Animal Liberators: Research and Morality

By Susan Sperling

What has inspired such diverse groups as holistic health advocates, radical ecologists, and feminists to join forces in the recent passionate protests against animal experimentation? Small antivivisection groups have always existed in the United States, but the strength of the new animal rights movement, which began to develop during the late 1970s, has no parallel in modern history. Susan Sperling's brilliant investigation leads her to compare the movement today with the powerful antivivisectionist movement in Victorian Great Britain. She exposes the tensions and anxieties about technology which underlie these protests. Antivivisectionists in both periods have perceived scientific and medical technologies as manipulative, invasive, and exploitative, overwhelming human lives as well as those of animals.

Animal Liberators examines the important links between past and present animal rights movements and the movements for radical feminism, ecology, and holistic health. The book also explores changing ideas of animals in modern culture. In the decades since the 1960s our interest as a society in studies of animals has been manifested in a wide scholarly and popular literature. The complex social behavior of apes, dolphins, and other mammals is now part of the popular imagination of our culture. The great popularity of these accounts of animal behavior has created an image of animals on the border of humanity, and that image fuels antivivisection sentiment. The author has conducted probing interviews with many of the architects of the contemporary animal rights movement, revealing aspects not widely understood. Biomedical scientists, animal lovers, and a concerned public will find important implications for public policy in this thoughtful book.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520061985
• ISBN13: 9780520061989
• Release Date: September 1988
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

An excellent review of the animal rights movement

An excellent review of the animal rights movement This book was referred to me by the head veterinarian of the University of California. It follows the animal rights movement from early industrialized England to the Berkley streets. A must read for any one trying to understand PETA, or the animal liberation movement.