Defending Animals

July 24, 2023
Coulter (Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity), a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, delivers an uneven examination of efforts to protect animals from such dangers as abuse or unsafe living conditions. Surveying the horrors of animal maltreatment, Coulter discusses a hoarding case in which 70 dogs rendered a house so “filthy and dangerous” the human resident had to move out, and tells how one Oregon horse suffered permanent frostbite from being left outside all winter without food or shelter. Protecting animals, Coulter explains, falls to a patchwork of underfunded government and private entities, such as animal control services and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose employees and volunteers are often undertrained and harassed in the line of work. Still, Coulter finds reason for optimism in the dedication of animal protection specialists, including an Ontario nonprofit that repairs the shells of turtles hit by cars. Coulter provides a competent overview of the current state of animal protection, but her suggestions on how to improve it are too general to be useful (“We can’t change the past, but we must learn from it as we shape the future”). It’s a harrowing look at animal cruelty and a hazy roadmap for the work still to be done.