A Plea for the Animals

October 3, 2016
Buddhist monk and author Ricard (Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and Your World) makes a strong argument for treating animals with respect and compassion. In practice, he says, that means not eating them. Ricard is systematic and comprehensive in developing his case; he examines the conditions of contemporary meat production, the use of animals in experiments and for entertainment, the history of human-animal relations, and what contemporary ethology shows about animal consciousness. The most original part of his treatise is philosophical and ethical. He draws on well-known animal rights advocates such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan and also looks closely at moral philosophy, from Kantian ethics to the contemporary “trolley problem” of distinguishing between two evils. Given his monastic livelihood, it’s surprising and disappointing that he does not draw more from Buddhism, which has a rich understanding of compassion. Instead he relies on sensational indictments of animal breeding developed by others such as novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and French journalist Aymeric Caron. Two chapters repackage prior work. Despite some flaws, the book makes an important contribution to the
literature on animal rights.