26 Books Like Understanding Animal Welfare

Bernie, of blessed memory, provides ways to think about animal welfare and Animal Husbandry and its impact on food quality. Bernie argues that we have lost the concept of animal husbandry except in smaller, individually run farms. CAFOs have become so large and industrialized that they can no longer house their animals, resulting in poorer conditions that matter to the animals and ultimately impact human health. This book outshines the best of the best books on what an animal needs and wants. 

Maisie has more than 30 years of experience working with Bon Appetite to develop sustainable food production on a grand scale. I believe that the methods she and Fedele Bauccio developed are the future of sustainable and great foo systems. It's a great and fun read with wonderful stories. This book provides a clear path to sustainability and good food.

This book deals with conflicts of Interest in the food world and industrial influence on academic research. You can’t make this stuff up. One issue highlighted by the Pew Commission on “Putting Meat on the Table”—which Marion and I were both part of—was conflict of interest. In this book, Marion describes the range and impact of these conflicts of interest on the quality of the information used for nutritional information. It is scary.   

Are things getting better or worse for farmed animals? I greatly appreciate the honesty of Peter Singer’s update to his 1975 classic. His dream was to inspire a movement that would end cruel “factory farming” by boycotting its products. And he did inspire a movement—but the industry has only got bigger, more intensive, more brutal, more ruthless.

It’s wrecking our environment, our health, and other animals’ lives all at once. The enemy was tougher to beat than he thought. Where do we go from here if we care about other animals? I think this book is a really powerful place to start.

H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, published in 1896, is one of his most intriguing—and frightening. Moreau has created human hybrid beings via surgical experimentation on live animals.

In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s retelling of the Wells classic, she goes further than the original’s philosophical themes by exploring the political, sociological, and cultural conflicts that arise from colorism, colonialism, and sexism.

In a fascinating twist on Wells’s narrative, she sets her novel in 19th-century Mexico during the Caste War of Yucatán, when the indigenous Maya people rebelled against the Mexicans and Europeans who subjugated them to work their ranches and farms. 

She also centers much of her tale on Moreau’s hybrid beings. It is, quite simply, a thrilling novel that is as horrifying as it is thought-provoking.

This book came out right after I completed Laika, but I wish I’d been able to use it in my research (although Dubbs’ earlier book, Space Dogs: Pioneers in Space Travel was extremely useful).

If Siddiqi’s book focuses more on the human journey behind the Soviet space program, this is a parallel account of some other unwitting (and undersung) pioneers: the experimental animals who were sent ahead of humankind. We share this world with animals and they were dispatched on our behalf to test the deep waters of the heavens also. It was thought - correctly - that if they could survive, so could we. Laika may very well be the most famous of these pathfinders (at least beyond Russia), but there were many more. This book is a history of all those other animal astronauts launched into space both prior to Laika and aboard more recent missions.

I loved this book because it was so gripping. It made me long to be a writer. Although it was written over a hundred years ago, the dark story spoke directly to me.

I read it at the darkest time in my life. I was fourteen, and my alcoholic father had become a terrifying force in our home, just like Dr. Moreau, who rules his island with vicious power. I had never dreamed that a crazed leader could break an entire population, but the idea seems shockingly prescient now.

The book made me realize that I, too, could escape from the trap around me, just like the book’s hero, and learn to use my imagination to tell stories.

This is one of those books that stayed with me long after I finished the last page. I think the author’s choice to tell the story from the point of view of the two dogs and the other animals they meet is powerful. We get to feel their fear, sadness, mistrust, and hope for a better life. 

This story can pose quite a dilemma for a reader because on one hand, we know that we’d never hurt animals, but we also realize that when we purchase products that are tested on animals, we are the villains in the story.

I found this to be a hard list to put together because there are so many excellent books on animal history--on any given day I could have presented a completely different list. However, this was the one book that absolutely had to be on my list. Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights was the book that started me on this journey. I first encountered this book when I was a grad student, and it has shaped my thinking on animal history in many important ways over the years. Animals and concerns for their welfare have always been important to me in my personal life, but I hadn’t thought about incorporating human-animal histories into my scholarship until I read this book. It was a real game-changer for me. This is a very good introduction to some of the shifts in thinking that took place regarding relationships between humans and nonhuman animals in Britain… show more.

You’ve probably read The Rosie Project, but have you read the prequel? I’ve always been a sucker for back story and what happened before the moment a movie or novel starts. Well, that’s what you get in The Rosie Effect. And even better, its setting in the vibrant and thrilling New York City only adds to the romance and excitement in this beautiful romantic comedy.