The No-Nonsense Guide to Animal Rights.

Tami Oliphant is a Ph.D. candidate in Library and Information Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

The No-Nonsense Guides are polished, succinct, jam-packed, pocket-sized gems. Each book in this series clearly and authoritatively presents and explains the most pressing political, social, and cultural issues of our time. The No-Nonsense Guide to Animal Rights follows this tradition of excellence.

In the guide, Catherine Grant covers every aspect of how humans use other animals. Her discussion ranges from the origins of the animal rights movement, the circumstances governing the production and consumption of food animals, animal entertainers, animals exploited for fashion, and animal testing, and she provides a guide on how to reduce our impact on animals. The guide is meticulously researched, well balanced in the presentation of information, and full of contacts, resources, references, and supportive charts and graphs.

Even those familiar with the animal rights movement have much to learn from the guide. For example, meat conglomerates act very much like media conglomerates—in the U.S., the vast majority of the meat and dairy industry is owned by a handful of companies, and these meat conglomerates work in a vertically integrated fashion, owning both meat and dairy production and processing facilities. Often, they also control distribution and retail outlets. The most important argument Grant makes, however, is that when humans hurt animals they hurt themselves. Animal exploitation inevitably leads to human exploitation. When we mistreat animals we mistreat humans (who are animals too), and Grant makes this connection clear.

The No-Nonsense Guide to Animal Rights is essential reading for everyone. However, human beings tend to grossly mistreat animals and the mere presentation of facts in the guide is heartbreaking and horrifying. It is not easy to read that 20–30 million dogs and cats are destroyed in the U.S. every year or that 15,000 acts of animal cruelty occurred in Alberta alone in 1998 or that every year 57 billion pounds of sea life, including fish, birds, turtles, and dolphins, is unintentionally caught in nets. The guide is highly recommended—everyone will be affected by this book and hopefully will be spurred to take action.