A revised and improved edition of a book in continuing demand. Do animals have rights? If not, do we have duties towards them? If so, what duties? These are myariad other issues are discussed in this brilliantly argued book, published in association with the leading think-tank Demos. Why are animal-rights groups so keen to protect the rights of badgers and foxes but not of rats mice or even humans? How can we bridge the growing gap between rural producers and urban consumers? Why is raising animals for fur more heinous than raising them for their meat? Are we as human beings driving other species either to extinction or to a state of dependency? This paperback edition is fully updated with new chapters on the livestoick crisis, fishing and BSE and a layman's guide introduction to philosophical concepts, the book presents a radical response to the defenders of animal rights and a challenge to those who think that because they are kind to their pets, they are therefore good news for animals.
Author
Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C. In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband. In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).
