Book Recommendations, Reviews and Author Interviews from All-Creatures.org



Thing: Inside the Struggle for Animal Personhood

Publisher: Island Press



Thing animal personhood
Thing: Inside the Struggle for Animal Personhood
Available at Island Press
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1642830852
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1642830859

From Nonhuman Rights Project:

Our work shines a light on the suffering caused by animals’ rightlessness and their need for freedom and dignity. Thanks to a new graphic novel about the NhRP’s elephant client Happy and our fight for legal rights for animals, that light is now bigger and brighter.

Thing: Inside the Struggle for Animal Personhood tells Happy’s life story and makes clear–through moving imagery, a sweeping narrative, and thoughtful explorations of law, philosophy, history, science, and more–all that Happy has lost through her decades of captivity in the Bronx Zoo and how her court case has forever changed the legal landscape for nonhuman beings.

Illustrated and written by comic artists Sam Machado and Cynthia Sousa Machado with the NhRP’s founder and president Steven M. Wise, it is the first graphic nonfiction book about animal rights. Publishers Weekly has called it “thought-provoking and inspiringly hopeful.”

Marc Bekoff Interview:

Globally, nonhuman animals (animals) are considered to be “things”—objects and property—in the eyes of legal systems with no fundamental rights. Clearly, animals who have complex minds, deep social, intellectual, and emotional lives, and who are able to make choices (have agency) and display self-recognition are not things. Yet, Happy, a clearly smart and sentient elephant, has been caged at the Bronx Zoo for most of her 48 years and has remained largely isolated and lonely for more than a decade.

Some of the nitty-gritty scientific, philosophical, and legal details about what it means to grant personhood and fundamental rights to other animals are difficult for people to understand, and I’m pleased that a new beautifully designed and illustrated book written by award-winning cartoonists Sam Machado, Cynthia Sousa Machado with lawyer Steven Wise titled Thing: Inside the Struggle for Animal Personhood clarifies many of the difficult and not-so-difficult to understand issues.

Read the ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE: Animals Are Not "Things": Happy the Elephant and Personhood.


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