Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Towards Speciesism - Softcover

Richard D. Ryder

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859733301 ISBN 13: 9781859733301

Publisher: Berg Publishers, 2000

Synopsis

When Richard Ryder coined the term 'speciesism' over two decades ago, the issue of animal rights was very much a minority concern that had associations with crankiness. Today, the animal rights movement is well-established across the globe and continues to gain momentum, with animal experimentation for medical research high on the agenda and very much in the news. This pioneering book - an historical survey of the relationship between humans and non-humans - paved the way for these developments. Revised, updated to include the movement's recent history and available in paperback for the first time, and now introducing Ryder's concept of 'painism', Animal Revolution is essential reading for anyone who cares about animals or humanity. Dr Richard D. Ryder is a psychologist, ethicist, historian and political campaigner. He is also a past chairman of the RSPCA. His other books include Victims of Science: The Use of Animals in Research, The Political Animal: The Conquest of Speciesism and Animal Welfare and the Environment (editor). As Mellon Professor, he taught Animal Welfare at Tulane University.

About this title

Review

"The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But can they suffer?" Jeremy Bentham's 1789 dictum lies at the heart of Richard D Ryder's very modern thinking. Psychologist, ethicist, historian: it is, however, a fourth dimension, his campaigning, which gets up the noses of those who embrace tradition and revere a self-defined notion of "natural" above Nature itself. Twenty years ago Ryder coined the term "speciesism" to describe the prejudicial attitudes of humans to nonhumans (he is inclined against the word "animals" when not inclusive of humans), controversially giving its similar status to racism and sexism. Animal Revolution was first published in 1989; this update, 10 years on, refines the theory to reflect 1990s developments, and on the whole the report card reads favourably, though naturally with scope for improvement.

The bulk of the text is a bestial concordance to the English and classical canon. Ryder strives to avoid a familiar catalogue of cruelties, but sets himself the harder task of weaving ideas from eclectic sources onto a framework of British, and to an increasing extent World, history. The detailing is serious but not po-faced--he relishes stories such as the sparrows excommunicated in 1499 for leaving their droppings on a church's pews--yet from 1824 onwards the narrative becomes more political with the forming of the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (among its founders was anti-slavery campaigner Sir William Wilberforce). A succession of setbacks and inertia, punctuated by legislation, finally erupted in the 1960s into radicalism, with which Ryder was heavily involved, taking things up to the modern day, where debate still rages as to the Society's purpose--rescuing kittens or lobbying politicians. The closing chapters, where Ryder outlines his personal philosophy of painism, are a model of gentle yet insistent didacticism drawn from reserves of ethical militancy, and it is to his credit that he prescribes understanding rather than absolutism when the fur starts to fly. Such compassionate reason, to apply his own words, is "easy to ridicule, hard to refute". --David Vincent

Review

"A fascinating account of how animals have been regarded and treated from ancient times to the present day ... Buy this book for the history and the campaigning ... buy it for the psychology and the ideas too. Even if you don't agree with him, Ryder is never less than stimulating." --International Society for Applied Ethology Newsletter

"It would be difficult to find a text that provides a more comprehensive history of man's changing use and relationship to non-human animals. A book full of valuable observations and insights? This book has something important to say and Richard Ryder knows how to say it." --Freethinker (2000)

"Richard Ryder analyses such springs of human conduct as machismo, stoicism and squeamishness. He has never been afraid to court controversy or to unleash uncomfortable new ideas. This is a bracing book." --Times Literary Supplement

Edition details

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1859733301
• ISBN 13: 9781859733301
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 300