlands ends his own discussion of real-life animals in his preface.  Rowlands in gist seems to agree with Bekoff and de Waal,  while finding fault with their approach. Read more

BOOKS | Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  November/December 2012:


Nature Wars:  The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds by Jim Sterba   Crown Publishers  (c/o Random House,  1745 Broadway,  New York,  NY 10019), 2012.  336 pages,  hardcover.  $26.00.

Born in 1943,  during the deprivations of World War II and just after the Great Depression, Jim Sterba grew up hunting in rural Michigan. Sterba considers himself a lifelong conservationist, but “conservation” in his formative years meant little more than promoting hunting practices that helped to ensure abundant “game”–albeit for people who hunted for meat, as his family did,  not just for sport,  like the European nobility who originated the conservation movement around 200 years earlier in response to the Industrial Revolution and fencing the grazing commons. Read more

I’m a good dog: Pit Bulls, America’s Most Beautiful (and most Misunderstood) Pet

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  October 2012: (Actually published on November 1,  2012.)

I’m a good dog Pit Bulls,  America’s Most Beautiful (and most Misunderstood) Pet by Ken Foster Viking Studio (c/o Penguin USA, 375 Hudson St.,  New York, NY 10014),  2012. 143 pages,  paperback.  $25.00.
. The major question in assessing I’m a good dog,  by Ken Foster,  is deciding whether Foster sincerely believes his many misrepresentations,  most of which occur by omission. Read more

Spillover: Animal Infections & The Next Human Pandemic

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  October 2012: (Actually published on November 1,  2012.) __________________________________________

BOOKS Spillover:  Animal Infections & The Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen W.W. Norton and Company (500 5th Ave.,  New York, NY  10110),  2012.  592 pages,  hardcover.  $28.95 __________________________________________

Among the very first postings to ProMED-mail,  the listserve for the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases now reaching more than 60,000 animal and human health experts per day,  was an October 1994 letter to The New York Times by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg,  then director of the Federation of American Scientists Biological Program. Read more

The Vegan Police: the Vegan Outreach perspective

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  October 2012: (Actually published on November 1,  2012.)
Politics,  personal conduct,  and the Vegan Police:  the Vegan Outreach perspective by Matt Ball,  cofounder,  Vegan Outreach http://whyveganoutreach.blogspot.com/ 
Having been prompted to do some broader thinking about the status of animal advocacy in the past year,  including contrasting the AR-2012 conference in Washington D.C. with past AR conferences, I have a somewhat different perspective on the issues raised by the editorial in this October 2012 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE,  “Politics, personal conduct,  and the Vegan Police,” compared to my concerns when we were starting Vegan Outreach in the 1990s.

Romancing the Dog: The Struggle To Make A Pound Dog Happy in Beverly Hills

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  October 2012: (Actually published on November 1,  2012.)

Romancing the Dog: The Struggle To Make A Pound Dog Happy in Beverly Hills by Marion Zola Planet Publishing (distributed by Amazon.com),  2012.  331 pages. $12.98 paperback.
Among the most ancient of Indian proverbs is that “Whenever a human is unhappy,  God sends a dog.” .
The first and most important point to understand about dog behavior,  at least from my perspective,  is that almost all dogs are instinctively and contagiously happy and anticipatory,  unless someone is actively trying to make the dog unhappy.  Even then,  most dogs will defy the effort.  Seldom have I met a dog,  no matter how dire and painful the dog’s circumstances,  who did not demonstrate hope that everything would be better soon,  seemingly crediting humans with the ability to work miracles.  I have even met street dogs,  variously suffering hideously from mange,  cancer,  and bones broken by automobiles,  with no evident reason to think well of any human,  who tried to comfort the people who euthanized them. Read more

BOOKS: A Novel Exploring the Challenges and Triumphs of Running an Animal Shelter

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  September 2012:

THE RIPPLE EFFECT A Novel Exploring the Challenges and Triumphs of Running an Animal Shelter

by Marcy Eckhardt 268 pages,  paperback ($17.99) or e-book ($7.99.) http://marcyeckhardt.com/

Probably close to 100% of the ANIMAL PEOPLE readership have at some point either worked or volunteered in an animal shelter. Thus probably close to 100% will either intensely identify with the characters in The Ripple Effect,  by longtime shelter worker and consultant Marcy Eckhardt,  or at least recognize them–and probably most who start to read The Ripple Effect will read it cover-to-cover  in just a couple of sittings,  as I did,  feeling that The Ripple Effect is by,  for,  and about us,  the people who know animal sheltering from the inside out, as opposed to them, who interact with shelters in various ways and often vocally criticize shelter procedures, but have little understanding of why things are done as they are. Read more

BOOKS: How to Treat Your Dogs & Cats with Over-the-Counter Drugs

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  September 2012:

How to Treat Your Dogs & Cats with Over-the-Counter Drugs and companion edition
by Robert L. Ridgway, DVM IUniverse:  http://bookstore.iuniverse.com
168 and 104 pages,  paperback.  $15.95 and $13.95.

Along with not judging books by the cover. one must sometimes be careful not to judge them by the title.  Orlando Animal Services’ veterinarian Robert L. Ridgway’s handbook How to Treat Your Dogs & Cats with Over-the-Counter Drugs and companion edition of additional advice are useful and practical.  But the mention of over-the-counter drugs in the titles may be misleading.  Ridgway’s books are not pharmacological guides written to help pet keepers avoid the use of prescription medication. Read more

BOOKS: With the Eyes of Love, by Christa Blanke

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  September 2012:

With the Eyes of Love,  by Christa Blanke, translated by Sheelagh D. Graham Animals’ Angels Press (Rossertstraße 8,  D-60323 Frankfurt a. Main,  Germany),  2011. 168 pages,  hardcover.  $16.76

For 21 years, before co-founding ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1992,  I moonlighted as a literary editor and publisher, chiefly of poetry, after hours on mostly animal-related news beats.  Works by many authors I helped to introduce to print now claim shelf space in major book stores–but few of them won readership as poets. Read more

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