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How to Care about Animals

An Ancient Guide to Creatures Great and Small
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( 28 ratings, 6 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
How to Care about Animals by Porphyry examines our moral responsibilities towards animals, drawing from ancient philosophical perspectives. The text explores the relationship between humans and animals, advocating for compassionate and ethical treatment. It delves into the ethical implications of diet and lifestyle choices, encouraging readers to reflect on their interactions with all living creatures.
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Format: Hardback
$5400

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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

You might enjoy this book if you're interested in exploring ancient philosophical views on ethics and compassion towards animals. It delves into the relationship between humans and animals, offering timeless insights that bridge philosophy and psychology.

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"Drawing on ancient writers, from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and working farmer, Mark Usher compiles in this book an anthology of Greco-Roman passages illustrating how they thought about animals and illuminating they might help us to rethink our relationships with them."--

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

An entertaining and enlightening anthology of classical Greek and Roman writings on animals - and our vital relationships with them.

How to Care about Animals is a fascinating menagerie of passages from classical literature about animals and the lives we share with them. Drawing on ancient writers from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and farmer M. D. Usher has gathered a healthy litter of selections that reveal some of the ways Greeks and Romans thought about everything from lions, bears, and wolves to birds, octopuses, and snails - and that might inspire us to rethink our own relationships with our fellow creatures. Presented in lively new translations, with the original texts on facing pages, these pieces are filled with surprises - anticipating but also offering new perspectives on many of our current feelings and ideas about animals.

Here, Porphyry makes a compelling argument for vegetarianism and asserts that the just treatment of animals makes us better people; Pliny the Elder praises the virtuosity of songbirds and the virtuousness of elephants; Plutarch has one of Circe's pigs from the Odyssey make a serio-comic case for the dignity of the beasts of the field; Aristotle puts the study of animals on par with anthropology; we read timeless Aesopian fables, including 'The Hen That Laid the Golden Egg' and 'The Fox and the Grapes'; and there is much, much more.

A Noah's Ark of a book, How to Care about Animals is guaranteed to charm and inspire anyone who loves animals.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780691240435

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 10 October 2023

Country: United States

Imprint: Princeton University Press

Contributors:

  • Translated with commentary by M. D. Usher
  • Edited and translated by M. D. Usher
  • Edited and translated by Mark D. Usher

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 114.0mm

Height: 171.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 248

About the Author

M. D. Usher is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature and a member of the Department of Geography and Geosciences at the University of Vermont. With his wife, he also built, owns, and operates Works & Days Farm, which produces lamb, eggs, and maple syrup in Shoreham, Vermont. His books include How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land and How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism (both Princeton).

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