Results

This Comment is divided into four parts. Part I will describe the problem presented by international whaling and provide a historical context of the industry, its relatively recent regulation, and specific actions concerning Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. Parts II and III will draw on this case study to illustrate the competing models of activism--protest and interventionist--and highlight the demonstrated advantages of and drawbacks to each. Part IV will lend insight into the implications of permitting each model.

This note analyzes the challenges that the animal rights movement faces in reforming society’s relationship to animals--particularly in regard to farmed animals--by tracking a similar evolution of the concepts of “dominion” and “civilization” within the early feminist movement. Specific focus is on nineteenth-century white middle-class women, who viewed themselves as models of civilized, liberated womanhood, while asserting maternalistic dominion over their “primitive” and underprivileged sisters. Acknowledging the way in which nineteenth-century America--which, for socio-political and legal purposes, was composed almost exclusively of Protestant white men--was willing to gradually “grant” one class of women a voice in society, based on well-established perceptions of “true womanhood,” is important in considering the way in which modern society seems poised to acknowledge some degree of rights for companion animals, while ignoring the legally-sanctioned misery to which billions of farmed animals are subjected annually.

This introduction to Volume 16 is provided by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of such book as When Elephants Weep, and The Pig Who Sang. to the Moon.

This book review examines Lee Hall’s new book, which presents an innovative animal rights theory: wild animals, due to their autonomous nature, are endowed with rights, but domesticated animals lack rights because they are not autonomous. With that theory in mind, Hall outlines ideas about how humans are obligated to treat both wild and domestic animals. Hall first argues that the rights of wild animals require that humans let them alone. Yet, despite the fact that domestic animals lack rights under Hall’s theory, Hall argues that humans are required to care for them because it is humans who brought them into existence. While the reviewer believes that Hall’s theory is indeed innovative and appealing, he ultimately concludes that it cannot explain why domestic animals completely lack rights and that the implications of the theory for how they are to be treated are unsatisfactory.