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  • Ethics and Animals: An Introduction by Lori Gruen
  • Kathy Rudy (bio)
Ethics and Animals: An Introduction Lori Gruen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 233 pages.

I have been teaching an undergraduate course called “Ethics and Animals” for almost a decade now. It counts as a core course for the ethics certificate at my university, and is housed in my home department, Women’s Studies, so there is some presumption of feminist or progressive content. I have the syllabi from all these years laid out in front of me on my desk. What strikes me immediately is that the turnover of the reading list is at least 75 percent, and sometimes even 100 percent, from year to year. Early on, I see Singer (1975) and Regan (1983), Adams (1990), DeGrazi (2002), Francione (1996), Singer and Regan again, Linzey (1987), Haraway (1989), Francione again, Wolfe (2003), Derrida (2008), Waldau (2006), Agamben 2004), Deleuze (1987)—the lineup looks like I Googled “books: ethics and animals” and spread the results out over a decade. My classes usually went well, but most of the books I assigned never quite met students exactly where they were, or pushed them in the directions toward which I wanted them to head. I often had to fill in lots of background and argumentation. Or worse, I had to problematize what an author saw as the only possible orientation toward the topic. Worse still, I sometimes had to do close readings of the text and explain to them what the words actually meant. I seemed always to be looking for something more teachable.

But that quest may be over with the publication of Lori Gruen’s Ethics [End Page 125] and Animals: An Introduction. Finally, here is a text that is, to my thinking, perfectly targeted toward the smart undergraduate interested in the topic of ethics and animals. While so many of the books I have taught over the years were designed to “advance the understandings of the field,” and therefore presumed a great deal of information or background theory, Gruen’s work outlines the shape of the discipline, and advances it by inviting in new and younger voices. I’ve taught the book for three semesters now, and it remains fresh, moving, and insightful.

For me, teaching a class on “Ethics and Animals” entails three different goals. First, you want to fully explain to students the problems that exist with the human use of animals today. The average undergrad that finds her way into one of these classes probably doesn’t know much about puppy mills, or factory farming, or chimp research. So the book you assign has to introduce these topics, and describe the conditions in which animals live in a clear, unwavering, but slightly dispassionate manner. Singer’s 1975 Animal Liberation, the book that ostensibly launched the contemporary animal rights movement, did just that, especially for food animals and scientific research subjects. But a lot has changed in the last forty years and that book often feels a little out of date. As I will detail below, Gruen takes a similar tack to Animal Liberation, but with descriptions and topics that are more current.

Second, you want a textbook for an intro ethics course to offer sound, ethical solutions for WHY keeping animals in terrible conditions and using their bodies in the ways we do is so troublesome. You want the book to explore questions like: should animals be granted rights like many humans have? If not, how should we take their suffering into consideration? Many of the other texts in animal ethics presume that readers understand the differences between, say, rights and utilitarianism, or between abolitionism and welfare. However, the reality is that many of the students who find their way into these classes don’t know what the analytical tradition is, let alone the differences between deontologists and teleologists. Again, Gruen’s book is the perfect introduction to these concepts. She explains the differences between different approaches very clearly and is not bound by a commitment to only one approach. She often shows how different approaches produce different (or sometimes similar) outcomes for solving any dilemma; Gruen uses whatever she can to...

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