It’s the holiday season, and more than a few of us are celebrating with turkeys laid out on dining room tables. To be precise, 46 million of the birds are consumed every Thanksgiving, to say nothing of Christmas. That’s the figure that the moral philosopher Peter Singer cites in his latest book, Consider the Turkey (Princeton Univ., Oct. 22). A short work that can be read in less time than it takes to roast a bird, Singer’s book—as the title suggests—is intended to have us think more about the prodigious creature whose cultural roots in this country date back to the Pilgrims. (As Singer notes, the turkeys we eat are descendants of Mexican birds that were brought home by Spaniards via Constantinople—thus the bird’s name—then reintroduced to this continent by English colonists.)
As you might imagine, the raising of turkeys in the United States has little to do with what farming was like for those early generations. The industrial production of the birds, as described by Singer, is shocking—both in how they are confined in factories and ultimately killed. The details are grisly and disturbing, and Singer hopes that, at a minimum, they encourage people to buy turkeys from farms, not slaughterhouses, if not abstain from eating them altogether.
Consider the Turkey is but one of many notable new books about animals and our relationships to them. Another is What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World’s Most Familiar Bird (Atria, Nov. 5) by Sy Montgomery, who wrote the bestseller The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness. As with that book, Montgomery opens readers’ eyes to a largely overlooked yet familiar animal. In What the Chicken Knows, our reviewer writes, Montgomery “reframes the assumptions that many laypeople carry about chickens, debunking stereotypes about their lack of intelligence with support from specific scientific studies and stories from her own experiences with her ‘Ladies,’ as she affectionately refers to her flock of hens.” Montgomery, though, steers clear of anthropomorphism, “insisting,” our critic adds, “that chickens do not deserve our respect because of the ways in which they are similar to humans, but instead for the simple fact that they are living things, with their own lives.”
Another person with a new and deeper understanding of animals is Liese Greensfelder, author of the forthcoming Accidental Shepherd: How a California Girl Rescued an Ancient Mountain Farm in Norway (Univ. of Minnesota, Feb. 4). Our reviewer calls the book “a reliable guide to the kind of rural life that no longer exists.”
In even more remote climes, on Canada’s northernmost island, researchers L. David Mech, Morgan Anderson, and H. Dean Cluff found wolves that are not afraid of humans. Fittingly, their book, The Ellesmere Wolves: Behavior and Ecology in the High Arctic (Univ. of Chicago), comes out in the dead of winter (Feb. 10).
Thankfully, there are easier ways of learning about—and from—canines without straying too far from home. Here to guide the way is philosopher Mark Rowlands, whose forthcoming book is The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life (Liveright, Jan. 28). Dog lovers, prepare to slobber over this one.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
