Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals
By Josh Milburn
Former Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Studies in the Queen’s University Department of Philosophy, Josh Milburn published a new book on a radical approach to animal rights that brings into question when – and what – we should feed animals.
About the book:
Animal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a paradox: perhaps fewer animals would be harmed if they stopped feeding the ones they love. Animal diets do not raise problems merely for individuals. To address environmental crises, health threats, and harm to animals, we must change our food systems and practices. And in these systems, animals, too, are eaters.
Beyond what humans should eat and whether to count animals as food, Just Fodder answers ethical and political questions arising from thinking about animals as eaters. Josh Milburn begins with practical dilemmas about feeding the animals closest to us, our pets or animal companions. The questions grow more complicated as he considers relationships with more distance – questions about whether and how to feed garden birds, farmland animals who would eat our crops, and wild animals. Milburn evaluates the nature and circumstances of our relationships with animals to generate a novel theory of animal rights.
Looking past arguments about what we can and cannot do to other beings, Just Fodder asks what we can, should, and must do for them, laying out a fuller range of our ethical obligations to other animals.
About the author:
Josh Milburn is a moral and political philosopher and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. Josh Milburn was the 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Studies in the Queen’s University Department of Philosophy.
240 Pages
ISBN 9780228011514
July 2022
Formats: Cloth, Paperback, eBook