BETWEEN LIGHT AND STORM

A beautifully written reflection on the enduring conceit of human exceptionalism and the resultant harm caused to animals.

Two suppositions guide this book. One is that all Earth’s creatures possess “an indefatigable determinedness of self”—for this reason, they have a right to flourishing lives. Humans are neither behaviorally nor morally superior, nor are animals “a thing apart.” Animals and humans are equal in moral standing: “If I have a soul, so do my birds,” writes Woolfson, acclaimed author of Corvus: A Life With Birds and Field Notes From a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. Our response to the “egregious, destructive, purposely and wantonly cruel” treatment that animals often receive from humans should be nothing short of indignation. The other supposition is that “our behavior towards the natural world” is shaped by the diverse ways that we interact with it. Woolfson weaves together a rich array of personal anecdotes, historical documents, novels, religious scripture, philosophical ruminations, and scientific studies to explore human-animal encounters: killing them for food, hunting them for pleasure, subjecting them to experiments, displaying them in museums, farming them for use in clothing, and living with them as pets. Woolfson is particularly concerned about arguments that defend human cruelty, as when “tradition” is called on to justify hunting whales and killing birds. Throughout, Woolfson’s prose is lyrical—e.g., “the heavy hum of insects in scented air”; regarding vivisection, she recalls accounts “so graphic and disturbing that, like the whispered memories from prolonged and punishing sieges, peculiarly sanguinary battles or wanton massacres, they live to be revisited.” While the author exercises restraint when it comes to justified outrage, she does not wholly resist: “Eric and Donald Trump Jr., enthusiastic ‘big game hunters’, were famously photographed with their kill—a leopard, an elephant, a buffalo. One of them holds up an elephant’s severed tail. They smile, as they all do, bathed in the full glow of their malignant vacuity.”

Learned, compassionate, and disconcerting, this is a major contribution to the literature on animal welfare.