A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion

by Matthieu Ricard

Overview

A powerful and wide-ranging indictment of the treatment of animals by humans—and an eloquent plea for animal rights.

Every cow just wants to be happy. Every chicken just wants to be free. Every bear, dog, or mouse experiences sorrow and feels pain as intensely as any of us humans do. In a compelling appeal to reason and human kindness, Matthieu Ricard here takes the arguments from his best-sellers Altruism and Happiness to their logical conclusion: that compassion toward all beings, including our fellow animals, is a moral obligation and the direction toward which any enlightened society must aspire.  He chronicles the appalling sufferings of the animals we eat, wear, and use for adornment or “entertainment,” and submits every traditional justification for their exploitation to scientific evidence and moral scrutiny.  What arises is an unambiguous and  powerful ethical imperative for treating all of the animals with whom we share this planet with respect and compassion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611804744
Publisher:	Shambhala
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	766,889
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Matthieu Ricard received a PhD in molecular genetics from the Pasteur Institute in 1972 before departing his native France to study Buddhism in the Himalayas, eventually becoming a monk of the Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal. Renowned also as a photographer and translator, he is the author of numerous previous books, including Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and Your World,  Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, and, with his father, the late Jean-François Revel, The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life. He dedicates all the income of his work to two hundred humanitarian projects run in the Himalaya by the organization he founded, Karuna-Shechen.

Table of Contents

Translator's Preface xi

Introduction 1

1 A Brief History of the Relations between Humans and Animals 5

2 Out of Sight, Out of Mind 41

3 Everybody Loses: Effects of Industrial Breeding and Meat Eating on Poverty, the Environment, and Health 55

4 The Real Face of Industrial Animal Breeding 71

5 Sorry Excuses 93

6 The Continuum of Life 115

7 The Mass Killing of Animals: Genocide versus Zoocide 147

8 A Little Side Trip into the Realm of Moral Judgment 159

9 The Dilemma of Animal Experimentation 167

10 Illegal Trade in Wildlife 187

11 Animals as Objects of Entertainment: The Will to Power 199

12 Animal Rights, Human Obligations 239

Conclusion: An Appeal to Reason and Human Kindness 263

Acknowledgments 273

Notes 275

Bibliography 322

Index 330

About Karuna-Shechen 342

Editorial Reviews

Are animals mere things, here for us to exploit? Or are they rather sentient, often intelligent beings, entitled to live their own lives? Matthieu Ricard examines theological, philosophical and scientific thinking on both sides of the issue and concludes that without doubt we must recognize each animal is an individual deserving of our compassion and respect. A Plea for the Animals is fascinating, instructive and compelling, speaking to us on both an intellectual and emotional level.”—Jane Goodall

"A Plea for the Animals continues and completes the wonderful work Matthieu Ricard did in his Altruism, drawing on science and philosophy to show that compassion cannot be limited to members of our own species but must be extended to all beings capable of suffering.  This is a book for everyone who is willing to consider the case for a radical change in the way we treat animals."—Peter Singer, author of Practical Ethics and Animal Liberation

"A Plea for the Animals is an outstanding and well-referenced book that surely will make a difference for the billions of nonhumans who routinely suffer globally at the hands of humans, be it in slaughterhouses, laboratories, or other captive situations, or in what's left of their natural environs. Matthieu Ricard's heartfelt plea for us to tap into our caring and compassionate selves and to treat other animals with unbounded dignity and respect will go a long way toward inspiring people to see other animals for who they truly are, to feel for them deeply, and to recognize how they fully depend on us to grant them the ability to be able to live their lives in peace and safety — to survive and to thrive in an increasingly human-dominated world. By personally rewilding and understanding what other animals want and need, humans will more easily reconnect and become re-enchanted with other animals so that peaceful coexistence becomes a reality, and it will be a win-win for all concerned."—Marc Bekoff, author of Animals Matter and Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence 

From the Publisher

10/03/2016
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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-09-01
Buddhist philosopher Ricard (Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, 2015, etc.) examines the fraught relationship between humans and animals, proposing a new ethic to govern it.“Can the notion of rights really be restricted to the human species when there exist at least 7.7 million species of animals?” So, extending arguments advanced by Peter Singer and other students of animal rights, asks Ricard. His book is a careful disquisition on that large question, in which he answers, emphatically, in the negative while encouraging his human audience to consider it with at least some small degree of humility—for we are not alone, and we alone are not the only creatures endowed with intelligence. Indeed, in the early part of his argument he examines what he calls “sorry excuses” for our treatment of animals, some of which center on our supposed superiority, others of which propose that animals somehow respond to and process pain and suffering differently than us. (Blame it on Descartes.) Neither nutrition nor tradition demands that we eat animals, Ricard urges, and those sorry excuses amount to a poor effort “to efface our scruples and to allow us to continue to exploit and mistreat animals with an untroubled conscience.” Though eminently accessible, Ricard’s thesis interacts with the latest, often highly technical philosophical theories, and he can find few that even begin to defend that exploitation and maltreatment. He closes his argument by noting that many countries around the world have begun to extend legal personhood of some kind to animals, particularly our great apes kin, with Austria being the most advanced of them: that nation prohibits killing animals “without a valid reason,” which of course opens up its own can of worms. With legal personhood thus established, moral personhood necessarily follows. Fascinating, if a source of as many questions as answers, and essential fuel for any discussion of the rights of animals.

Kirkus Reviews