Here we turn to some important distinctions that everyone needs to know. These distinctions can become very technical and academic if one wishes to go that way, but the basic issues are relatively easy to understand. This chapter starts with the key distinction between...
Education, the professions, and the arts have all been a rich part of human ingenuity. Each has also played important roles in humans’ past interactions with other living beings, and each will surely play such roles in future possibilities.
The “education” examined here is...
In the daily lives of humans are many opportunities to protect or harm nonhuman animals. Through consumer choices, environmentally sensitive acts, or treatment of nearby animals, individual humans create animal protections or harms. For this reason, social realities are as important as are the...
The individuals and organizations listed here are mentioned because they have made a difference somewhere and thus become revealing parts of the worldwide animal protection movement. Some are very well known, even famous. Peter Singer is, for example, a high-profile philosopher at Princeton University...
Just as the major human endeavors of law, education, religion, and various fields like literature and the study of history reveal humans’ diverse engagement with other living beings, so too do many sciences reveal that humans and other animals are connected in important ways....
The history of humans interacting with the living beings outside our own species is deep and broad. Any single attempt to tell the whole story of how humans have seen and reacted to, as well as protected or harmed, our fellow Earth creatures is...
A central issue in any discussion of protections for living beings outside our own species is the question of the animals’ actual biological realities. Intuitively, we know that other animals have their own experiences of the world, but some philosophers have aggressively denied that...
In the phrase “animal rights,” the word “animal” is rarely, if ever, understood to refer to humans. Instead, it is virtually always a reference to living beings outside our own species. Humans are, of course, primates, mammals, vertebrates, and so forth. Since all of...
In the 1957 documentary The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, the Algerian strategist Larbi Ben M’Hidi says to one activist, “It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder still to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it....
As one of humans’ most significant institutions, legal systems have impacted greatly the ways in which humans deal with other living beings. There are several different kinds of legal systems around the world, and while most of the discussion here focuses on the legal...
