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 Western world is currently gripped by an obsessive concern for the rights of animals - their uses and abuses. In this book, Leahy argues that this is a movement based upon a series of fundamental misconceptions about the basic nature of animals. This is a radical philosophical questioning of prevailing views on animal rights, which credit animals with a self-consciousness like ours. Leahy's conclusions have implications for issues such as bloodsports, meat eating and fur trading.

The history of the vivisection debate is a case study in the use of vilification not unlike its rhetorical use by adversaries in the pro-life/pro-choice controversy. According to Vanderford, vilification in that debate serves a number of functions: to identify adversaries as ; to cast opponents in an exclusively negative light; to attribute diabolical motives to one's adversaries; and to magnify the opposition's power as an enemy capable of doing great evil. In the vivisection debate, both sides have attempted to (...) delegitimize each other by one or more of these means. On the antivivisection side, Samuel Johnson in 1758 produced the fiercest attack up to that time on and When the antivivisectionist movement peaked in England in the 1870s, the animal experimentalists began to organize in earnest to fend off the charge that vivisection was both cruel and useless. By the turn of the century an American neurologist, Charles Loomis Dana, identified a way to discredit the mainly female antiscience in the antivivisection movement by inventing the disease to describe one of the diseases affecting mainly women who, having no children or a useful occupation, joined animal protection societies and campaigned against vivisection. Zoophil-psychosis, it was claimed, was a form of mental illness, an incurable insanity that afflicted the hysterical opponents of vivisection. (shrink)