How to Care about Animals: An Ancient Guide to Creatures Great and Small

An entertaining and enlightening anthology of classical Greek and Roman writings on animals--and our vital relationships with them 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--and that might inspire us to rethink our own relationships with our fellow creatures. Presented in lively new translations, these pieces are filled with surprises--anticipating 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's 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 hear timeless Aesopian fables, including "The Hen That Laid the Golden Egg" and "The Fox and the Grapes"; and there is much, much more.

About the Author :
Porphyry (c. 232-c. 304 CE) was a Neoplatonic philosopher and a student of Plotinus. His many works include On Abstinence from Killing Animals, On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey, and Against the Christians. M. D. Usher is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Vermont, where he is a faculty member in the Environmental and Food Systems Programs and the Department of Geography. He and his wife, Caroline, built, own, and operate Works & Days Farm in Shoreham, Vermont. Peter Noble is an Audie Award-winning narrator who has recorded hundreds of audiobooks and audio dramas, including the 2021 Booker Prize winner, as well as Audible and New York Times bestsellers. Peter is a brain injury survivor, and has a unique understanding of the music of language. He was born in South Africa, in a valley Alan Paton called "lovely beyond any singing of it." He grew up traveling and studied music and drama at the University of Cape Town. In South Africa, Peter worked in the theater, touring the country with a small repertory company, as well as appearing on radio, TV, and film. Peter moved to London to study classical acting at LAMDA. He went on to train as a singer at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was part of the second graduating cohort of the legendary RAM Musical Theatre program. He also has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He lives just outside of London, in Hertfordshire.