Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals [Paperback]

Animal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a paradox: perhaps fewer animals would be harmed if they stopped feeding the ones they love. Animal diets do not raise problems merely for individuals. To address environmental crises, health threats, and harm to animals, we must change our food systems and practices. And in these systems, animals, too, are eaters.Moving beyond what humans should eat and whether to count animals as food, Just Fodder answers ethical and political questions arising from thinking about animals as eaters. Josh Milburn begins with practical dilemmas about feeding the animals closest to us, our pets or animal companions. The questions grow more complicated as he considers relationships with more distance  questions about whether and how to feed garden birds, farmland animals who would eat our crops, and wild animals. Milburn evaluates the nature and circumstances of our relationships with animals to generate a novel theory of animal rights.Looking past arguments about what we can and cannot do to other beings, Just Fodder asks what we can, should, and must do for them, laying out a fuller range of our ethical obligations to other animals.

Just Fodder addresses ethical and political questions arising from thinking about animals as eaters rather than as foodstuffs. Josh Milburn offers a novel theory of animal rights that insists that figuring out the full range of our obligations to animals requires asking questions about the nature and circumstances of our relationships with them.

That philosophersto say nothing of political theoristshave largely failed to seriously address the ethics of feeding animals is likely a reflection of how they have, until relatively recently, failed to take animal ethics in general seriously. Just Fodderbeyond being itself a lucid and thoughtful account of an important topicis therefore a heartening indication of the current state of animal ethics, and an exciting sign of ló"