The Bureaucracy of Empathy revolves around two central questions: What is pain? And how do we recognize, understand, and ameliorate the pain of nonhuman animals? Shira Shmuely investigates these ethical issues through a close and careful history of the origins, implementation, and enforcement of the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act of Parliament, which for the first time imposed legal restrictions on animal experimentation and mandated official supervision of procedures "calculated to give pain" to animal subjects. Exploring how scientists, bureaucrats, and lawyers wrestled with the problem of animal pain and its perception, Shmuely traces in depth and detail how the Act was enforced, the medical establishment's initial resistance and then embrace of regulation, and the challenges from anti-vivisection advocates who deemed it insufficient protection against animal suffering. She shows how a "bureaucracy of empathy" emerged to support and administer the legislation, navigating incongruent interpretations of pain. This crucial moment in animal law and ethics continues to inform laws regulating the treatment of nonhuman animals in laboratories, farms, and homes around the worlds to the present.

In myths and legends, squids are portrayed as fearsome sea-monsters, lurking in the watery deeps waiting to devour humans. Even as modern science has tried to turn those monsters of the deep into unremarkable calamari, squids continue to dominate the nightmares of the Western imagination. Taking inspiration from early weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, modern writers such as Jeff VanderMeer depict squids as the absolute Other of human civilization, while non-Western poets such as Daren Kamali depict squids as anything but threats. In Squid, Martin Wallen traces the many different ways humans have thought about and pictured this predatory mollusk: as guardians, harbingers of environmental collapse, or an untapped resource to be exploited. No matter how we have perceived them, squids have always gazed back at us, unblinking, from the dark.

What is a crab? What significance do crabs play in the world? In Crab, Cynthia Chris discovers that these charming creatures are social by nature, creative problem-solvers, and invaluable members of the environments in which they live. Their formidable physical forms, their hard-to-harvest and quick-to-spoil flesh, and their sassy demeanour have inspired artists and writers from Vincent van Gogh to Jean-Paul Sartre. Cynthia Chris sketches vivid portraits of these animals, tracing the history of the crab through its ancient fossil record to its essential role in protecting its own habitats from the threat of climate change.

Animals have featured in the lives and cultures of the people of Merseyside since the dawn of time, and in so many ways. Beastly Merseyside describes this, and tells wonderful stories about these animals, and about the roles they have played. Horses have carried us and our weaponry into battle for millennia, right up to the wars of the twentieth century. They have ploughed our fields, carried our goods, and pulled our carts, wagons, carriages, stagecoaches, canal barges, buses, trams, and ambulances. We have been racing horses on Merseyside for centuries. We have hunted animals for food, from rabbits and ducks to those great leviathans of the sea, the whales. Liverpool's whaling fleet was once one of the most important in Britain. We have also hunted, and in some cases still hunt, animals simply for 'sport'. This has included dog-fighting, cockfighting, bear and bull baiting, as well as fox hunting, hare coursing, and shooting. Animals have entertained us on the streets, in the days of dancing bears and organ grinders' monkeys; in circuses; and in the very many zoos we have had on Merseyside, again over many centuries. Animals have also rescued us, provided comfort to us, and helped us to see and hear. In Beastly Merseyside, popular local historian Ken Pye tells tales about the likes of Mickey the Chimp, Liverpool's own 'King Kong'; the execution of Rajah the Elephant; Pongo the Man Monkey; the amazing Hale Duck Decoy; the 'Lion in the Wheelbarrow'; the nineteenth-century Knowsley Great Aviary and the modern safari park; and why and how the Liver Bird became the emblem of Liverpool. Full of well-researched, informative, and entertaining facts, this book really shows just how vital a role animals of all kinds have played, and continue to play, in our lives and communities.

Christine M. Korsgaard presents a compelling new view of humans' moral relationships to the other animals. She defends the claim that we are obligated to treat all sentient beings as what Kant called "ends-in-themselves". Drawing on a theory of the good derived from Aristotle, she offers an explanation of why animals are the sorts of beings for whom things can be good or bad. She then turns to Kant's argument for the value of humanity to show that rationality commits us to claiming the standing of ends-in-ourselves, in two senses. Kant argued that as autonomous beings, we claim to be ends-in-ourselves when we claim the standing to make laws for ourselves and each other. Korsgaard argues that as beings who have a good, we also claim to be ends-in-ourselves when we take the things that are good for us to be good absolutely and so worthy of pursuit. The first claim commits us to joining with other autonomous beings in relations of moral reciprocity. The second claim commits us to treating the good of every sentient creature as something of absolute importance. Korsgaard argues that human beings are not more important than the other animals, that our moral nature does not make us superior to the other animals, and that our unique capacities do not make us better off than the other animals. She criticizes the "marginal cases" argument and advances a new view of moral standing as attaching to the atemporal subjects of lives. She criticizes Kant's own view that our duties to animals are indirect, and offers a non-utilitarian account of the relation between pleasure and the good. She also addresses a number of directly practical questions: whether we have the right to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us and fight in our wars, and keep them as pets; and how to understand the wrong that we do when we cause a species to go extinct.

Zoo Ethics examines the workings of modern zoos and considers the core ethical challenges faced by people who choose to hold and display animals in zoos, aquariums, or sanctuaries. Jenny Gray asserts the value of animal life and assesses the impacts of modern zoos, including the costs to animals in terms of welfare and the loss of liberty. Gray highlights contemporary events, including the killing of the gorilla Harambe at the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016, the widely publicized culling of a young giraffe in the Copenhagen Zoo in 2014, and the investigation of the Tiger Temple in western Thailand. Gray describes the positive welfare and health outcomes of many animals held in zoos, the increased attention and protection for their species in the wild, and the enjoyment and education of the people who visit zoos. Zoo Ethics will empower students of animal ethics and veterinary sciences, zoo and aquarium professionals, and interested zoo visitors to have an informed view of the challenges of compassionate conservation and to develop their own ethical positions.

Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England explores a seldom-studied trove of English veterinary manuals, illuminating how the daily care of horses they describe reshapes our understanding of equine representation in the popular romance of late medieval England. A saint removes a horse’s leg the more easily to shoe him; a wild horse transforms spur wounds into the self-healing practice of bleeding; a messenger calculates time through his horse’s body. Such are the rich and conflicted visions of horse/human connection in the period. Exploring this imagined relation, Francine McGregor reveals a cultural undercurrent in which medieval England is so reliant on equine bodies that human anxieties, desires, and very orientation in daily life are often figured through them. This book illuminates the complex and contradictory yearnings shaping medieval perceptions of the horse, the self, and the identities born of their affinity.

Birds have inspired people since the dawn of time. They are the notes behind Mozart's genius, the colours behind Audubon's art and ballet's swansong. In The Birds They Sang, Stanislaw Lubienski sheds light on some of history's most meaningful bird and human interactions, from historical bird watchers in a German POW camp, to Billy and Kes in A Kestrel for a Knave. He muses on what exactly Hitchcock's birds had in mind, and reveals the true story behind the real James Bond. Undiscouraged by damp, discomfort and a reed bunting's curse, Lubienski bears witness to the difficulties birds face today as people fail to accommodate them in rapidly changing times. A soaring exploration of our fascination with birds, The Birds They Sang opens a vast realm of astonishing sounds, colours and meanings - a complete world in which we humans are never alone.