Loved the belief and idea of the book, but it was SO LONG and dry. I mostly skimmed.

Extremely well written and the religion didn’t detract. Some parts of this were absolutely horrific, as if Clive Barker had wrote Brave New World

A different perspective on a familiar, distressing topic. While the prose got to be a bit repetitive toward the end, his points were well (and passionately) argued.

I've read other excellent books in this vein (Eating Animals, Animal Liberation, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?), so there's not much new here to a student of this topic, but what is new is the willingness to tackle the religious arguments in favor of God-granted human dominion over animals. I admire the author's courage and dogged pursuit of his case.

Some great quotes:

“Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them.”

"The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.”

“An author describing the methods of intensive farming, or the excesses of sport hunting, or even the harsher uses of animals in science writes with confidence that most readers will share his sense of concern and indignation. Sounding the call to action--convincing people that change is not only necessary, but actually possible--is more problematic. In protecting animals from cruelty, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fringe. To condemn the wrong is obvious, to suggest its abolition radical.”

My first book after turning vegetarian that made me go completely vegan.

Matthew Scully is a political speech writer and sometimes this driving home of a point like a stump speech comes through on the page. I was not a Christian nor conservative nor vegan, but read Scully's book to see the arguments made to advance this position. There was a line in it about rabbits - those raised for food living in the same conditions as those raised for fur - where Scully stated that it would be better to be "arbitrarily kind as opposed to arbitrarily cruel." And, that was it. I became a Jewish liberal pescatarian. So, I guess it is a pretty effective book in many ways.

Powerful arguments, on a variety of levels, that challenged me to re-evaluate some of my own actions and attitudes toward the rest of the animal kingdom. I walked away questioning some of my choices as a consumer of meat and my naive participation in systems that degrade both animals and the environment. The deconstruction of the traditional "dominion" philosophy many traditional Christians have been socialized into is a great theme throughout the book. I highly recommend this one.

Still one of the most powerful books I've ever read. Every few years I pick it up again. Parts of it are hard to get through, but Scully is unmatched in his ability to communicate the heart and soul of this issue. He's also a unique voice in the animal advocate world, as a religious and conservative man. The argument made on a spiritual level - the true meaning of dominion and stewardship, for example - just hits me like a speeding train every time. The plain, inarguable logic and harsh truth of what it means to torture and kill living beings just to have a piece of fried chicken or a steak makes me realize that if people saw what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses, no one would ever defend the meat and dairy industries again. Sometimes this book breaks my heart, but other times it's so uplifting that I understand for the first time what it is to have God speak to my heart. I'm not very familiar with God sometimes, but I understand mercy. Mercy is the gift we were given, and what we're called to give to others, human and animal alike. It's the only thing of value we really have. That knowledge is life-changing for me.

A beautiful and heartbreaking book.

The author does two things really, really well. First, he persuasively takes a leading argument against animal protection -- sentimentalism -- and throws it back at those who defend hunting, whaling, and meat-eating by using their own words. Second, he promotes an ethic of gentleness in a way that made it seem appealing and not at all wimpy. I didn't feel that the author was ever emotionally manipulative -- after all, he needs to confront the charge that animal protection is all about sentimentality -- but rather he makes you feel outraged and stricken by the suffering of these animals in a really compelling way.

I found the first chapter a little aimless and its prose a bit heavy, but once the author launches into the substance of the book, he drives home his message with tremendous force. I understand why he had to devote so much space to the debate on animal consciousness, but, perhaps because I find so little merit in the arguments against animal consciousness (which is exactly his point), I found it tiresome. I thought that the other theoretical chapter (on the idea of animal rights) was interesting and well-written, though, and I was really grateful for the last chapter on what could be done and what some big-hearted people are already doing. Although it often made me cringe, I appreciated the amount of research he did in the practices he opposes and the fact that he allows their advocates to speak for themselves.

I thought that much of the book would be preaching to the choir - I'm already a vegetarian, after all - but the chapters on big game hunting and whaling were novel and shocking even to me. I do wish it were shorter - not because there was a lot of wasted space, not because I would want to cut any of the content, but because it is hard to recommend it to others when it is so long (400 pages).

Read it.

"My point is that when you look at a rabbit and can see only pest, or vermin, or a meal, or a commodity, or a laboratory subject, you aren't seeing the rabbit anymore. You are seeing only yourself and the schemes and appetites we bring to the world --- seeing, come to thing of it, like an animal instead of as a moral being with moral vision" (3).

"For me it was a simple moral step of extending that vision out into the world, for what are dogs but affable emissaries from the animal kingdom? Here, in this one creature, was a gift given to me and to my family, bringing so much life and happiness. What gifts they are if our hearts are inclined in the right way and our vision to the right angle -- seeing animals as they are apart from our designs upon them, as fellow creatures on their own terms, some glorious and mighty like the elephant, some fearful and lethal like the tiger, some joyful and gentle like the dolphin, some lowly and unprepossessing like the pig, but not a one of them, however removed from our exalted world, hidden from its Maker's sight" (26).

"The animals were kept in the mine for years at a time, such was the effort involved in dragging them back...'Usually when brought to the surface, the mules tremble at the earth radiant in the sunshine. Later, they almost go mad with fantastic joy. The full splendor of the heavens, the grass, the trees, the breezes, breaks upon them suddenly. They caper and career with extravagant mulish glee. A minor told me of a mule that had spent dome delirious months upon the surface after years of labor in the mines. Finally the time came when he was to be taken back. But the memory of a black existence was upon him; he knew the gaping mouth that threatened to swallow him. No cudgellings could induce him. The men held conventions and discussed plans to budge the mule. The celebrated quality of obstinacy in him won him liberty to gambol clumsily on the surface.' There is nothing fanciful here. It is hard realism, facing facts about suffering both human and animal" (36).

"Take one impulse, your hankering for a hot dog. Multiply it a hundred million times over and follow the lines as they meet in Utah at that 50,000-acre facility, housing all those hogs never once allowed outside. That is the complex world one craving creates. Most people can't even face the details behind it" (44).

"Whenever we are called to decide the fate of an animal, the realism comes in at least facing up to the price of things whenever man with all his powers enters the picture. It requires discernment and care and humility before Creation. It means understanding that habits are not always needs, traditions are not eternal laws, and the fur salon, kitchen table, or Churchill Room are not the center of the moral universe. It means seeing 'the things that are' before we come marching along with our infinite agenda of appetites and designs and theories, and not covering it up with phony science or theological niceties or the unforgiving imperatives of tradition or economics or conservation" (45).

"'Killing 'for sport' is the perfect type of that pure evil for which metaphysicians have sometimes sought. Most wicked deeds are done because the doer proposes some good to himself...[but] the killer for sport has no such comprehensible motive. He prefers death to life, darkness to light. He gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, 'Something that wanted to live is dead. There is that much less vitality, consciousness, and perhaps, joy in the universe. I am the Spirit that Denies'"(77).

"Why there is no Theodore Roosevelt Award at SCI [Safari Club International] is a mystery. A fitting honor in his name might recognize, for instance, excellence in the total number of orphans and wounded left behind in a single year" (82).

"I found Sharp just as he was completing some forms for an elephant-hunt package, his specialty, judging by the posters displayed at his booth. He seemed to welcome the chance to set aside his price lists and contracts and to talk about the creatures themselves, surprising me with his eloquence. 'Elephants, yes, I always feel regret and sadness. Especially the old bulls like this'--pointing to the picture on his desk. 'Everybody wants the big tuskers. But they're very intelligent, very sensitive animals. They even know when the hunting season begins and ends. I have seen elephants who wandered into the hunting areas running back into the protected areas, and you can see them visibly relax when they've crossed the road, as if they know they're safe. They begin grazing again'"(86).

"'Elephants are like us,' he answers. 'They live to be eighty and they are sexually mature at, what, eighteen or twenty. When you kill them, like when they have to cull the herds from helicopters, it's terrible because you can't just kill some individuals. You have to kill them all. Men just cry like babies. I have been there.' You have to kill them all because we have lately discovered the intricate family relationships at work in the herd. The calves, without their mothers' care, will become rampaging, asocial juveniles, and so they, too, must go"(87).

"In fact, let us just call things what they are. When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgement, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help him avoid, that is moral cowardice"(121).

"Few adults have any illusions about our modern factory farms and packing plants, or about the tender mercies accorded the creatures that creepeth therein: the bright, sensitive pig dangling by a rear hoof as he or she is processed along, squealing in horror; the veal calf taken from his mother, tethered and locked away in a tiny dark stall for all of his brief, wretched existence. If you could walk all of humanity through one of these places, 90 percent would never touch meat again. We would leave the place retching and gasping for air. We cringe at the thought of it, and that cringe is to our credit"(128).

"If any actual reverence still inspires Japan's whalers, it seems to be of the self-directed variety. Thus, we may 'adore' whales all we want, provided we have killed them first. We may indulge sentimentality, but only if it is showered upon the butchers themselves and their cherished ways. One may demand again and again to know just what is so 'special' about whales, only one must never, ever ask just what is so 'special' about whale meat. One may even acknowledge the 'loss of merit' in a man who would kill a whale or dolphin, but only if the reproof is confined to empty, self-serving ritual. And one is permitted to feel pity, even to wallow in it, just so long as it is self-pity"(171).

"Confronted with each nation's own questionable products and practices, we have two choices. We can say, as Mr. Komatsu hopes, 'Well, they do X but we do Y, so who are we to judge?' We then end up with no standard at all, instead using other people's cruelties as an excuse for our own. Or, in each country, we can take animal welfare seriously enough to examine X and Y on their own merits, by reference to clear and fixed standards we apply to ourselves and our own industries and all who enjoy the privilege of trading with us"(185).

"Is there, ask the modern theorists, 'something that feels like to be an animal'? Can it be scientifically established that animals feel anything? Can an animal 'think thoughts about thoughts'? Do animals act with 'intentionality,' conscious and deliberate in their actions, or are they merely 'purposeful,' driven by hither and yon by the blind instinct, impulse, or appetite of the moment? Can any animal be 'an appropriate object of sympathy'? As a practical matter it comes down to this: Do animals suffer and, if they do, what duties do we bear them"(191)?

"None of these abstract theories would warrant such space and attention if they stayed where they belong -- in the world of theory, mind puzzles to be debated in the faculty lounge. The problem lies in their practical application. They are what gives license to the vicious things that people actually do to animals. Here, piling conjecture upon conjecture, we have a smart fellow like Mr. Budiansky straining to prove that an elephant doesn't even know his or her own trunk. Somewhere in Africa, meanwhile, some unphilosophical lout is tormenting and killing an elephant, that elephant is trumpeting in fear and rage, the calves are crying and scattering, and the law does nothing to stop it because we're still not quite satisfied that the creatures suffer or that their suffering is meaningful or that they think or feel anything at all, and on and on. I am not sure what is the worse evil, the kill or the theory" (229).

"Missing above all is love, which the theorists mistake for utility. Love for animals, like our own love for one another, comes in seeing the worth and beauty of other apart from us, in understanding that the creatures need not be our equals to be our humble brothers in suffering and sadness and the story of life" (246).

"Closing the door on five hundred faces, I wonder how Perry gets any sleep himself over in that pretty new house of his. How does a man rest at night knowing that in this strawless dungeon of pens are all of these living creatures under his care, never leaving except to die, hardly able to turn or lie down, horror-stricken by every opening of the door, biting and fighting and going mad? This is how the hurricane found them too, all packed in like this, and what was that scene like"(260)?

"To run our modern factory farms and charnel houses, you need people actually willing to do the soul-killing work it requires. In America we have turned to our brothers to the south. Just as in Saint Thomas More's Utopia the bloodletting is left to the slaves, today, here and in Western Europe, we have our immigrants. Packing plants have long relied on the unskilled labor of immigrants, but only now are their services also needed for the rearing of livestock. They make fine 'associates.' They don't ask a lot of questions. They don't make demands. Deportable at any moment, they don't start unions or any of that nonsense. They keep to themselves, especially the illegal ones, and don't make trouble. Typically they don't know the first thing about pigs or other farm animals, either. But what does that matter when there is no tending or herding or caring to be done? All you need is hardworkin' people, people without choices, people so poor and desperate that seven or eight dollars an hour for cutting throats and filling dead holes seems like a break in life. Best of all, immigrants disappear. When they've saved enough and endured enough, you can send them back and feel like you've done them a favor. We don't have to see them, either" (262).

"Gay trundles ahead, directing my attention to this and that with the AI rod she has been using as a pointer, cheerfully unaware, apparently, of the profound betrayal of veterinary ethics everywhere around us -- the sworn obligation of every veterinarian 'to protect animal health [and] relieve animal suffering'"(268).

"To sum up, factory-farm animals aren't suffering, and Smithfield is not to blame for the suffering of factory-farm animals. It's all the consumers' fault. It's the shareholders' fault. It's the economy's fault. It's the competition's fault. It's the fault of the Japanese. The scientists. The weather. The mosquitos. It is the fault, the misery of factory-farm animals, of everything and everybody except the people who actually own the animals and control the farms"(280).

"Now...there is no more element of surprise because there is no more kindness. The treacheries begin on the day they are born. From the start they must feel they are in the hands of an enemy. No creature of the factory farm goes to its death feeling betrayed by friends"(286).

"Only effete 'urbanites,' we are admonished, care about such things because we are so estranged from nature's harsh realities. But these particular realities are not of nature's design, and in every corner of our factory farms one finds the most casual disregard for the nature of the animals themselves. Nature has its own hardships, but its own kindnesses, too, like straw and room to sleep and the care of a mother for her young. when we take even those away, we are smothering the inmost yearnings of these creatures and the charity in our own hearts" (288).

"Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them...Take anything else I have described in this book -- elephants ambushed at the water hole, baby monkeys ripped from their mothers and eaten alive, dolphins trapped and clubbed to death -- and the reality is that none of it is any worse than anything we tolerate in our corporate farms. Perhaps you share my opinion of people who do those other things. You may call them cruel. You may call them reprehensible. But they all have a ready answer: 'You eat meat, don't you'"(289)?

"What are all these hardy menfolk really defending here? A pleasure. A flavor. A feeling in their bellies. And what does this say of them? Here life has presented them with a moral problem, maybe by their lights a little one but a moral problem all the same, and this is all they can think about, hens and burgers and pork loin stiffed with prunes and dried apricots. It's just too inconvenient, too much trouble to change"(320).

"Yet nothing so convinces me of the soundness of my own choice to do without meat as to be told again and again, in a thousand ads and cultural cues, that I have no choice at all, that I must eat meat to be strong and stout and hardy. I must have animal flesh, and yet somehow, with little sense of privation or struggle or self-mortification, I have managed to go twenty-eight years without it, never suffered a single nutrition-related medical problem, and, if I may strut a bit myself, have been known to bench press a respectable 355 pounds"(320).

"For my part, it has always seemed a good rule never to support or advocate any moral act that I would not be prepared to witness in person. I apply that to the questions of human welfare and I see no good reason not to apply it to animal welfare as well. When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral reasoning" (321).

"From all three of these thinkers we get the same set of relevant facts: There is such a thing as pain or injury to an animal. There is such a thing as cruelty to animals. And directly or indirectly, cruelty to animals is bad. It is the act of an unjust person" (340).

"Perhaps that is part of the animals' role among us, to awaken humility, to turn our minds back to the mystery of things, and open our hearts to the most impractical of hopes in which all creation speaks as one. For them as for us, if there is any hope at all then it is the same hope, and the same love, and the same God who 'shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away'" (398).

I went into this book narrow-minded. Knowing that it was written by a self-proclaimed religious, conservative author, I assumed I would not enjoy it. I was in fact wrong.

As a long-time vegetarian myself, I am accustomed to books on the subject of animal rights that are written as an appeal to our logic, or perhaps an appeal to our emotional side, with gruesome descriptions of animal abuse and treatment. This book appeals to the reader's spiritual side, arguing that the religious concept of "dominion" that man was given over all living things requires responsibility and compassion and not the complete disregard and cruelty that we generally have.

Scully focuses a great deal of time on trophy hunting, furriers, killing and whale "poaching", low-hanging fruit given the number of people that actually partake in these activities, but important subjects given the diminishing populations of some of these highly sought after animals. He delves a bit into the treatment of animals for experimentation and in abattoirs, but does shy away from making stronger recommendations in those cases. I would assume that Scully understands his intended audience well (right-leaning, religious folks), and knows that appeals to vegetarianism and environmentalism are often seen as cults of the Left.

Compared to many books on the subject, Scully does not talk very descriptively about what occurs in feed lots, laboratories, etc. He assumes the reader already has a good grasp of these things. Instead, he talks about what our treatment towards animals should be, regardless of whether a case can be made for animal sentience, intelligence, or a claim to "rights". Using religious appeals from mainly Christianity, he asks the reader to show mercy to animals, even when it means that it will add cost to the price of meat, or change a long-held belief or tradition.

I would definitely recommend this book for long-time vegetarians, as it is interesting to see the subject of animal treatment from a completely different point of view, as well as a great book for conservatives, religious book clubs, etc.

Was a required reading for a Women's and Animal Rights class in college. While I don't fully agree with Matthew Scully on everything, this is actually a very good read. I am a vegetarian (I try to do vegan for a month every 3 months) and am very big into animal rights. I like that this book highlights factory farming and the intelligence of these wonderful animals that we dismiss to make us feel better about the meat we eat.