Brute Souls, Happy Beasts, and Evolution: The Historical Status of Animals

Alan Belk is a sessional instructor in the Philosophy Department at the
University of Guelph.

According to one of the models human beings have developed over the
years to guide our thoughts and behaviour, humans are superior to
everything except God and sundry winged beings; this entitles them to
use, for their own ends, anything that is inferior to them. Darwin is
supposed to have changed all that. To accept evolution as an explanation
is to accept that humans are part of the so-called animal kingdom and
have no natural authority for using other animals. They are ends in
themselves, not means to our ends. This shift requires us to find some
basis other than divine authority for our ethical views concerning
animals.

In this long and densely argued book, Preece wants to show that our
current views concerning the status of animals are too simple to be
worth holding and that they are informed by second-rate scholarship. He
tries to do this by showing that the history of our relationship with
animals over the last 2,500 years is far more complex than we tend to
believe and that there is no simple story or model that can do it
justice.

Preece is of the view that much modern scholarship is shoddy and often
directed by self-serving political motives, so he is concerned to
present both sides of a claim fairly, accurately, and at length. The
result of this admittedly laudable view is a book that is extremely
difficult to read. Extremely long sentences are embedded in extremely
long paragraphs that form some extremely long chapters—all of which
makes it difficult for the author to make his points clearly. His book
is therefore recommended for those who can tolerate this kind of
scholarship.