Animal Dignity

How best to think about and do justice to the dignity of animals? As Challenger’s superb collection demonstrates, this task involves not simply extending traditional notions of dignity to animals but also considering how the lives and deaths of animals themselves might challenge us to conceive of dignity in new and unanticipated ways. * Matthew Calarco, Professor of Philosophy, California State University, USA *
Melanie Challenger has earned a place as an essential, foundational thinker on topics of animal capacity for experiencing life and the world, and in calling us to consider our appropriate response to the beings cohabiting this planet. In this consideration of dignity and its ramifications and imperatives, Challenger has gathered the best, brightest, highest, and deepest other thinkers and convened them for us between the covers of this daring and pathfinding book. * Carl Safina, Ecologist and Author of Alfie and Me (2023), USA *
Animal Dignity is a bold, modern effort to ascribe to non-human beings a concept that heretofore has eluded them. These forceful essays also awakened me to the idea when we deny other animals their dignity, we corrupt our own. * Jonathan Balcombe, Ethologist and Author of What a Fish Knows (2016) and Super Fly (2020), Canada *
Dignity is such an obvious concept to apply to animals, yet for a long time human dignity was defined by stressing how unlike other species we are. Our changing relation with nature is reflected in these thoughtful essays, which instil respect for the intelligence and emotions of other life forms. * Frans de Waal, Author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016), USA *