Barbara J. King is professor emerita of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, where she taught for twenty-eight years. She is the author of How Animals Grieve and Evolving God, and her work has been featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and on NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog.
"As factory farming and meat consumption increase globally, Barbara
King's new book makes for crucial reading. Combining new scientific
studies, personal experiences, and an honest, compassionate
approach, King turns attention to the cognitive, social and
emotional lives of species exploited for consumption. She puts
firmly on the table the facts about animal sentience that omnivores
would prefer not to think about. Brimming with ethological insights
and boosted by anecdotes about individual animals (such as Ursula
the pig, Mr Henry Joy the rooster, and Olive the octopus), there is
no doubt that after reading Personalities on the Plate people will
be compelled not just to rethink what to eat for dinner, but who
they might be eating. A rigorously researched, eloquent, thoughtful
and potentially life-changing book for all consumers of
animals."--Annie Potts, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
"Barbara King has written a gem. With deft, lively writing, she
guides us into the inner lives of the animals so often conveniently
hidden from our view, and reveals why they deserve a place at the
table, not on it. Personalities on the Plate should be read by
everyone who eats, and especially the majority who eat others who
had a life."--Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows
"In Personalities on the Plate, Barbara J. King uses the latest
discoveries about mental capacities and social lives of creatures
from insects and chickens to chimpanzees and dogs to make the moral
case against meat. Combining first-rate science with personal
experience, this book offers a fascinating window into the minds of
animals that will make readers think deeply about what they are
going to eat for dinner tonight."--Hal Herzog, author of Some We
Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat
"This thoughtful book is not about whether we 'should' or
'shouldn't' eat meat--but you'll probably have your own conclusion
at the end. Barbara J. King looks at the range of values
surrounding farming and feasting, and at who we are considering
eating. But King also shows that different approaches to meat and
to animal farming can be viewed through different lenses, giving us
a richer understanding."--Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What
Animals Think and Feel
"Whether we realize it or not, whether we want to or not, with
every meal we eat, we choose who gets to live and who will die. We
need to look this thrice-daily fact in the face and make decisions
we can live with. Here to help us is the compassionate and lyrical
voice of Barbara J. King. Never shrill, always revealing, often
surprising and even funny, Personalities on the Plate is must
reading for everyone who cares about animals, ethics and the
earth."
--Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus
"Into this overheated grudge match steps a voice of reason: a
retired college professor with a fondness for animal videos on
YouTube and a child's sense of wonder about the natural world. . .
. Much of Personalities on the Plate reads like a fascinating
zoological primer, exploring the social and emotional intelligence
of animals. . . . It is not anthropomorphism, Ms. King convincingly
argues, to describe animals' emotional experiences with accuracy
and precision. 'The animals we have met in these pages, ' Ms. King
writes, 'demonstrate decisively that, to varying degrees, they
think their way through their days and experience feelings about
what they make happen and what happens to them.' We, of course,
determine what happens to most animals. Readers will finish the
book and resolve to go forward--eating meat, abstaining from it, or
consuming less of it--in a more purposeful way. The animal-welfare
debate needs more thoughtful, informative and level-headed
discussion--not least because it makes for effective advocacy.
Personalities on the Plate is a good place to start."-- "Wall
Street Journal"
"King illuminates the animal lives and sensibilities that undergird
the book's title. . . . King carefully engages recent scientific
advances in ethology to document how animals learn, behave, and, to
the extent that human systems of observation can hypothesize, feel.
In doing so, she challenges the reader to consider that animals can
be said to have personality; not to anthropomorphize animals per
se, but to draw our attention to how individual animals feel and
act so that we can 'train ourselves to see the complexity of
animals' lives'. . . . Overall, Personalities in the Plate is a
highly valuable, multidisciplinary contribution to the growing body
of literature on how we as human beings come to be aware of the
creatures we eat, and what kinds of embodied behavioral cues we can
observe in animals in order to potentially make different decisions
about our consumption."-- "Gastronomica"
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