Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
by Hal Herzog
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2010
336 pages
Genre: Other
Publication Information
Does living with a pet really make people happier and healthier? What can we learn from biomedical research with mice? Who enjoys a better quality of life - the chicken on a dinner plate or a rooster who dies in a Saturday night cockfight? Why is it wrong to eat the family dog? Drawing on over two decades of research in the emerging field of anthrozoology, the science of human-animal relations, Hal Herzog offers surprising answers to these and other questions related to the moral conundrums we face day in and day out regarding the creatures with whom we share our world.
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat is a highly entertaining and illuminating journey through the full spectrum of human-animal relations, based on Dr. Herzog's groundbreaking research on animal rights activists, cockfighters, professional dog show handlers, veterinary students, and biomedical researchers. Blending anthropology, history, brain science, behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy, Herzog carefully crafts a seamless narrative enriched with real life anecdotes, scientific research, and his own sense of moral ambivalence.
Alternately poignant, challenging, and laugh-out-loud funny, his enlightening and provocative book will forever change the way we look at our relationships with other creatures and, ultimately, how we see ourselves.
"An intelligent and amusing book that invites us to think deeply about how we define - and where we limit - our empathy for animals." - Publishers Weekly
"One of a kind. I don't know when I've read anything more comprehensive about our highly involved, highly contradictory relationships with animals, relationships which we mindlessly, placidly continue no matter how irrational they may be….This page-turning book is quite something—you won't forget it any time soon." - Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World
"This is a wonderful book - wildly readable, funny, scientifically sound, and with surprising moments of deep, challenging thoughts. I loved it." - Robert M. Sapolsky, Neuroscientist, Stanford University, and author of Monkeyluv and A Primate's Memoir
"Hal Herzog does for our relationships with animals what Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma did for our relationships with food….The book is a joy to read, and no matter what your beliefs are now, it will change how you think." - Sam Gosling, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You
"Everybody who is interested in the ethics of our relationship between humans and animals should read this book." - Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human
This information about Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hal Herzog is recognised as one of the world's leading experts on human-animal relations. His research has been published in prestigious academic journals including Science, the Proceedings of the Royal Society, The American Psychologist, The American Scholar, Journal of Social Issues, and the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, and has been featured in Newsweek, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Scientific American, New Scientist, Slate, CNN, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, MSNBC, Science Daily, the London Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Vancouver Sun, the New Zealand Herald, and India Times. He is Professor of Psychology at Western Carolina University and lives in the Great Smoky Mountains near Asheville, NC, with his wife and their cat Tilly.
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