Remember the old Penguin Classics?  Well here’s a Little Chicken Classic.  The first.  It isn’t quite as pristine as its Penguin counterparts because Luke has got his grubby mits on it and defaced it with stickers and smudges.  Luckily,  they don’t obscure the title 😀

“One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” 

Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Little Chicken Classic – Luke Walker animal stick up for-er contains the first sixteen chapters of our beloved outlaw’s adventures, complete with illustrations.  It seemed a good idea to put them all in one volume, making them more portable and therefore easier to keep on hand for public transport delays or long waits in doctors’ waiting rooms or whenever you have a few moments at your disposal.  Getting so much adventure into so few pages was achieved by simply changing the font – this Little…

Raystede, described on its website as a “leading Centre for Animal Welfare”, justifies the selling of animal products in its cafe with the claim that they source “any meat and dairy from local, high welfare farming systems.”  But can meat and dairy really ever be humane?  Someone who should know the answer to that question is former cattle farmer, Harold Brown.  The following is an excerpt from his essay on the Humane Myth website:

“I was born on an independent family cattle farm in south central Michigan, and I have spent over half of my life in agriculture. I started out as any farm kid does who has grown up around animals. There was an indoctrination involved as to how I should relate to farm animals. My indoctrination started with my parents, then family, then community, our church, 4-H, FFA, a land-grant college, and finally, the reinforcement of…

Let the dogs out has been re-done and is now available in paperback with full page watercolour illustrations.

As you might imagine, although there is a happy ending for the story’s hero, this one is something of a tear-jerker.  You can read the whole story here, if you want to try before you buy, but, basically, it’s about a beagle who was born and raised in a laboratory breeding facility.  The story is told from his point of view and we learn how life is for him and his peers in this bleak place.  The reader actually knows more than he does because they can understand what the humans are saying, and they can read the label on the cage and the order form that slips to the floor.

The whole business is a very unhappy prospect indeed.  However, about half way through the book everything changes: one of…