By Eric Paine

The Extended Circle. Jon Wynne-Tyson. Sphere, 1990. £6.99  

THIS is a most formidable collection of the thoughts of eminent  people on the underlying unity of life and the obligation we have to  extend the boundary of our compassion to the natural world. It runs to over six hundred pages, and requires no index as the contributions are in alphabetical order.  

The book took Wynne-Tyson six years to compile and a life-time of appalled observation of our unremitting cruelty towards non-human species, being motivated by the conviction that our treatment to each  other will not improve until we have learned to behave more  compassionately towards all sentient life.  

The book is not just a catalogue of man’s particular cruelties to animals such as vivisection, zoos, rodeos, factory farming, bull fighting,  blood sports, etc., but has the positive purpose of stressing the need for  a beneficial love of all creatures as an ante-dote to the chilling  inhumanity of societies which have inherited the life denying values of  an existence deifying growth above all humane, holistic and long term  considerations. The book makes for good soul searching and the church comes in for condemnation for being almost totally indifferent  towards the suffering of animals.  

This paperback is good value and should prompt many to re-think their attitudes towards weaker non-human species generally. It is fitting to conclude with a quotation from Paine’s, The Age of Reason:

‘The moral duty of man consists in imitating the moral goodness of God,  manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.’