Read more
"How do people who love animals translate that devotion into helping creatures who are not our pets? How do we express our care for animals when that means different things to omnivores and vegetarians-or, say, to hunters and non-hunters? Barbara J. King, a widely read expert on animal cognition and emotion, here guides readers through the difficult choices and deep rewards of turning empathy into action on behalf of animals. King discusses our relationship to animals in five different contexts: our homes, the wild, zoos, our food system, and research facilities such as biomedical laboratories. She offers a host of ways in which each of us can be better, and do better, for animals. Acting to improve animals' lives can, she shows, immeasurably enrich our own. True, there is also heartache and the risk of burnout from endlessness of animal rescue the dilemmas that attend it. But King's focus is on the joys. She describes the "happiness lift" that she herself has experienced joining with other activists on behalf of animals destined for slaughter or confined in sub-standard zoos-and in rescuing dozens of cats, some of whom we meet in this book. This is a book for anyone who cares for animals and wishes to do more for them, whether it's learning to live peaceably with spiders in the home or join with others to rescue our more dramatically endangered animal friends"--
About the author
After twenty-eight years of teaching anthropology at the College of William and Mary,
Barbara J. King retired early to become a science writer and public speaker. The most recent of her seven books are
Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat and
How Animals Grieve, both published by the University of Chicago Press. King's work has been featured at
Scientific American,
Aeon,
Undark,
SAPIENS, NPR, the BBC,
Times Literary Supplement, the World Science Festival, and the annual TED conference in Vancouver. Her TED talk on animal love and grief is available online at https: //www.ted.com/speakers/barbara_j_king. She lives in Wicomico, VA.
Summary
Warmly written and scientifically informed, Animals’ Best Friends is the invitation we all need to improve the lives of nonhuman animals among us—and thereby improve our own.
