Are non-human animals our friends or enemies? In this provocative book, Dinesh Wadiwel argues that our mainstay relationships with billions of animals are essentially hostile. The War against Animals asks us to interrogate this sustained violence across its intersubjective, institutional and epistemic dimensions. Drawing from Foucault, Spivak and Derrida, The War against Animals argues that our sovereign claim of superiority over other animals is founded on nothing else but violence. Through innovative readings of Locke and Marx, Dinesh Wadiwel argues that property in animals represents a bio-political conquest that aims to secure animals as the “spoils of war.” The goal for pro-animal advocacy must be to challenge this violent sovereignty and recognize animal resistance through forms of counter-conduct and truce.

We are currently engaged in an existential species war against nonhuman animals. This book argues that, during this war, nonhuman animals should be granted legal personhood and treated as ‘protected persons’ rather than the property of ‘protected persons.’ The main argument is that War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity – rape, forced pregnancy and other acts of sexual violence – are being committed within the meat, egg and dairy industries. Avoiding ‘dreaded comparisons’, the book explores shared sources of oppression between human and nonhuman animals who are subject to the expressions and consequences of reproductive violence. It asks: what drives and facilitates the war against nonhuman animals? And what are the global consequences of this war? Throughout, it demonstrates how racism, sexism, and speciesism informs both intrahuman violence and the violence(s) of the animal-industrial complex. Ultimately the book asks us to reconsider what it means to be human.

Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex is the first book to examine how nonhuman animals are used for war by military forces. Each chapter delves deeply into modes of nonhuman animal exploitation: as weapons, test subjects, and transportation, and as casualties of war leading to homelessness, starvation, and death. With leading scholar-activists writing each chapter, this is an important text in the fields of peace studies and critical animal studies. This is a must read for anyone interested in ending war and fostering peace and justice.

Jared Diamond and other leading scholars have argued that the domestication of animals for food, labor, and tools of war has advanced the development of human society. But by comparing practices of animal exploitation for food and resources in different societies over time, David A. Nibert reaches a strikingly different conclusion. He finds in the domestication of animals, which he renames "domesecration," a perversion of human ethics, the development of large-scale acts of violence, disastrous patterns of destruction, and growth-curbing epidemics of infectious disease. Nibert centers his study on nomadic pastoralism and the development of commercial ranching, a practice that has been largely controlled by elite groups and expanded with the rise of capitalism. Beginning with the pastoral societies of the Eurasian steppe and continuing through to the exportation of Western, meat-centered eating habits throughout today's world, Nibert connects the domesecration of animals to violence, invasion, extermination, displacement, enslavement, repression, pandemic chronic disease, and hunger. In his view, conquest and subjugation were the results of the need to appropriate land and water to maintain large groups of animals, and the gross amassing of military power has its roots in the economic benefits of the exploitation, exchange, and sale of animals. Deadly zoonotic diseases, Nibert shows, have accompanied violent developments throughout history, laying waste to whole cities, societies, and civilizations. His most powerful insight situates the domesecration of animals as a precondition for the oppression of human populations, particularly indigenous peoples, an injustice impossible to rectify while the material interests of the elite are inextricably linked to the exploitation of animals. Nibert links domesecration to some of the most critical issues facing the world today, including the depletion of fresh water, topsoil, and oil reserves; global warming; and world hunger, and he reviews the U.S. government's military response to the inevitable crises of an overheated, hungry, resource-depleted world. Most animal-advocacy campaigns reinforce current oppressive practices, Nibert argues. Instead, he suggests reforms that challenge the legitimacy of both domesecration and capitalism.

How much do animals matter--morally? Can we keep considering them as second class beings, to be used merely for our benefit? Or, should we offer them some form of moral egalitarianism? Inserting itself into the passionate debate over animal rights, this fascinating, provocative work by renowned scholar Paola Cavalieri advances a radical proposal: that we extend basic human rights to the nonhuman animals we currently treat as "things." Cavalieri first goes back in time, tracing the roots of the debate from the 1970s, then explores not only the ethical but also the scientific viewpoints, examining the debate's precedents in mainstream Western philosophy. She considers the main proposals of reform that recently have been advanced within the framework of today's prevailing ethical perspectives. Are these proposals satisfying? Cavalieri says no, claiming that it is necessary to go beyond the traditional opposition between utilitarianism and Kantianism and focus on the question of fundamental moral protection. In the case of human beings, such protection is granted within the widely shared moral doctrine of universal human rights' theory. Cavalieri argues that if we examine closely this theory, we will discover that its very logic extends to nonhuman animals as beings who are owed basic moral and legal rights and that, as a result, human rights are not human after all.

Fiction. Stemming from a through-line of marital discord in the household of the great French vivisector, Claude Bernard, Thalia Field has discovered a number of voices, some famous, some forgotten, and allowed them all a moment in which to be heard again. This compelling tale is made up largely of excerpts and quotations, pieced together with great artistry. A beautiful and thought-provoking collage of a tale of rescued history and a sobering tribute to some of its victims. --Karen Joy Fowler Advancing what she started twenty years ago with her earliest explorations of essayistic fiction, Thalia Field has now composed what very well might be her life's work--a tragic, comical, and utterly fascinating tale of a marriage that vividly encapsulates not only the origins of experimental medicine, but an entire age that spirited experiments in literature, science, engineering, film, etc. It's nothing less than a history--gorgeously fictional, purposefully essayistic--of how we got where we are. --John D'Agata

Drawn from a thousand photos taken over fifteen years, We Animals illustrates and investigates animals in the human environment: whether they're being used for food, fashion and entertainment, or research, or are being rescued to spend their remaining years in sanctuaries. Award-winning photojournalist and animal advocate Jo-Anne McArthur provides a valuable lesson about our treatment of animals, makes animal industries visible and accountable, and widens our circle of compassion to include all sentient beings.