VeganCleopatra

What can I say about Wild Justice? Nothing great, that is for sure. I should be the target audience for Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. I hold a degree in Biology and I am a vegan on moral/ethical grounds. But I found this book to be dull, dry, slow, basic and extremely repetitive. Oh boy was it repetitive.

The preface itself is an extremely long winded summary of the book that seemed never ending. It literally seemed by the writing choices to be on the verge of ending a dozen times or so but you turn the page and it is still going and going and going. *sigh* Then you think you are going to get into the nitty gritty when the chapters start but all you get is dull repetition and bland attempts at covering the topic at hand. Circles, so many circles we traveled in. I cannot even count the number of times we were told an example was coming up only for no example to come. THEN we would be told "for example" and it wasn't even necessarily the example we were promised. At this point though I just could not come to care.

The lack of science was also a major hangup for me. The only times scientific data was even mentioned was during brief summaries of studies they noted. Unfortunately many of the studies they used employed animal testing to support the claims of empathy or other evidence of morality. For some crazy reason I just cannot get on board with injecting mice with acid to cause them incredible pain just to see how the other mice react (who subsequently also get injected). So let me get this straight, Mark Berkoff who supports animal rights uses vivisection cruelty in his book to support this philosophical crap? Way to go.

Perhaps I am not the target audience, perhaps the target audience is actually philosophy fans as this book was extremely heavy on the philosophy and extremely weak on science. It had far too much philosophy, turns out I really am not much of a fan of philosophy. Are philosophers naturally repetitive? If so I'll avoid any such topic in the future.

This book is an insomnia cure, duller than most biology and other class textbooks I've read over the years. If you enjoy reading a grad student's thesis in philosophy by all means, read this and you'll get about the same amount of enjoyment.