Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals

by Josh Milburn

Animal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a 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.Moving 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.

Genres: Philosophy, Animals

240 pages, Paperback

Published July 19, 2022

Reviews

[Heather Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although there is a lot of work on the ethics of how we feed ourselves (including the role animals play in our food systems), there is almost nothing on what and how we feed other animals. This book is easy to read and opens up important conversations about the ethics of feeding animals. It takes a relational ethical approach, basing our duties towards other animals in the different relationships with them, and doesn't shy away from tackling some genuinely tricky topics, such as the suggestion that by rehabilitating and releasing predators we take on responsibility for the prey animals they kill in future. I didn't agree with everything, but appreciated the presentation of the novel and important topics.