Animals’ Best Friends By Barbara J. King — Review

An inspiring manifesto for how caring humans can become truly humane by choosing to live more compassionately with all animals

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If your pet dog or cat or parrot or fish were asked to rate you as a companion, how do you think you would fare? Are you as good a friend to your animals as you expect them to be to you? What could you do to improve their lives — indeed, to improve the lives of all animals, domesticated and wild, that you come into contact with?

These are the issues that form the central premise of a newly published book, Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild, by Barbara J. King (University of Chicago Press; 2021: Amazon US / Amazon UK). In this captivating book, Dr King, an anthropologist who is an expert on the human-animal bond, shares her knowledge of and experiences with animal cognition and emotion, and highlights how our actions may harm animals. But rather than scolding her readers for our thoughtlessness, Dr King instead examines the overlap between different philosophical positions that impinge upon animal welfare through a delightful blend of interviews, personal anecdotes, news stories, and scientific studies. Throughout the book, Dr King is a steadfast and committed advocate for compassionate action to improve the lives of animals.

This 274 page book has six substantial chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter is a public declaration and call to cultivate compassionate action towards animals, and the next five chapters examine the main situations where humans and animals come into contact: the home, the wild, zoos, the farm and in research labs. Each chapter makes for both delightful and difficult reading because Dr King lays out the ways that people use and abuse animals, betray and support them, overlook and respect them.

In this book, Dr King doesn’t avoid ethically challenging questions. For example, Dr King, whose life was saved from a particularly nasty cancer by animal-based biomedical research, raises many important questions about the welfare of lab animals, including: what is the right thing to do with ‘retired’ research animals (especially apes and monkeys, who have very long life spans and complex psychosocial needs), how to improve research design so animals’ contributions are more meaningful and less wasteful, and the fact that the vast majority of biomedical research that appears promising in animal models actually fails in human clinical trials, sometimes with very dire consequences for humans.

Dr King also tackles other thorny questions, such as whether cats ought to be allowed to roam freely outdoors, if people should adopt a vegan or vegetarian or ‘reducetarian’ life style, and under what circumstances may hunting wildlife be ethical. As she explores the ethics and the reality associated with these conundrums, Dr King also empowers her readers by providing us with simple ways to make a difference in the lives of animals.

This is the first of Dr King’s books I’ve read (she’s published seven so far), but it will not be the last. Her writing is engaging, crisp and fresh, her ideas are carefully thought out and meticulously investigated, and her arguments are reasoned and reasonable. It’s also obvious that she has read widely through the scientific literature, the news and popular books. Dr King is a clear-eyed advocate of animal welfare, a philosophical position that she presents consistently and effectively. But perhaps Dr King’s greatest achievement is her quiet optimism that we can change how we interact with animals and make things better for them — and improve our own lives along the way.

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