Animal Welfare in a Changing World contains four kinds of essays. First, there are the ones that offer glimpses into specific welfare problems in different domains: whales entangled in fishing gear, and the limits of the existing strategies for minimizing harms to these creatures; cattle health in feedlots, including a discussion of several foot defects that can create stress; the plight of domesticated dogs, with mention of the particular problems facing brachycephalic canines. Second, there are more general essays that explore the structural factors that create welfare problems: the implications of intensification for all farmed animals; the impact of public opinion on shifting corporate welfare standards; the vagaries of animal welfare laws. Third, there are the essays that are straightforwardly philosophical: the costs and benefits of anthropomorphizing animals; objections to speciesism; the debate over the badness of death for animals. Finally, we might divide the essays in a way that cuts across the other distinctions: there are the rather personal and narratival contributions — describing, for instance, the experience of walking through farrowing sheds — and the relatively impersonal ones, following more conventional scholarly norms.

This diversity means that it’s difficult to summarize the volume. The contributions are united only by their concern with animal well-being: the methodological disagreements are stark; the essays represent quite different views on the relative moral importance of animals; and the authors don’t see eye to eye on which issues, exactly, constitute welfare issues in the first place. However, rather than viewing this range as a kind of problem, I suggest that it’s the main appeal of the book. It does what you would expect: it leaves the reader with a sense of the remarkable number of ways in which we harm nonhuman beings, as well as the enormous scope of their suffering. But there are other books that do that work, even if they aren’t quite as recent. The novel offering, to my mind, is that Animal Welfare in a Changing World leaves the reader with a sense of the many people who are concerned to relieve nonhuman suffering. There are policy wonks and vegan activists, animal scientists and economists, lawyers and philosophers. There are people who are inclined to protest; there are others for whom animal pain is an engineering problem. Let it suffice to say that all advocates for animals aren’t cut from the same cloth. In a world where they have to partner to achieve their ends, it’s valuable to be reminded of their diversity.

© 2018 Bob Fischer

Bob Fischer teaches philosophy at Texas State University. He’s the editor of The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat (Oxford, 2015; with Ben Bramble) and College Ethics: A Reader on Moral Issues That Affect You(Oxford, 2017). He’s also the author of several essays on animal ethics, moral psychology, and the epistemology of modality.