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How to Care about Animals is a fascinating menagerie of passages from classical literature about animals and the lives we share with them. Drawing on ancient writers from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and farmer M. D. Usher has gathered a healthy litter of selections that reveal some of the ways Greeks and Romans thought about everything from lions, bears, and wolves to birds, octopuses, and snails鈥攁nd that might inspire us to rethink our own relationships with our fellow creatures. Presented in lively new translations, with the original texts on facing pages, these pieces are filled with surprises鈥攁nticipating but also offering new perspectives on many of our current feelings and ideas about animals.

Here, Porphyry makes a compelling argument for vegetarianism and asserts that the just treatment of animals makes us better people; Pliny the Elder praises the virtuosity of songbirds and the virtuousness of elephants; Plutarch has one of Circe鈥檚 pigs from the Odyssey make a serio-comic case for the dignity of the beasts of the field; Aristotle puts the study of animals on par with anthropology; we read timeless Aesopian fables, including 鈥淭he Hen That Laid the Golden Egg鈥� and 鈥淭he Fox and the Grapes鈥�; and there is much, much more.

A Noah鈥檚 Ark of a book, How to Care about Animals is guaranteed to charm and inspire anyone who loves animals.