Best animal rights books according to redditors
We found 79 Reddit comments discussing the best animal rights books. We ranked the 39 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 79 Reddit comments discussing the best animal rights books. We ranked the 39 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
When it comes to the abolitionist vs. reductionist "debate", there are a massive number of misconceptions on both sides. The thing is both "sides" want the same thing: minimizing harm done to animals. Everyone agrees that a world in which fewer nonhumans were harmed would be better than a one in which more nonhumans were harmed. So then where does the divide come from?
Well, as it turns out, there are multiple stages of behavioral change.
>Stage 1: Pre-contemplation: The individual does not recognize that their behavior needs changing. In the context of animal advocacy, the individual may proudly consume animal "products" and state that they have no intention of ever changing.
>Stage 2 — Contemplation: The person first begins to consider the merits of changing the behavior. They may ask for information about vegan nutrition or recipes, or ask about videos that show the cruelty of the animal agriculture industry.
>Stage 3 — Preparation: The individual perceives a need to change and is getting ready to do so. They may indicate that it's time for them to go vegan and that they are ready to take that final step.
>Stage 4 — Action: The individual is actively working on changing the behavior. Here, the individual is in the early stages of their transition to veganism and is changing their routines.
>Stage 5 — Maintenance: The behavioral change has been made and the individual is working to prevent relapsing to their old ways. This phase is critical because a relapse is a very real concern, though the more one resonates with ethical arguments of veganism related to minimizing our harm to animals, the less likely they are to revert to non-veganism.
Misconception #1: Abolitionism condemns people who take baby steps.
So this is where a lot of the confusion arises. Abolitionism isn't against encouraging baby steps, it's against advocating for baby steps as an end goal. One can still be assertive with the idea that animals "are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way" (i.e., Stage 1) while encouraging those who are making changes (Stage 4), and in fact this sweet spot leads to the best activism possible: it means animal rights advocates never advocate for any kind of animal abuse yet still encourage change along the way to the end goal of veganism.
Misconception #2: Abolitionism is about being morally pure in our advocacy, reductionism is about being effective.
This is a common way to sterotype abolitionists and reductionists, but in fact abolitionism is precisely about valuing what is the most effective form of activism over what what merely feels good. This leads to the next misconception:
Misconception #3: Advocating for less-than-veganism is the most effective way to get people to start making changes in the right direction. (Alternatively, advocating for veganism scares people away from making small changes.)
To some, this seems intuitive; if people are angry at us for advocating such "extreme" ideals, won't that make them more likely to ignore us or even harm more animals? Well, the core of clinical behavioral change science does not agree.
To quote Casey Taft, one of the vegan community's leading experts on this topic:
>Our goal should be to work on motivating people to go vegan; then, once they have made the commitment to do so, we can help them take the steps necessary to get there. That is a true behavioral change strategy.
>Many individual animal advocates and organizations fear promoting veganism as an end goal because they feel that if they're too "pushy" they will lose people altogether. This is likely a leading factor in why a larger cultural shift towards veganism has not occurred. It is in fact possible—and optimal—to clearly state a goal of ending violence towards animals and work with non- vegans in a productive, non-aggressive manner to produce behavioral change.
>Many of us (myself included) took many years to go vegan, and progressed from reducing animal consumption to transitioning to a plant-based diet and then veganism. Some argue that since they took a gradual approach, this is what we should be advocating for others. What they are missing, though, is that if they received clear vegan messaging to end all animal use, they may have gone vegan much sooner and prevented the deaths of many more animals. When we advocate for veganism as an end goal, people will naturally reduce their animal consumption, but will likely do so at a faster pace and will ultimately go vegan. Some will literally go vegan overnight.
>Some animal advocates may also argue that it is simply more effective to ask people to cut down on animal use rather than asking them to go vegan. It is important to keep in mind that there is absolutely no scientific evidence for such claims, [...] and this perspective is not based on any sound theoretical rationale for long-term behavioral change. In fact, such notions disregard a wealth of data showing that it is important to set clear long-term goals that involve a true discrepancy between that goal and current behavior. In other words, it is counterproductive to "settle" for an easy-to-attain goal that the individual is likely to change without our intervention when we could be helping to set more challenging long-term goals to strive for, and that would represent truly internal behavioral change.
>You might still be asking yourself, "That all sounds good, but what if the person I'm communicating with refuses to commit to going vegan?" My response is that I would expect the other person not to make that commitment when you first begin discussing veganism with them in particular. However, their resistance to committing to veganism does not mean that they are a lost cause by any means. Your communication with them may have helped stimulate some thoughts on the issue, and perhaps it will open the door to them having a follow-up discussion or conducting some research on their own. Few people go vegan after any one particular interaction, and we must not place too much pressure on ourselves to make others go vegan after any interaction. Making such a commitment is best thought of as a process. [...] All that we can do is to help move them closer to choosing veganism, but we cannot force them to change, and we should not engage in desperate tactics such as asking them to reduce their animal use rather than promoting veganism because it is less conducive to long-term change.
>We should also be mindful of our larger end goal at the societal level in our advocacy efforts. If our goal is to ultimately convince the world population that we must end all animal use, we should be treating veganism as an issue of social justice and should not encourage others to continue to think of animals as "products" for which we can continue to consume in moderation. We must be careful that our animal advocacy does not perpetuate oppressive views of nonhuman animals, which would ultimately be to their detriment.
Misconception #4: It is permissible for abolitionists to be agressive in their advocacy.
Often times online you will encounter vegans who, in an "argument" against a nonvegan, will degrade themselves to name calling, personal attacks, and bad form. Remember, abolitionism is about what is most effective, not what feels right, and such behaviours are clearly detrimental to the movement.
Such behaviours are often pinned on abilitionism, however, because of a confusion between aggressiveness and assertiveness. The thing is, both aggressiveness and assertiveness may lead to anger, but these are very different types of anger. One leads to increased hatred, while the other leads to true social change, as clearly demonstrated by the civil rights movement and every other social justice movement before and afterwards.
>“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
>Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Further reading and listening:
I recently made a post here if you're interested in the subject.
>This article does a good job giving an overview of the links between toxic masculinity and eating meat/domination over animals. This is a concept that's been explored for a long time and is gaining more prevalence. See for example Carol J. Adams' "The Sexual Politics of Meat". Even just googling "meat masculinity" will show you tons of discussion like this and this.
>I don't see carnism linked to toxic masculinity very often in this sub. Given how deeply this affects all of us, our cultural, societal, and gender roles, our health, our environment, and multiple systems of oppression (speciesism, racism, sexism, classism, etc.), I think this difficult topic ought to be more well-known and discussed outside of vegan circles.
Killing on a massive scale justified by differences between us and them. The comparison is valid. It's not meant to be thrown into people's faces as a one liner, though. It should be done in a well crafted, respectful way.
I recommend reading Eternal Treblinka and The Dreaded Comparison. Those books do this well.
http://www.powerfulbook.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Dreaded-Comparison-Human-Animal-Slavery/dp/0962449334
Peter Singer is amazing. I remember having a 2-week breakdown and existential crisis when I read Animal Liberation. I just didn't know how to handle and accept the mind-blowingly immense suffering happening every second; I couldn't figure out how to go about my life with that fact existing. How could I simply turn my back on that fact, and not fight it every second? How could I possibly forget those animals and go about my life as if it weren't true?
Ultimately I had to make the conscious choice to forget. I could only do what I could do - become vegan, evangelize, be an advocate, protest, boycott, take part in everyday activism. But beyond that, what can I do for the billions of animals suffering unimaginable horrors every second?
There are facts and images seared into my brain that I cannot and never will forget - pigs snouts being sliced off and salt rubbed in the wound, cats being boiled alive in cages, raccoon dogs skinned alive and thrown in a pile of agony, animals caught in unbearable suffering in steel traps, others anally/vaginally/orally electrocuted to death for their furs, pigs boiled alive, chickens trampled and pecked to death in too-small to move cages, cows beaten and prodded to walk on broken legs, the heartbroken wail of a pig or cow whose baby is stolen away, male chicks ground up alive... I have SEEN these things. And it is unbearable.
I think these things should be shown to everybody. How anybody could bite into the flesh of a chicken after that is beyond me.
Edit: for those who may be interested in learning more:
I can't remember the other videos I've watched, and frankly, I can't deal with finding them right now. But they're on Youtube, or at least they were a few years ago.
It can and has gone both ways. We need public support, but change can also occur through legislation, and often public support will follow once legislation has been passed. Tobias Leenaert writes in How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach:
>When a democratic government implements a new law, it's usually the case that enough public support exists for it to pass. However, there will always be people (sometimes a large number of them) who don't support the law. Yet, by definition, if the law applies to them, they have to obey it or risk being penalized. This forced behavioral change, however, may be followed by a change in attitude later, so that people who were initially opposed to the law eventually come to accept it.
>A classic example is the law on buckling your seat belt. Polls show that many of those who initially opposed wearing seat belts later supported mandatory use (Fhaner and Hane). I can imagine the same switch with the prohibition of smoking in public places. Initially, the ban caused opposition and outrage in many countries. Today, many people can hardly believe or even remember that smoking used to be acceptable in universities or hospitals, or that teachers could smoke at school. Many of those same resisters find it obvious and good that the law was changed.
I understand I was a level 10 meat fanatic before I went vegan. Since you've seen Earthlings you already know there's no way the fleeting taste sensation from eating animals is worth it. Farmed animals have just a strong a desire to stay alive as you and I and I'm glad you've decided to make the switch!
The FAQ has a bunch of tips and since it's still January this Veganuary website has loads of tips and info for people starting out.
You may be interested in reading just to build on that desire to avoid animal products. Eating Animals is a well written and easy read from a more investigative, curious perspective. Also, Eat Like You Care is a very simple and short but very clear explanation on the morality of consuming animals.
But the biggest tip is that although right now it seems like a huge switch once you stop eating animals for a few days and start getting the hang of it you'll be amazed at easy it gets.
Finished up 5 non-fiction books this week!
The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens
by Samuel Bowles. 3/5 stars.
The Psychology of Pro-Environmental Communication: Beyond Standard Information Strategies
by Christian Klöckner. 3/5 stars.
How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach by Tobias Leenaert. 5/5 stars.
Motivational Methods for Vegan Advocacy: A Clinical Psychology Perspective
by Casey T. Taft. 4/5 stars.
The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It
by Vanda Felbab Brown. 3/5 stars.
Still reading/started:
Bird Box by Josh Malerman
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
I think Mr Ranters misandry is ubiqutious, not racial ... It's from John Gray's book, Straw Dogs I think :) and is a reference to sapiens and monkeys evolving from the same linege. The irony of course being the teaching of Evolution being phased out in the great state of Texas :)
I started a debate thread on r/vegan a while back in order to get their perspective on one of my favorite pastimes; hunting. The discussion was very one sided as I was the only hunter participating, and it was not exactly philosophically rigorous. But here is a short example of how I would justify hunting and the consumption of meat in general. For further reading check out Carl Cohen and Tom Regan's debate on animal rights. Also here is another fairly un-philosophical, colloquial defense of hunting I posted in a thread on r/documentaries.
Here are a few. I hope some of them catch your enthusiasm, since you're quite active! I think James McWilliams is especially popular lately. I read his blog regularly. The others do great work for the animals and food justice and for how we think about ourselves within the movement.
"The case for animal rights" - Tom Regan
Causing death and saving lives - Jonathan Glover
Philosopher-turned-crumudgeon John Gray has entered the point of his career where he sees the flaws in just about to everything, and writes a book about it. His attack on humanism is called [Straw Dogs] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0374270937?qid=1425697191&sr=8-1&vs=1) .
People being critical of our ideas is never fun, but it can be valuable. He's not everyone's cup of tea, but it fits the bill of what you're asking for.
Becoming Vegan: http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Vegan-Complete-Adopting-Plant-Based/dp/1570671036
Vegan for Life: http://www.amazon.com/Vegan-Life-Everything-Healthy-Plant-Based/dp/0738214930/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311656144&sr=1-1
Animal Liberation: http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311656159&sr=1-1
Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: http://www.amazon.com/Terrorists-Freedom-Fighters-Reflections-Liberation/dp/159056054X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311656159&sr=1-3
Shorter encapsulations of his work in animal ethics.
"The Animal Rights Debate
Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights" serves as a pretty good intro to him and animal ethics in general:
The Case for Animal Rights. Most important work. Written in 1983; I think it's still the most rigorous argument in animal ethics.
And The Moral Rights of Animals. From the description: "The attitudes of philosophers on our obligations to other animals and the view that other animals possess certain moral rights have shifted considerably in the last 40 years and a great deal of credit for this shift is owed to Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights and subsequent work. This excellent anthology grew out of a 2011 workshop held in Regan's honor and is dedicated to him. It features fourteen essays all of which intersect with Regan's views in some way."
You should check out Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray
>A radical work of philosophy, which sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world.
>Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. Even in the present day, despite Darwin's discoveries, nearly all schools of thought take as their starting point the belief that humans are radically different from other animals.
Non-mobile: Straw Dogs
^That's ^why ^I'm ^here, ^I ^don't ^judge ^you. ^PM ^/u/xl0 ^if ^I'm ^causing ^any ^trouble. ^WUT?
I wrote my thesis on this. Here are a few of my sources and some new works:
The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery
Eternal Treblinka
The Sexual Politics of Meat
Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters
Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation
The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J Adams.
I have written a reccomendation for Mind if I Order the Cheeseburger before. I also recommend 'Bleating Hearts for a well sourced account of how animals are treated in industry. For a rebuttal against 'humane' meat I recommend 'The Ultimate Betrayal'
The go-to document as a starting point when discussing environmental impact is the United Nations Food and Agriculture report 'Livestock's Long Shadow'. Stronger claims have been made since it was published, but it's a thorough review from a source that's hard to argue with.
The go-to article to re-assure someone that veganism does not jeopardise health is the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) position paper on vegetarianism.
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer might interest you. Almost seven years old now, but still interesting.
Maybe you would like something written by the animal rights philosopher Tom Regan. His Empty Cages are a great read, and he has written a very readable introduction to moral philosophy on ~150 pages: Animal Rights, Human Wrongs
You might check out Anthropocentrism and its Discontents by Gary Steiner. You'll likely find that Veganism is in contest with Anthropocentrism.
I attended a lecture on the rise of fundamentalism about six years ago, but I don't have any references to hand I'm afraid.
If these topics are of interest to anyone, I'd recommend reading Straw Dogs, by John Gray. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1862075964/202-4818677-1343821?v=glance&n=266239
Apologists.
And I agree. You were being assertive, not aggressive. The book Motivational Methods for Vegan Advocacy: A Clinical Psychology Perspective argues that there is no evidence that compromising your message will be helpful in advocating on behalf of animals.
Gray is great. In philosophical terms, he's a "hedgehog" not a "fox". He has knows one big thing, not lots of little things (it seems to me that he gets a lot of the little things wrong) - so if you read one of his books, you've read them all. I'd recommend Straw Dogs - in my opinion his best.
I would recommend reading Animal Rights, Human Wrongs: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy by retired philosophy professor Tom Regan. This clarified the moral dimension of the issue for me. For instance, if you still have persistent moral justifications for exploiting non-human animals, this book makes everything theoretically clear.
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals blew my mind when I was 15, although it seems to have very mixed reviews.
This e book
ancient
I hope they will include
http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer/dp/0316069884/ref=zg_bs_14454_1
and
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306/ref=zg_bs_14454_9
or
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Dogs-Pigs-Wear-Cows/dp/1573245054/ref=zg_bs_14454_14
or
http://www.amazon.com/Terrorists-Freedom-Fighters-Reflections-Liberation/dp/159056054X but i guess not.
> I'm just going to ignore the equivolency you are trying to draw between ...
Ever heard of The Dreaded Comparison? (Great book by the way. I highly recommend it.)
I'm not equating racism with speciesism. I'm pointing out the close similarities between the civil rights movement and the animal rights movement to highlight how the stigmatization of an initially normal, yet harmful, ideology is a good thing.
I agree that random insults are never productive, but I never see vegans on this sub directly calling anyone a rapist. We use it as a perfect example to demonstrate how pleasure doesn't justify abuse, but never as a direct insult. I've only seen vegans call people who say they don't care about factory farming psychopaths/sociopaths, but that seems pretty justified given the horrible suffering the animals are forced to endure.
> there is a large, or at least noisy portion of the vegan movement that is violent and extreme.
Extreme is subjective. Giving women property rights was extreme 100 years ago. Anti-speciesism is extreme today. I can only wonder what will be extreme in 100 years from now...
It's not true that vegans are violent. I'm involved in multiple activist groups, and the most violent thing we do is show people slaughterhouse footage lol. Compared to carnists who demand that animals suffer and die for them 24/7, we're incredibly peaceful.
Straw Dogs
> the use of slavery as a rhetorical tool is not a perfect analogy, obviously.
You should try to get your hands on a copy of this book. You might think differently afterwards.
I think you'd like this book.
There doesn't seem to be a Dutch version of Amazon, but alas.
It could be lost surprisingly fast. Think of the Dark ages. If the world fell under a dark, oppressive cloud of Islam for example. Obviously Muslims are not a race but the races that hold on to Islam are breeding very fast and invading Europe at the same time. They will raise their children as Muslims who will then go on to have children themselves and raise them as Muslims. All the while white European birth rates plummet (and places like Japan). Don't think they won't literally burn down all the libraries of "infidel blasphemy", destroy technological infrastructure etc. while yelling Allahu Akbar! if they get the chance. Things could change very quickly if all the defences were dropped. As much as you want this great world where everyone is united and working together to explore space it just isn't reality not totally anyway. People are still just tribal, pack animals at heart. There are people out there that hate you and your way of life and they want to destroy it. They are training, they are armed and they are fuelled by a powerful, delusional belief.
Here's a (kind of related) interesting book suggestion I think you might like:
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
>In a work of thoroughgoing iconoclasm, British philosopher Gray attacks the belief that humans are different from and superior to animals. Invoking pure Darwinism, he savages every perspective from which humans appear as anything more than a genetic accident that has produced a highly destructive species (homo rapiens)--a species that exterminates other species at a phenomenal rate as our swelling numbers despoil the global environment. Gray explains the human refusal to confront the darker realities of our nature largely as the result of how we have consoled ourselves with the myths of Christianity and its secular offspring, humanism and utopianism. Human vanity, he complains, has even converted science (which should teach us of our insignificant place in nature) into an ideology of progress. But neither hope for progress nor confidence in human morality passes muster with Gray, who envisions a future in which the human population finally contracts as a world politics that grows ever more predatory and brutal shatters all such illusions. As a work of ruthless rigor, this provocative book will force readers to re-examine their own convictions.
It's good to talk about this stuff and I appreciate you taking the time to respond.