Bekoff and Pierce argue that animals should be treated much better than they are. They start from the idea of the Five Freedoms, which have been widely used as a way of promoting animal welfare. They are a way of spelling out that idea that animals in human care should be treated well. They should not experience pain and discomfort, fear or distress, and they should be allowed to express their normal behavior. Building on this, Bekoff and Pierce address different ways in which humans use animals: the meat industry, scientific experimentation, zoos, pets, and the treatment and regulation of wild animals. There’s a short final chapter envisaging a different sort of future co-existence with animals.

The main message of the book is that our society does not treat animals well and we often fool ourselves when we think that we do. It is no surprise that the meat industry causes a great deal of suffering of animals, and Bekoff and Pierce make a good case for this. They point out ways in which animals could be treated better and also highlight the odd gap between people’s concern for some individual animals (especially in cases of pet cruelty) and their indifference to the maltreatment of millions of farm animals. They are critical of ideas like “cage-free” chickens and organic farming, arguing that the animals in these farms still suffer and are deprived of freedom.

The authors remain on familiar ground in their discussion of the use of lab animals. They focus on the treatment of the great apes, but they also discuss a wide range of other animals. They point out that a great deal of scientific research deprives animals of the five freedoms, and they also argue that research is invalidated when the animals being experimented on are in pathological states of distress. They challenge the claim that the ends justify the means partly by pushing the suggestion that the accomplishments of animal experimentation are far less than are generally claimed.

The use of animals in zoos is often justified as a form of education for people and also as a means of conservation of rare species. Bekoff and Pierce argue that zoos are very often guilty of animal cruelty, and rarely allow animals to express their normal behavior. They also argue that zoos are not necessary for education and don’t do the job well. While they are for the conservation of rare species, they point out that this does not need to be done in zoos. They appeal to the idea of animal dignity in their criticisms here, and decry the act of humans gawking at animals whose habitats have been destroyed. This goes beyond their basis of the five freedoms and is particularly contentious.

The chapter on pets will be a challenge for some animal lovers who have pets of their own. While not completely against pet-owning, Bekoff and Pierce are critical of many practices of locking pets up in cages, leaving social animals alone for many hours a day, the cruel practices of the pet industry, and the reduction of quality of life of pets who are not able to live as they naturally would. There’s some discussion of whether pet cats should be kept indoors to keep them safe or allowed outside so they can enjoy their freedom. They don’t consider the threat that outdoor cats pose to the wild bird population.

The chapter on wild animals is a mixture of ideas and cases without an overarching thesis. It doesn’t fit so well with the theme of the book in examining human responsibilities to animals in our care, but in a wider sense since we dominate the earth and take away so many living environments of wild animals, all animals on earth are in our care. There are government agencies with responsibility for wildlife and every land owner has some effect on the living environment of wild animals with their decisions about what to do with their land. So the rather random selection of topics in this chapter is nevertheless interesting.

The book has 6 pages of references and both authors have academic affiliations, so it is grounded in scholarship. But it is not an academic book as such. Published by the Beacon Press, it is aimed at a general readership and the arguments are stated simply, without all the qualifications and definitions that one would find in journal articles. The Animals’ Agenda presents a straightforward argument that we should make major changes to the way we treat animals and how our lifestyles affect them. They don’t consider many counter-arguments and so presumably defenders of the industries of farming, zoos, laboratory experimentation on animals, and pets will have their standard replies. But the book does a good job of stating the authors’ view, based on the morally plausible five freedoms, which present an impressive challenge to the status quo.

© 2017 Christian Perring

Christian Perring is Vice President of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry.