An Article Series from All-Creatures.org 

 

Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies

Kim Stallwood Interviews Mark Hawthorne

From Kim Stallwood
January 2024

I have written about our relationships with animals before, but this is the first book I’ve written that includes a special emphasis on spiritual aspects of those relationships—both the good, such as how many people bond with their companion animals, and the bad, such as the tradition of “honoring” animals used for food for their “sacrifice” before eating them.

Mark Hawthorne is the author of five books on animals, animal rights, and social justice: The Way of the Rabbit; A Vegan Ethic: Embracing a Life of Compassion Toward All; Bleating Hearts: The Hidden World of Animal Suffering; and Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism, which empowers people around the world to get active for animals. He stopped eating meat after an encounter with one of India’s many cows in 1992 and became an ethical vegan a decade later.

What prompted you to write Eco-Spirituality and Human-Animal Relationships?

My publisher, John Hunt Publishing, has several imprints, including Changemakers, which has published most of my books. Another of their imprints, Moon Books, asked me to write this book as part of their “Earth Spirit” series. This series includes a number of titles, with each one dedicated to our planet’s future. Since my writing has mainly focused on animals—and they know me to be a spiritual person—I suppose they thought I would be a good fit for Eco-Spirituality and Human-Animal Relationships.

I’m glad they asked me to write this, because, as you know, writing a book makes you scrutinize your feelings about the subject you’re examining. There are things that I believed about Nature in general and animals in particular that I have never put into words, and writing this book was an excellent way for me to articulate those feelings. I have written about our relationships with animals before, but this is the first book I’ve written that includes a special emphasis on spiritual aspects of those relationships—both the good, such as how many people bond with their companion animals, and the bad, such as the tradition of “honoring” animals used for food for their “sacrifice” before eating them.

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