A timely look at animal rights.

Does animal liberation justify violent means? Is it right to threaten or harm companies or persons associated with animal testing? Should we, as one militant animal rights group puts it, bite back? Lee Hall's answer is no. Hall, the legal director of the Connecticut-based advocacy group Friends of Animals, lays out her sharp reasoning in Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror (Nectar Bat Press, $14.95), a look at some of the philosophical quandaries currently facing animal rights activists. Violence, she claims, not only allows conservative pundits to dismiss activists by labeling them terrorists, but also violates fundamental values of the animal rights movement. Animal rights, Hall argues, must apply to all living things, and we cannot protect the rights of one animal by impinging on the rights of another. We cannot return a rabbit to its burrow by burning a CEO's house.

How then should we work towards change? Veganism is one of Hall's recommendations, and she also argues that we must break down the hierarchical thinking that dominates our relationships with animals and with each other. She envisions a world in which all life has inherent worth and calls this "the most comprehensive peace movement the world has ever known."