In Review
Knowing Animals
Buddhist and Posthuman Resources for a New Interspecies Ethics
This course, taught from the Buddhist perspective of compassion, is a constructive exercise in the optimal epistemic orientations and bodily habits for post-human life on planet Earth. It focuses on efforts to understand the experience of animals, including both their suffering and their exceptional intimacies and appreciation of life, and efforts to liberate them from their current extreme suffering in the factory farming of animals and other abuses. The readings, while not always authored by Buddhist scholars and teachers, illustrate some of the virtues that the course aims to cultivate
Words of My Perfect Teacher: A Complete Translation of a Classic Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism
Patrul Rinpoche (trans. Padmakara Translation Group; Yale University Press, 2010)
This practical guide to inner transformation introduces the fundamental spiritual practices common to all Tibetan Buddhist traditions. It is the classic commentary on the preliminary practices of the Longchen Nyingtig—one of the best-known cycles of teachings and a spiritual treasure of the Nyingmapa school—the oldest Tibetan Buddhist tradition. For the purposes of this course, it provides a traditional Buddhist perspective on compassion.
The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan
Andy Couturier (North Atlantic Books, 2017)
Providing a larger ethical framework for the course, this book tells the stories of 10 people who left the stress, consumerism, busyness, and technology-dependence of urban Japan for the rural mountains where they lived, as artists, philosophers, and farmers, relying on themselves for happiness and sustenance. It illustrates the larger ethos that will be important for our planet going forward.
Living with Herds: Human-Animal Coexistence in Mongolia
Natasha Fijn (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Blending biological and social anthropology, ethology and ethnography, this book examines the process of animal domestication by studying the social behavior of humans and animals in a contemporary Mongolian herding society. Having lived with the herding families, Natasha Fijn demonstrates how herd animals influence Mongolian herders’ lives and how the animals themselves are active partners in the domestication process.
Of Wolves and Men
Barry Holstun Lopez (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978)
This classic explores the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf’s prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing upon an array of literature, history, science, and mythology and extensive personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the wolf’s preservation and immerses the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling portrait of the wolf both as a real animal and as imagined.
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Frans de Waal (W.W. Norton, 2017)
Exploring the oddities and complexities of animal cognition—in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos—this book shows how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long.
The Hidden Life of Dogs
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)
This fascinating account, based on thirty years of living with and observing dogs, demonstrates that what dogs want most is other dogs.
Additional articles:
- “You Don’t Know What Pain Is: Affect, the Lifeworld, and Animal Ethics,” by Donovan O. Schaefer (Studies in Christian Ethics 30.1 [2017])
- “Reflections,” by Barbara Smuts (in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals [Princeton University Press, 2017])
- “The Compassionate Treatment Of Animals: A Contemporary Buddhist Approach in Eastern Tibet,” by Holly Gayley (Journal of Religious Ethics 45, no. 1 [2017]).
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