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Book Review
| Killing Animals. By the Animal Studies Group. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. x + 217 pp. Appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $50.00, paper $25.00.
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| Modern technology has allowed people to do many things faster and on a larger scale. Such things most strikingly include the transformation of landscapes and the manufacture of goods. As the authors of the essays collected in this provocatively titled volume point out, they also include the killing of animals. The contributors represent a range of fields (anthropology, art history, literary and cultural studies, geography, and philosophy), and their contributions address the main traditional modes of mass animal killing (slaughtering and hunting) as well as one distinctively modern mode (euthanasia in animal shelters). Several essays address the representation of animal killing in art and literature. Although the introduction expansively promises to explore "ways in which societies past and present manage the concept of animal killing in various cultural arenas," the essays all focus on Anglophone cultures of recent centuries, and mostly on Britain at present or in the not-too-distant past (p. 5). This emphasis on the contemporary resonates with the volume's fundamental assertion that recent developments have made a difference of kind in the way animals are killed and in what it means to kill them, not just a difference in degree. The most interesting essays in the volume deal with distinctively modern topics. They also admit the difficulty of finding practicable solutions for the complex moral questions they raise. |
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