Sebo, Jeff: Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes

Abstract

In his new book Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes Jeff Sebo argues that animals matter with regard to human-induced crises and that humans have a moral responsibility to prevent, reduce, or repair the increasing amount of nonhuman suffering and death that we find in today’s world. Moreover, he attempts to show how these various human-induced crises are interlinked among themselves and with our treatment of animals in a number of complex ways on both the levels of empirical facts and moral considerations. In this review I summarize Sebo’s argumentation and then critically evaluate it.