Book picks similar to
Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals by Karen Dawn
animals
non-fiction
animal-rights
nonfiction
The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for The Animals We Love
Jane Goodall - 2002
Respect all life2. Live as part of the Animal Kingdom3. Educate our children to respect animals4. Treat animals as you would like to be treated5. Be a steward6. Value the sounds of nature and help preserve them7. Do not harm life in order to learn about it8. Have the courage of your convictions9. Act knowing that your actions make a difference10. Act knowing that you are not alone.Filled with inspirational stories, The Ten Trusts provides lessons Jane Goodall has learned from a lifetime of experience, with the warmth and emotion her readers have come to expect from her. Marc Bekoff, cofounder of the Roots and Shoots program with Jane, also contributes his profound insights and research, which Jane has come to rely on. Together, they share their hope and vision for humanity and all the earth's creatures, distilled into ten eloquent spiritual lessons. Within these ten trusts, Goodall reveals how we can gain true enlightenment by living in harmony with the animal kingdom and honoring the interconnection between all species.
Vegan Yum Yum: Decadent (But Doable) Animal-Free Recipes for Entertaining and Everyday
Lauren Ulm - 2009
She hosts a popular blog that is read by more than 30,000 a day. She's a 2008 Veggie Awards winner from VegNews magazine who has been featured on The Martha Stewart Show, AOL, and the hippest sites on the web, including BoingBoing.net and Etsy.com. Now she delights her blog fans, as well as millions of vegetarian and vegan enthusiasts, with this sophisticated four-color cookbook filled with original and the most beloved meals from her blog. From appetizers to desserts, breakfasts to dinners, as well as holiday- and company-worthy fare, Ulm proves that vegan food doesn't have to be bland food. It's her love (okay, her obsession!) of making vegan foods exciting that is evident in her creations—recipes that are as artistic as they are quirky. With 90 percent of her ingredients available at any grocery store, her recipes are doable for the average person, and range from comfort-food staples like whoopee pies, macaroni, and blueberry cobbler, to foods with a sophisticated flair like mojito cupcakes, daikon noodle salad, and flaky pizza purse tapas appetizers. Stunning photographs and step-by-step instructions make Vegan Yum Yum an essential resource for any vegan kitchen.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegan Living
Beverly Lynn Bennett - 2005
It?s about making a lifestyle change. In The Complete Idiot?s Guide to Vegan Living, authors Beverly Lynn Bennett (known as the Vegan Chef) and Ray Sammartano provide a complete guide to living vegan- style, focusing on compassion for all, good health, and great eating. Inside, readers will find 50 sensational recipes, tips for everyday vegan living, the lowdown on vegan myths, and much more. -One of the few titles that combines information on the vegan lifestyle with recipes -Being a vegan isn?t only about what you eat; this book also discusses clothing, cosmetics, etc. -Author is a renowned vegan chef
Mercy for Animals: One Man's Quest to Inspire Compassion and Improve the Lives of Farm Animals
Nathan Runkle - 2017
Instead, he founded our nation's leading nonprofit organization for protecting factory farmed animals. In Mercy For Animals, Nathan brings us into the trenches of his organization's work; from MFA's early days in grassroots activism, to dangerous and dramatic experiences doing undercover investigations, to the organization's current large-scale efforts at making sweeping legislative change to protect factory farmed animals and encourage compassionate food choices.But this isn't just Nathan's story. Mercy For Animals examines how our country moved from a network of small, local farms with more than 50 percent of Americans involved in agriculture to a massive coast-to-coast industrial complex controlled by a mere 1 percent of our population--and the consequences of this drastic change on animals as well as our global and local environments. We also learn how MFA strives to protect farmed animals in behind-the-scenes negotiations with companies like Nestle and other brand names--conglomerates whose policy changes can save countless lives and strengthen our planet. Alongside this unflinching snapshot of our current food system, readers are also offered hope and solutions--big and small--for ending mistreatment of factory farmed animals. From simple diet modifications to a clear explanation of how to contact corporations and legislators efficiently, Mercy For Animals proves that you don't have to be a hardcore vegan or an animal-rights activist to make a powerful difference in the lives of animals.
The Happy Vegan: A Guide to Living a Long, Healthy, and Successful Life
Russell Simmons - 2015
In The Happy Vegan, Simmons shares how once he started practicing yoga and meditation, he became more conscious of his choices, particularly the choices he made regarding his diet. Simmons first adopted a vegetarian and then vegan diet, and almost immediately began to experience the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of eating green and clean. He delves into research about mindful eating, the links between stress and poor eating habits, the importance of listening to your body, the well-documented problems associated with eating animal products and processed foods, along with tips on how to transition to a vegan diet. Drawing on his own experience, the experiences of others, and science and research on the health benefits of conscious eating and veganism, The Happy Vegan is an accessible and inspiring guide to help others make the move toward a vegan diet and a more successful, focused, and purposeful life.
Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment
David Kirby - 2010
Bird flu. Unusual concentrations of cancer and other diseases. Massive fish kills from flesh-eating parasites. Recalls of meats, vegetables, and fruits because of deadly E-coli bacterial contamination. Recent public health crises raise urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is raised and brought to market. In Animal Factory, bestselling investigative journalist David Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms, and tracks the far-reaching fallout that contaminates our air, land, water, and food. In this thoroughly researched book, Kirby follows three families and communities whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms. These farms (known as “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs), confine thousands of pigs, dairy cattle, and poultry in small spaces, often under horrifying conditions, and generate enormous volumes of fecal and biological waste as well as other toxins. Weaving science, politics, law, big business, and everyday life, Kirby accompanies these families in their struggles against animal factories. A North Carolina fisherman takes on pig farms upstream to preserve his river, his family’s life, and his home. A mother in a small Illinois town pushes back against an out-sized dairy farm and its devastating impact. And a Washington State grandmother becomes an unlikely activist when her home is invaded by foul odors and her water supply is compromised by runoff from leaking lagoons of cattle waste. Animal Factory is an important book about our American food system gone terribly wrong---and the people who are fighting to restore sustainable farming practices and save our limited natural resources.
Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos
Derrick Jensen - 2007
This compelling work paints an unforgettable portrait not only of life on the inside?, but of our views of the natural world and our place in it.
Meatonomics: How the Rigged Economics of Meat and Dairy Make You Consume Too Much—and How to Eat Better, Live Longer, and Spend Smarter
David Robinson Simon - 2013
Yet omnivore and herbivore alike, the forces of meatonomics affect us in many ways.Most importantly, we've lost the ability to decide for ourselves what - and how much - to eat. Those decisions are made for us by animal food producers who control our buying choices with artificially-low prices, misleading messaging, and heavy control over legislation and regulation. Learn how and why they do it and how you can respond.Written in a clear and accessible style, "Meatonomics" provides vital insight into how the economics of animal food production influence our spending, eating, health, prosperity, and longevity"Meatonomics" is the first book to add up the huge "externalized" costs that the animal food system imposes on taxpayers, animals and the environment, and it finds these costs total about $414 billion yearly. With yearly retail sales of around $250 billion, that means that for every $1 of product they sell, meat and dairy producers impose almost $2 in hidden costs on the rest of us. But if producers were forced to internalize these costs, a $4 Big Mac would cost about $11.
The Monkey Wars
Deborah Blum - 1994
We have all benefited from the medical discoveries of primate research--vaccines for polio, rubella, and hepatitis B are just a few. But we have also learned more in recent years about how intelligent apes and monkeys really are: they can speak to us with sign language, they can even play video games (and are as obsessed with the games as any human teenager). And activists have also uncovered widespread and unnecessarily callous treatment of animals by researchers (in 1982, a Silver Spring lab was charged with 17 counts of animal cruelty). It is a complex issue, made more difficult by the combative stance of both researchers and animal activists. In The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum gives a human face to this often caustic debate--and an all-but-human face to the subjects of the struggle, the chimpanzees and monkeys themselves. Blum criss-crosses America to show us first hand the issues and personalities involved. She offers a wide-ranging, informative look at animal rights activists, now numbering some twelve million, from the moderate Animal Welfare Institute to the highly radical Animal Liberation Front (a group destructive enough to be placed on the FBI's terrorist list). And she interviews a wide variety of researchers, many forced to conduct their work protected by barbed wire and alarm systems, men and women for whom death threats and hate mail are common. She takes us to Roger Fouts's research center in Ellensburg, Washington, where we meet five chimpanzees trained in human sign language, and we visit LEMSIP, a research facility in New York State that has no barbed wire, no alarms--and no protesters chanting outside--because its director, Jan Moor-Jankowski, listens to activists with respect and treats his animals humanely. And along the way, Blum offers us insights into the many side-issues involved: the intense battle to win over school kids fought by both sides, and the danger of transplanting animal organs into humans. As it stands now, Blum concludes, the research community and its activist critics are like two different nations, nations locked in a long, bitter, seemingly intractable political standoff....But if you listen hard, there really are people on both sides willing to accept and work within the complex middle. When they can be freely heard, then we will have progressed to another place, beyond this time of hostilities. In The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum gives these people their voice.
The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health
T. Colin Campbell - 2004
If we’re obsessed with being thin more so than ever before, why are Americans stricken with heart disease as much as we were 30 years ago?In The China Study, Dr. T. Colin Campbell details the connection between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. The report also examines the source of nutritional confusion produced by powerful lobbies, government entities, and opportunistic scientists. The New York Times has recognized the study as the “Grand Prix of epidemiology” and the “most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.”The China Study is not a diet book. Dr. Campbell cuts through the haze of misinformation and delivers an insightful message to anyone living with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and those concerned with the effects of aging.
Always Too Much and Never Enough
Jasmin Singer - 2016
From the extra pounds and unrelenting bullies that left her eating lunch alone in a bathroom stall at school to the low self-esteem that left her both physically and emotionally vulnerable to abuse, Jasmin Singer’s struggle with weight defined her life. Most people think there’s no such thing as a fat vegan. Most people don’t realize that deep-fried tofu tastes amazing and that Oreos are, in fact, vegan. So, even after Jasmin embraced a vegan lifestyle, having discovered her passion in advocating for the rights of animals, she defied any “skinny vegan” stereotypes by getting even heavier. More importantly, she realized that her compassion for animals didn’t extend to her own body, and that her low self-esteem was affecting her health. She needed a change. By committing to monthly juice fasts and a diet of whole, unprocessed foods, Jasmin lost almost a hundred pounds, gained an understanding of her destructive relationship with food, and finally realized what it means to be truly full. Told with humble humor and heartbreaking honesty, this is Jasmin’s story of how she went from finding solace in a box of cheese crackers to finding peace within herself.
Meat Is for Pussies: A How-To Guide for Dudes Who Want to Get Fit, Kick Ass, and Take Names
John Joseph - 2010
As the lead singer of a punk rock band and a competitive triathlete, his tattoo-covered biceps don’t exactly scream “plant eater.” But it’s that very misconception he rallies against in his provocative book, Meat Is for Pussies.According to Joseph, eating animals—whether in the form of steak, burgers, wings, or ribs—is for the weak. Contrary to popularly accepted wisdom, eating animal protein doesn’t make you stronger, tougher, or manlier—it makes you sicker, heavier, slower, and more prone to life-threatening disease. In essence: it makes you a pussy.In Meat Is for Pussies, Joseph shares his shocking and compelling story of evolving from a life of violence and hard-knock living to a man who chooses not to participate in the cycle of violence by eating animals. He also dispels the common myths surrounding meat, while sharing the latest information on the nutritional benefits of a plant-based diet and the dangers of eating meat and processed foods. In addition, Joseph offers practical guidance about such everyday issues as meal planning, recipes, and working out.There is a substantial category of vegan literature out there, but no one has written a book like this. By turns explosive, controversial, moving, and laugh-out-loud funny, and illustrated with eight pages of black-and-white photos, Meat Is for Pussies is a plant-based manifesto.
Dead Meat
Sue Coe - 1996
A nationally prominent, politically oriented artist offers an unsparingly critical view of the meat industry in scores of illustrations, documenting the skewing, flaying, dismembering, castrating, debeaking, electrocuting, and decapitating of animals.
Behind the Dolphin smile: One Man's Campaign to Protect the World's Dolphins
Richard O'Barry - 1989
Ric O’Barry shares his journey with dolphins and other sea mammals in this captivating autobiographical look back at his years as a dolphin trainer for aquatic theme parks, movies, and television. Also included is a preface relaying a first-hand account of his adventures filming the 2010 Academy Award–winning documentary The Cove, which covertly uncovered Japan’s inhumane dolphin-hunting practices. O’Barry, a successful animal trainer who had had everything—money, flashy cars, pretty women—came to realize that dolphins were easy to train, not because of his great talent, but because they possessed great intelligence, and that keeping them in captivity was cruel and morally wrong. O’Barry now dedicates his life to stopping the exploitation of these exceptional mammals by retraining them to return to their natural habitats.
Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
Jason Hribal - 2003
A circus elephant tramples and gores a sadistic trainer, who had repeatedly fed her lit cigarettes. A pair of orangutans at the San Diego Zoo steal a crowbar and screwdriver and break-out of their enclosure. An orca at Sea World snatches his trainer into the pool and holds her underwater until she drowns. What's going on here? Are these mere accidents? Simply cases of animals acting on instinct? That's what the zoos and animal theme parks would have you believe. But historian Jason Hribal tells a different story. In the most provocative book on animal rights since Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, Hribal argues persuasively that these escapes and attacks are deliberate, that the animals are acting with intent, that they are asserting their own desires for freedom. Fear of the Animal Planet is a harrowing, and curiously uplifting, chronicle of resistance against the captivity and torture of animals."Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the captive beast. Prepare to have your illusions of security shattered as Jason Hribal shows us that a revolution is brewing among those frustrated leaping orcas, elephants in headdresses, and tigers kept behind bars. Animal spectacles, shows, and exhibits, it turns out, pose a deep, dark threat not only to nature herself but also to those who impose their will on wild spirits and those who pop in for a few hours to watch. A riveting, eye-opening book."--Ingrid Newkirk, president and co-founder of PETAJason Hribal is an historian and educator. He is the contemporary editor of John Oswald’s 1791 classic, The Cry of Nature.Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch and author of Born Under a Bad Sky.