Frankly a beautifully written book, very well researched and moving. Would've given 4 stars until I arrived at the conclusion which was some weak legislation for humane meat & free range animal products. If he has no issue with meat, apparently, but just with the raising & "cruel" slaughter of animals why is he himself a vegetarian? Because there is no humane way to take the life of someone who doesn't want to die. Slaughter always involves terror & injustice, and Scully knows this. Why not promote at the very -very- least vegetarianism at the end of the book to instruct people how to introduce some form of mercy for animals into their own lives. A waste of a truly powerful book.

Recommend it for christians & conservatives though but recommend reading up on veganism & viewing some documentaries afterwards.

A rare DNF. The hypocrisy is strong with this one. You can say you love animals as much as you want, provide many examples of the cruelty of animals. But if you support and praise the people who vote against policies that would help animals then your words are just empty. Too preachy and the words too empty.

If you interested in reading this book, you should read my brother Eric's review of it. He's said pretty much what I thought of the book, but more more eloquently than I could write it! Just a couple of my own thoughts - I was particularly struck by his comments about how the average person views their own animals (family pets, etc.) and would never dream of mistreating them vs. what they are willing to eat (i.e. meat from industrial farms) and use (i.e. products tested on animals). For example, why is it OK for dogs to be experimented on in the lab when we would never have consented to have our beloved black lab Kalua subjected to the same treatment? In the end, they are all animals and we tend to draw a false line between the two.

I really struggled to get through the latter half of the book (particularly the "Nature and Nature's God" chapter), which was much more theory-driven. Like Eric says in his review, the other chapters in which he catalogs the horrors of trophy hunting, whaling, and industrial pig farming are much more compassionate and compelling. I was particularly sickened by the trophy hunting chapter. The theory is important as well but in the end, I'm convinced and didn't end up reading all of that chapter.

I, like Eric, wished that he would have considered the humane treatment of animals on traditional family farms in more depth. However, he does mention this option on p. 316 and calls such farms a "decent compromise". He says that most consumers these days are left with "a choice between two radial alternatives...be radically kind or ...radically cruel." In other words, be vegetarians (radically kind) or buy inhumanely raised meat from the supermarket (radically cruel). This is the decision/way of life that Barbara Kingsolver writes about in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and the way of eating that Nik and I have committed to as well. We'd rather not eat meat than eat any meat that comes from animals raised in the industrial machine. And the more we read about "free range" chickens and other supposedly more responsible choices from the supermarket, the more we are determined to only buy our meat directly from a farmer, where we can see how our animals are raised and can verify for ourselves that there is not cruelty involved. And yes, it's much more expensive this way and so we eat a lot less meat than we otherwise would. We eat meat maybe twice a week (sometimes three), we eat small portions of it and we eat a lot more vegetables. In the end, we don't believe that we are entitled to meat at every meal nor do we even miss it at every meal. And I'm glad for that. And yes, if we lived in a place where we were not blessed to have so many small farm options, we would chose the radically kind option, and become vegetarians.

In the end, I think that the lesson I take with me from this book is that we, as humans, have a responsibility to take care of those who are less powerful than ourselves. This applies to people as well as to the animals.

This book is refreshing, with a different perspective and original thoughts on how humans treat animals.

The author is a former speechwriter for the Bush administration and it shows in many ways. His writing is a pleasure to read and evocative. Even now while reading through my highlighted sections I am affected emotionally. Unlike most writing of this kind, he comes from a conservative and Christian perspective and even though I don't share these political or religious leanings I can't help but be moved by appeals to universal values. Consider a woman who read Psalms and Proverbs to her dog all night. How much does God care about this animal, and does He care the same for all the other creatures in Creation?

The writing speaks for itself with moral clarity.

"Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest tall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at, morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky."

"When substitute products are founds, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. The warrant expires. The divine mandate is used up. What were once "necessary evils" become just evils."

He deals directly with Christian theology and how the Bible portrays the treatment of animals. This is probably the most effective section for pious Christians. The passages he analyzes are surprisingly supportive of animal welfare. God makes covenants in Genesis 9 and Hosea 2 with all creatures. Jesus commands the Gospel be preached to all creatures. As he says, Christianity is about condescension, with the strong serving the weak and the meek inheriting the earth. Even if animals somehow deserve the grisly fates we impose on them, isn't the point of mercy that it's given to the undeserving? Instead of calling eating meat murder, he calls it merciless. Again appealing to Christian values:

"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 avoid, that is moral cowardice."

An analogy that isn't in the book but I've thought about is the Christian perspective on slavery. In various points in the Bible, God explicitly allows slavery and regulates how it should be done. Since abolition, Christians have been against slavery of all forms and use values from the Bible to argue against it, even though slavery is allowed in the Bible under some circumstances. I think Christians could see the treatment of animals similarly. Yes, eating animals is explicitly allowed in the Bible, but in a modern context where eating animals is no longer necessary for survival it should be avoided out of mercy for all of God's creatures.

I recommend this book for anyone, especially animal rights activists or non-Christians. If you want your perspective to be widely adopted you will need to appeal to a broad audience, and this book puts the universal feelings of empathy humans have towards animals in a conservative and Christian perspective. I also strongly recommend it for anyone who is conservative or Christian and cares for our fellow members of Creation.

I'll end with this quote from the book:

"If, in a given situation, we have it in our power either to leave the creature there in his dark pen or let him out into the sun and breeze and feed him and let him play and sleep and cavort with his fellows - for me it's an easy call. Give him a break. Let him go. Let him enjoy his fleeting time on earth, and stop bringing his kind into the world solely to suffer and die. It doesn't seem like much to us, the creatures' little lives of grazing and capering and raising their young and fleeing natural predators. Yet it is the life given them, not by breeder but by Creator. It is all they have. It is their part in the story, a beautiful part beyond the understanding of man, and who is anyone to treat it lightly? Nothing to us - but for them it is the world."

I'll start by saying I had to read this for a class I was taking, and the professor had a horribly slanted view on this material. When I say slanted, imagine Rose & Jack trying to hold on to the Titanic as one end was going under. THAT kind of slanted. Ergo, my opinion of it is colored a great deal based on how she forced us to interpret it in class if we wanted to pass and the subsequent discussions that went along with it.

If you're looking for some references on this particular topic, I guess you could say this would be a good reference for it, however I do not believe it gives both sides of the point a fair shake. It, much like my professor, is drastically slanted towards the side of the crazy vegans (I say crazy, referring to the ones trying to slam their point of view down your throat, NOT the ones who don't make a big stink about it unless people are giving them a hard time). Also, it does have a few religious references and arguments in it, so if I'd skip over those areas if your professor or whatever audience your research is being presented to isn't exactly open to the religious side of things.

Wonderful book, wonderful proza and many arguments i use in my own activism. The rhetoric is strong, it is well researched, and although i didnt agree with his view on Singer, it was an absolute blast to read. So well written

This book is glittering prose! I read it with a pencil or pen in hand and typically felt like underlining every word on the page! I was always scribbling things in the margins. It was great! I am amazed at how carefully Matthew Scully explains his thinking on various subjects, without being overbearing or self-righteous. I will try to quote some of my favorite passages, although there are too many favorites to include here.

"let us just call things what they are. When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets his 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 avoid, that is moral cowardice." p. 121

"When substitute products are found, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. The warrant expires. The divine mandate is used up. What were once "necessary evils" become just evils. Laws protecting animals from mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation are not a moral luxury or sentimental afterthought to be shrugged off. They are a serious moral obligation, only clearer in the more developed parts of the world where we cannot plead poverty. Man, guided by the very light of reason and ethics that was his claim to dominion in the first place, should in generations to come have the good grace to repay his debts, step back wherever possible and leave the creatures be, off to live out the lives designed for them, with all the beauty and sights and smells and warm winds, and all the natural hardships, dangers, and violence, too." p. 43

"We tend to assume, moreover, that instinct, even when it is clearly at work, means there can be no accompanying thought or feeling--as if a doe when she caresses her fawn, or your cat when he or she kneads on you, can have no awareness or pleasure in that instinctive experience. We certainly don't assume that about ourselves when we feel the tug of instinct, in avoiding danger or safeguarding our young or seeking potential mates. On the contrary, the thoughts and emotions accompanying instinctive desires are usually the most vivid. The most earthy, ordinary human experiences--coupling, birthing, dying--are in fact, the most deeply experienced. Instinctive desire and action in our own case does not always mean blind, unfeeling reflex, and there is no reason to supppose it is any different for them." p. 228

"The whole sad business, even while defended in terms of reason and realism, is designed precisely to prevent that engagement with the facts, to keep information and conscience as far apart as possible, to soothe and satisfy all at once, now even to the point of eradicating 'cosmetic defects' like bloodsplash lest Everyone be troubled by the thought that pain was felt and blood was shed.

"I know many people far more upright and conscientious than I am who disagree, who think nothing of it. I know that vegetarianism runs against mankind's most casual assumptions about the world and our place within it. And I know that factory farming is an economic inevitability, not likely to end anytime soon.

"But I don't answer to inevitabilities, and neither do you. I don't answer to the economy. I don't answer to tradition and I don't answer to Everyone. For me, it comes down to a question of whether I am a man or just a consumer. Whether to reason or just to rationalize. Whether to heed my conscience or my every craving, to assert my free will or just my will. Whether to side with the powerful and comfortable or with the weak, afflicted, and forgotten. Whether, as an economic actor in the free market, I answer to the god of money or the God of mercy." pp. 324-325.

The author was a former Bush speech writer and each page has some damn eloquent sentances.

I basically read the book for a bit of background on the Christian side of the animal rights debate. Two years after reading it I'd say the argument is basically this: we own the world, we can do anything we want with it, but we should be respectful of God's gift.

Not too with the argument, but it seems as if it would be convincing to believers.

It also has some eye opening passages about the whaling industry, and the hunting industry ("canned hunts," and rich white men paying an arm and a leg to bag exotic animals in africa).

Growing up in the WI hunting culture, I have never thought of myself as anti-hunting. However, it was interesting to read about safari game/trophy hunting in Africa by extremely wealthy Americans. I didn't realize that Safari Club International was considered a charity for tax purposes. Even if Scully doesn't change your mind, you will feel an obligation to at least reexamine and justify to yourself your positions on issues related to animals.

Dominion has long been invoked as a religious justification for treating animals anyway we damn well please. In this book by the same name, Mathew Scully (a Christian and conservative) mostly succeeds in rebuting this and other excuses for our inhumane treatment of God's meeker creations. I gave the book only four stars because it bogs down in parts; the first chapter on biblical interpretation was academic enough to almost scared me off. But the later chapters flow and sometimes race, including passages so poetic that they demand to be read out loud. It's also fun watching Scully lay the smack down to conservative apologists for the needless suffering we inflict on animals. For a sample of his intelligent writing, check out the articles reprinted on his website, matthewscully.com.

Dominion: A Christian writes about hunting, factory farming, and other sins against animals

Several years ago, I heard about a Republican, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, who had written a book in favor of protecting animals. I also heard that he was vegetarian (now vegan).

I initially wondered if hell had frozen over.

I’m joking, but only slightly. Because it was just a few months ago, at the Republican CPAC conference, that a former aid for Donald Trump warned that democrats wanted to take your hamburgers away. And Rep. Mark Meadows (North Carolina) warned that Democrats were coming for your cows.

All this despite that fact that most Democrats eat cows too.

That this issue over beef and hamburgers is becoming an issue (driven more by climate change than animal rights) led me to finally get around to reading this book: Dominion, by Matthew Scully.


And while I disagree with a few aspects of the book (Scully’s off-putting obsession with abortion and Peter Singer), I would dare anyone to read this book — Democrat or Republican, Christian, Muslim, Jew or atheist, and not come away a vegetarian.

As a devout Christian, Scully goes back to the Bible and calls into question this idea that the Bible says it’s okay for humans to eat animals. He points out that after that much-cited line in Genesis about man having dominion over animals, comes this line:

And God said, Behold. I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding fruit; to you it shall be for meat.

If you read this line as advocating a plant-based lifestyle, you read it correctly.

Scully writes: “Indeed there was a time when Christians fasted from animal products throughout all forty days of Lent, a form of self-denial still found among the orthodox and matched in Islam by the prohibition on killing game while on pilgrimage.” Scully continues:

The next step seems obvious to me. If sanctity is the goal, and flesh-eating a mark of the Fall, the one is to be sought and the other to be avoided. Why just say grace when you can show it? Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, the life of a pig or a cow or fowl of the air isn’t worth much. But if it’s the Grand Scheme we are going by, just what is a plate of bacon or veal worth? The skeptical reader can write me off as misguided, if not mad. I am betting that in the Book of Life “He had mercy on the creatures” is going to count more than “He ate well.”

Scully is a powerful writer. I admire the courage it took him to write a book that flies counter to the worldview of so many of his colleagues.

As the subtitle of this book states, this is a book about mercy. And chapter after chapter we are confronted with scenes of great violence to animals, scenes utterly devoid of mercy.

Scully takes us with him to a conference for Safari Club, a grotesque affair, in which people win awards based on how many exotic animals they kill. Scully writes of ranches in the US, where animals are fenced in so that hunters on busy schedules can have guaranteed kills. If there is karma in the afterlife, well, you can imagine what I wish on hunters.

As a prominent Republican, Scully was welcomed to this event and it was fascinating to see how people interacted with him. He destroys the myth of hunting as conservation, something I hear often in this part of Oregon, where hunters talk about their duck stamps and license fees as a form of love for animals and the environment. He quotes one such “conservationist” who tells this story about elephants in Namibia:

…we have a road that divides the hunting area from the protected area. The water is in the hunting area. And I see the elephants come into the area, rushing, to get a drink. And then they rush back. And when they’re across the road you can see them relax. You can see the relief. They know.

Yes, elephants know all too well what monsters we can be.

Scully moves on to factory farms and spends a great deal of time touring pig enclosures, or prisons, as they really should be called. I won’t recount the horrors he witnesses on his tours — led by docents who are too numbed by it to apparently care — but I will say that this is some of the most powerful writing about pigs in captivity I have read. And, like the Safari Club, I suspect it is because the author is welcomed into these private areas by the executives who view him as one of their own. He is not one of those crazy vegan protestors, so he gets the personal tour. And when you see the disconnect between the executives who have convinced themselves they are treating the animals well and the author who sees the truth, you get a feeling for just what a massively awful system we have constructed, one that few people ever see, protected by laws and money as well as our allegiance to traditions and habits. A system that abuses and murders billions of animals every year. Not millions. Billions.

And we are all complicit. As Scully writes, “Everyone is wrong.”

It may be adamantly objected that I am equating injustice to animals with injustice to human beings, a sign of my own misplaced priorities and moral confusion. This rejoinder only cuts the other way. It is only further evidence of our own boundless capacity for self-delusion, especially when there is money involved. For if so many wrongs once thought right can fill our human story, such unbounded violence and disregard of human life, how much easier for the human heart to overlook the wrongs done to lowly animals, to tolerate intolerable things. Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide. “We had stopped short at Comfort, and mistaken it for Civilization,” as Disraeli remarked in another context. Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to MercySeveral years ago, I heard about a Republican, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, who had written a book in favor of protecting animals. I also heard that he was vegetarian (now vegan).

I initially wondered if hell had frozen over.

I’m joking, but only slightly. Because it was just a few months ago, at the Republican CPAC conference, that a former aid for Donald Trump warned that democrats wanted to take your hamburgers away. And Rep. Mark Meadows (North Carolina) warned that Democrats were coming for your cows.

All this despite that fact that most Democrats eat cows too.

That this issue over beef and hamburgers is becoming an issue (driven more by climate change than animal rights) led me to finally get around to reading this book: Dominion, by Matthew Scully.


And while I disagree with a few aspects of the book (Scully’s off-putting obsession with abortion and Peter Singer), I would dare anyone to read this book — Democrat or Republican, Christian, Muslim, Jew or atheist, and not come away a vegetarian.

As a devout Christian, Scully goes back to the Bible and calls into question this idea that the Bible says it’s okay for humans to eat animals. He points out that after that much-cited line in Genesis about man having dominion over animals, comes this line:

And God said, Behold. I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding fruit; to you it shall be for meat.

If you read this line as advocating a plant-based lifestyle, you read it correctly.

Scully writes: “Indeed there was a time when Christians fasted from animal products throughout all forty days of Lent, a form of self-denial still found among the orthodox and matched in Islam by the prohibition on killing game while on pilgrimage.” Scully continues:

The next step seems obvious to me. If sanctity is the goal, and flesh-eating a mark of the Fall, the one is to be sought and the other to be avoided. Why just say grace when you can show it? Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, the life of a pig or a cow or fowl of the air isn’t worth much. But if it’s the Grand Scheme we are going by, just what is a plate of bacon or veal worth? The skeptical reader can write me off as misguided, if not mad. I am betting that in the Book of Life “He had mercy on the creatures” is going to count more than “He ate well.”

Scully is a powerful writer. I admire the courage it took him to write a book that flies counter to the worldview of so many of his colleagues.

As the subtitle of this book states, this is a book about mercy. And chapter after chapter we are confronted with scenes of great violence to animals, scenes utterly devoid of mercy.

Scully takes us with him to a conference for Safari Club, a grotesque affair, in which people win awards based on how many exotic animals they kill. Scully writes of ranches in the US, where animals are fenced in so that hunters on busy schedules can have guaranteed kills. If there is karma in the afterlife, well, you can imagine what I wish on hunters.

As a prominent Republican, Scully was welcomed to this event and it was fascinating to see how people interacted with him. He destroys the myth of hunting as conservation, something I hear often in this part of Oregon, where hunters talk about their duck stamps and license fees as a form of love for animals and the environment. He quotes one such “conservationist” who tells this story about elephants in Namibia:

…we have a road that divides the hunting area from the protected area. The water is in the hunting area. And I see the elephants come into the area, rushing, to get a drink. And then they rush back. And when they’re across the road you can see them relax. You can see the relief. They know.

Yes, elephants know all too well what monsters we can be.

Scully moves on to factory farms and spends a great deal of time touring pig enclosures, or prisons, as they really should be called. I won’t recount the horrors he witnesses on his tours — led by docents who are too numbed by it to apparently care — but I will say that this is some of the most powerful writing about pigs in captivity I have read. And, like the Safari Club, I suspect it is because the author is welcomed into these private areas by the executives who view him as one of their own. He is not one of those crazy vegan protestors, so he gets the personal tour. And when you see the disconnect between the executives who have convinced themselves they are treating the animals well and the author who sees the truth, you get a feeling for just what a massively awful system we have constructed, one that few people ever see, protected by laws and money as well as our allegiance to traditions and habits. A system that abuses and murders billions of animals every year. Not millions. Billions.

And we are all complicit. As Scully writes, “Everyone is wrong.”

It may be adamantly objected that I am equating injustice to animals with injustice to human beings, a sign of my own misplaced priorities and moral confusion. This rejoinder only cuts the other way. It is only further evidence of our own boundless capacity for self-delusion, especially when there is money involved. For if so many wrongs once thought right can fill our human story, such unbounded violence and disregard of human life, how much easier for the human heart to overlook the wrongs done to lowly animals, to tolerate intolerable things. Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide. “We had stopped short at Comfort, and mistaken it for Civilization,” as Disraeli remarked in another context. Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

This review first appeared on EcoLit Books.

I read this book many years ago and still think about it year after year. I have not had a chance to revisit it yet, but it definitely deserves another read. This is the type of book that will enrage you, give you hope, and increase your overall knowledge of the animal kingdom and our relationship to it. I have recommended this book countless times to friends and can't wait to finally dive back in from the beginning. Matthew Scully does a phenomenal job of explaining the wonders of various species while highlighting the ways we continually abuse them for our own benefit and the ways we continue to advocate and help preserve them in spite of continual opposition to do so.