Animal Rights; The African Elephant; The Giant Panda

We'd all agree that animals have rights up to a point - what causes tension, protest and debate is our inability to agree on where that point is. One could reasonably suppose, for instance, that for every calf-campaigner grabbing a quick bite at the Brightlingsea chippie there's another who believes that fish have the right to swim free. 'A matter for individual conscience' is what the politicians usually say - be it fox-hunting or seal-culling but the individual conscience needs informing, training perhaps, and here's a book that does quite well at it.

Starting from newspoints like the Calf Campaign and the Rwandan gorillas, Miles Barton looks at various ways in which animals seem to be exploited (and at varying attitudes to these ways), introduces the food/sport/entertainment/research dilemmas, and charts the progress of pro-rights campaigning. The book uses a tabloid-style approach to push home facts and questions but unlike daily tabloids, leaves the answers to the now educated conscience of the reader.

Further conscience-training can be got from the two 'Wildlifers' which follow in the distinguished (Earthworm Award 1994) footprints of the author's Blue Whale - which fans will remember we spotted two years ago. These are gentle books providing a good long look at the nature of their subjects as well as examining the 'protection' that humankind affords them, and Strugnell's elephants are lovely.