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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: May 2007

Books for animal people

 

The Moral Menagerie: Philosophy and Animal Rights

by Marc R. Fellenz
Univ. of Illinois Press
(1325 S. Oak St., Champaign, IL 61820), 2007.
301 pages, paperback. $25.00

 

Marc Fellenz, a philosophy teacher at Suffolk County Community College in New York, writes from a broader and deeper perspective than is typical in debates over animal rights theory. Reviewing the major animal rights theories, Fellenz fails to find any that lack significant shortcomings. He goes on to look for a better intellectual basis on which to ground an ethical theory on behalf of animals.

Fellenz rejects Peter Singer's utilitarianism because one cannot weigh the benefits of most activities against the costs with any precision.

Tom Regan's deontological rights-based theory is based upon sentience, Fellenz points out, and since sentience exists along a continuum, no one knows where the arbitrary lines of exclusion should be drawn.

The Aristotelian ethic of emphasising the moral virtue of the human, rather than the moral effect of the activity, also fails to indicate where the virtuous line in our dealings with animals should be drawn.

The theory that society and ethics are based upon a social contract, to avoid perpetual warfare, is not easily applied to human/animal relations, because humans usually have nothing to gain by voluntarily refraining from exploiting animals.

Fellenz terms all of these approaches "extensionist" i.e. seeking to inappropriately extend human constructs to the animal world.

An environmental ethic, Fellenz claims, would "do more than establish a ground for our moral obligations to nature; it would risk making the natural world so sacrosanct that humanity's very presence in it cannot avoid being morally objectionable."

Fellenz compares the theoretical constructs for animal rights to the theories behind deep ecology and ecofeminism. Deep ecology and ecofeminism each provide a logical and compelling moral basis, Fellenz believes, for undermining the narrow anthropocentrism which contaminates traditional moral philosophy, and allow us to deal realistically with non-human animals.

Fellenz quotes John Berger's apt description of a zoo as an "epitaph--a monument to the permanent marginization of animals and a concession that authentic wildness is itself an endangered species. As wilderness and our access to it continue to shrink," Berger continued, "we may have little choice but to rely upon such impoverished and self defeating devices as the game farm and zoo to preserve the memory of the very existence of the animals' world 'Wildlife management' is thus an oxymoron, for if it has to be managed it is not truly wild."

Some of Fellenz's statements in regard to hunting may raise a sceptical eyebrow. For example, Fellenz writes, "it is telling that while the humane animal advocate feels compassion for the suffering animal it may be the hunter who truly befriends the animal, and heeds its call."

Some humans enjoy escaping the stultifying self- domestication that we call civilization through sport hunting, but to suggest that by taking up predation a person can actually "befriend" his victims is to make a claim at odds with the reality that wild predators usually do not kill and eat their friends, and do not hang their heads on the wall.

Like most philosophers, Fellenz seems to have little feeling for animals, and little direct experience with them. Extending sympathy and understanding to non-humans should not be rejected as "extensionist'" when those who do this know that it elicits the same responses from many animals, including wildlife, as from humans in need of care.

But such experience has little meaning to moral philosophers. Instead, Fellenz provides a fascinating summation of the philosophy of hunting and other ritualized or institutionalized forms of animal abuse, citing parallels with sacrifice and totemism. There are disquieting similarities between the ancient high priests, with their knives and sacrificial altars, and the hunters and vivisectors with their knives and guns, likewise eager to sacrifice animals for their gods, now named "conservation" or "science."

Just as guilt about killing was in ancient times expiated by collective rituals and a professed totemic kinship with animals, so contemporary hunters deceive themselves by ritually reciting that they are "lovers of nature'" who are "keeping down the numbers'" or "removing problem animals'" or "investing money in the Third World."

Vivisectors have a parallel ritualistic vocabulary. From their own perspective, what they do is "sacrifice" individual animals for the perceived greater good of society.

This book will not easily be understood by readers who are not already familiar with animal rights theory. But for those who can endure the turgid prose, the dense text and the multisyllabic philosophisms, the rewards are great. There is wisdom on every page, even if the book groans under the weight of it.--Chris Mercer
<www.cannedlion.co.za>

Whalewatcher:
A global guide to watching whales, dolphins and porpoises in the wild

by Trevor Day
Firefly Books Ltd.
(66 Leek Crescent, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada L4B 1H1), 2006.
204 pp., paperback, illustrated. $19.95.

 

Though Whalewatcher is structured as a field guide, armchair travelers will probably spend more time with it than marine mammal observers seeking to compile a life list.

More than 10 million people per year watch whales, dolphins, and porpoises or about as many as watched birds a generation ago, before the recent global explosion of interest in birding.

However, while anyone can watch birds from anywhere, few people have any opportunity to watch marine mammals from their homes, workplaces, or during a commute, and even those of us who do have the opportunity rarely manage many sightings.

United Nations Development Program zoologist and marine biologist Trevor Day in Whalewatcher describes 41 whale, dolphin, and porpoise species--about half of the known varieties. Day focuses on the most observable species, except for the Chinese baiji, or river dolphin, now officially extinct.
Yet, even though the listed species are mostly relatively easily seen, if one can go where they live, seeing all 40 would require visits to every corner of the world. Compiling a life list of 400 bird species would be comparatively simple.

In view of the difficulty and expense of whale-watching, one must wonder why Day omits mention of three of the most accessible venues: the junction of the Saguenay River with the St. Lawrence River estuary in Quebec, hosting minke whales, fin whales, a small population of resident belugas, and occasional visiting blue whales; the Stellwagen Bank off Cape Cod, featuring minke and fin whales, with many other species passing by; and Lime Kiln Point, on the western side of San Juan Island in Puget Sound, renowned as an especially good spot for watching orcas and Dall's porpoises, occasionally visited by minkes and grey whales.
--Merritt Clifton

National Geographic Field Guide
to the Birds of North America
Fifth Edition

Edited by Jon L. Dunn & Jonathan Alderfer
502 pages, paperback. $24.00.
National Geographic Birder's Journal
502 pages, paperback. $16.95.
Both from the National Geographic Society
(1145 17th St. NW, Washington, DC 20036), 2006.

 

How many National Geographic Society birding manuals can one person use?

For that matter, how many birding manuals from the many rival publishers can possibly find an audience?

According to the publisher's flack sheet, there are now from 46 million to 85 million birders in the U.S., depending on whether one counts only those who buy field guides and keep life lists of species seen, or includes everyone who watches and identifies interesting birds now and then.

Further, as the Baby Boomers reach retirement age, the numbers of active birders are expected to expand to about 128 million --comparable to the numbers of people who share their homes with cats and dogs.

"Forty percent of birders travel more than a mile from home to bird," says the flack sheet. "On average, bird enthusiasts spend 120 days a year observing birds around the home, and 17 days on bird-watching trips."

By those standards, and assuming that all trips including a substantial amount of time watching birds qualify, even if they have a different primary purpose, I'm in the 40%, and have been for much of my life. I watch birds almost every day, mentally identify most of those I see, and reach for a birding reference about once a week.

Yet even at this relatively high level of interest, I cannot imagine myself needing or wanting a birding library as extensive and overlapping as the National Geographic Society now offers, apparently trying to repackage every scrap of information to fill every possible market niche.

Having reviewed the National Geographic Complete Birds of North America and the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds--Washington & Oregon in April 2006, I was quite surprised in October to receive the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America and National Geographic Birder's Journal. They seemed, at a glance, to be heavily redundant.

And I do mean heavily. The Field Guide to Birds is not remarkably different in content or organization from competitor volumes, but it is among the heftier field guides around. The one time I actually took it outside, I dropped it in the mud, learning the hard way that it is not to be managed with just one hand. It also lands on one's toes with a substantial impact.

The Field Guide to Birds does, however, have the virtue of presenting the range maps of birds on the same pages as their pictures. That eliminates the problem presented by some other field guides of having to look in two different places to see if X species could really appear in Y location.

The Birder's Journal turns out to be handy for persons interested in compiling a life list, which seems to include most male birders, as well as many women. The length of one's life list is the currency of status among birders, many of whom take up birding as a use in retirement for the competitive drive that they formerly applied to careers in business, law, and finance.

Included in The Birder's Journal are sketches of all 967 bird species considered native to North America, opposite pages in which the birder can record the date, time, and place of each sighting, along with any other relevant notes.

This is a very neat, handy, organized way to collect information that birders formerly kept on index cards or in notebooks and looseleaf binders.

Compiling a life list has so far never seemed to me worth doing. To my birding friends, this confirms my status as a common loon. If I were going to do it, though, this is how I would begin.
--Merritt Clifton