Books

Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror by Lee Hall

Joel Marks advocates animal rights with Lee Hall.

Capers in the Churchyard is not a book of philosophy, but it ought to be. Ostensibly about tactics in the animal rights movement, the book is in fact a manifesto for thinking about nonhuman animals in a wholly different way from what we have become accustomed to. The author, Lee Hall, is legal director of the America-based Friends of Animals, an animal advocacy group whose approach to the issue of animal rights is novel even by animal advocacy standards.

The churchyard capers of the title refer to a particularly gross episode of animal activism that took place in England in 2004: somebody absconded with the remains of the mother-in-law of a farmer who bred guinea pigs for a testing lab. Letters were subsequently delivered to the family demanding that the breeding stop if they wanted mother-in-law returned to her final resting place.

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