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How We Live with Other Species
by Esther Woolfson
Book Reviewed by:A landmark examination of the fraught relationship between humans and animals, taking the reader from Genesis to climate change.
Beginning with the very origins of life on Earth, Woolfson considers prehistoric human-animal interaction and traces the millennia-long evolution of conceptions of the soul and conscience in relation to the animal kingdom, and the consequences of our belief in human superiority. She explores our representation of animals in art, our consumption of them for food, our experiments on them for science, and our willingness to slaughter them for sport and fashion, as well as examining concepts of love and ownership.
Drawing on philosophy and theology, art and history, as well as her own experience of living with animals and coming to know, love, and respect them as individuals, Woolfson examines some of the most complex ethical issues surrounding our treatment of animals and argues passionately and persuasively for a more humble, more humane, relationship with the creatures who share our world.
Beginnings
A late October afternoon. It's quiet. The blue light of dusk beyond the windows melts into early darkness. I'm in the company of others but I'm the only human being here. I'm walking from room to room, tidying, putting things in order, preparing for the evening when I notice a smirr of shadow passing over the surface of the kitchen floor. It's faint, just an impression before a glance, a small wisp of something, of blown feather, a dustball gusted in a draught. In these old houses, floors have weather of their own: breezes, cyclones, polar easterlies. I follow it closely until I see that it's walking, minutely but steadily across the desert expanse of floor, a spider so tiny that she freezes me where I stand, hyperaware suddenly of my feet, of my own power, my murderous boots. This is a fellow inhabitant of my house, brought in by the cold, the incessant rain. In autumn, they all begin to look for shelter and for food: the house mice, the field mice who will ...
The book is structured not as a systematic argument for Woolfson's view or a treatise on animal rights and welfare. Rather, Between Light and Storm is a cultural history of ideas. Interspersing personal anecdotes and reminiscences with discussions of science, literature, art, philosophy and religion, Woolfson surveys the belief systems that have shaped Western attitudes about other species, examining why some strands of thought have prevailed over others and what the repercussions of this cultural inheritance have been for animals and the environment...continued
Full Review
(927 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).
Frans de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
We live in a time in which our disrespect for nature is coming back to bite us. Timely and wide-ranging, Esther Woolfson's book offers sensitive reflections on how we relate to the animals around us as well as the animal within.
In Between Light and Storm, Esther Woolfson critiques the idea that humans have a unique moral status that grants us the right to exploit animals for our own purposes without regard to their interests and welfare. This belief system, founded on the notion of human exceptionalism, is often referred to as "speciesism," a term coined by English philosopher and psychologist Richard Ryder in an influential 1970 leaflet arguing against the use of animals in research experiments and popularized and expanded upon by Australian philosopher Peter Singer in his 1975 book Animal Liberation.
"Since Darwin, scientists have agreed that there is no 'magical' essential difference between human and other animals, biologically speaking," Ryder wrote, ...
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