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New Exploration of the Ethical Boycott of Animal Products

21st November 2018

To coincide with World Vegan Month, the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics has published a new book exploring why people give up meat and dairy.

The protest against meat eating may turn out to be one of the most significant movements of our age. In terms of our relations with animals, it is difficult to think of a more urgent moral problem than the fate of billions of animals killed for human consumption.

Ethical Vegetarianism and Veganism outlines three principal considerations that lead people to modify their diet. The first concerns the morality of killing sentient beings when it isn’t strictly necessary, the second concerns the abuse and cruelty that animals often endure during farming, and the third explores the human and environmental costs, including animal agriculture and climate change.

The book argues that vegetarians and vegans are not only protesters, but also moral pioneers. It provides 25 chapters which stimulate further thought, exchange, and reflection on the morality of eating meat.

A rich array of philosophical, religious, historical, cultural, and practical challenge our assumptions about animals, and how we should relate to them.

Published by Routledge, the book provides global perspectives and insights from 11 countries: US, UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Israel, Austria, the Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, and Sweden.

The volume is edited by the directors of the Centre, Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey. They comment: “The aim of the Centre has always been to pioneer ethical perspectives on animals through academic research, teaching, and publication, and this is our contribution to what has now become a world-wide movement for moral change.”

Please recommend the book to your university or college library.

Further information (including special discounts on hardback, paperback and eBook versions) is available here.

To request a review copy, see here.

Andrew Linzey is the director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. He has written or edited twenty books, including Animal Theology and Why Animal Suffering Matters.

Clair Linzey is the deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics and The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics.