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On ANIMAL EQUALITY, by Joan Dunayer

Animal Person

A handful Animal Person readers since May of 2006, when I started this then-daily blog, have asked me if I've read Joan Dunayer. And now that I've read Animal Equality and begun Speciesism , I think I know why. Dunayer devotes a chapter each to the language used in hunting, zoos, "marine parks," vivisection and "animal agriculture."

Animal 100
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John Passmore (1914-2004) on Animal Suffering

Animal Ethics

Neither Aquinas nor Kant nor Newman denied, however, that animals could suffer: Descartes and Malebranche thought differently. It is impossible, they argued, to be cruel to animals, since animals are incapable of feeling. For animals did not eat of the Forbidden Tree.

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How to Confront Cruelty

Critter News

I came across this 2005 book from the Society & Animals Journal titled Confronting Cruelty Moral Orthodoxy and the Challenge of the Animal Rights Movement. Readership: This book will be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the animal rights movement in England, the United States and Australia. Sounds interesting.

Cruelty 100
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On SPECIESISM, by Joan Dunayer

Animal Person

I finally read SPECIESISM , by Joan Dunayer, which was published a couple of years after ANIMAL EQUALITY , which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Whenever the media report that someone has killed "an endangered animal" or "an endangered species," they too confuse an individual with a species. To be consistent (and nonspeciesist).

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Where Does Entertainment Begin and End?

Animal Person

Vamsee Juluri, Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, takes me back to graduate school when he writes of the importance of the stories we tell ourselves in " Use Free Speech to Celebrate Animal Life, Not to Enjoy Their Suffering." They certainly depict cruelty to animals, right? What do you think?

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John Passmore (1914-2004) on the Moral Status of Animals

Animal Ethics

One restriction on the absolutism of man's rule over Nature is now generally accepted: moral philosophers and public opinion agree that it is morally impermissible to be cruel to animals. That, on the whole, is the Christian tradition. Controversies no doubt remain.

Morals 40
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J. Baird Callicott on Factory Farms

Animal Ethics

From the perspective of the land ethic, the immoral aspect of the factory farm has to do far less with the suffering and killing of nonhuman animals than with the monstrous transformation of living things from an organic to a mechanical mode of being. They have become, in Ruth Harrison 's most apt description, "animal machines."