Katherine Wills Perlo has turned the traditional discourse on animals and religion inside out. Instead of focusing on the impact of religion on our treatment of animals, she reveals the distortions that our prejudices toward our nonhuman neighbors have had on religious teachings. A remarkable marriage of insightful scholarship and deep compassion, Kinship and Killing is a seminal work that will influence the direction of the debate on religion and animals for decades to come. -- Norm Phelps, author of The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights According to the Bible Important and exciting, Kinship and Killing shows how the status of animals in major world religions arose as projections of the attitudes rooted in their respective cultures. The scholarship is rich, the writing is clear, and the critical evaluations are judicious. At last a study of animals and religions that deals with the negatives as well as the positives of each tradition and then critically evaluates modern theological commentators. -- Julian H. Franklin, author of Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy "Katherine Wills Perlo has turned the traditional discourse on animals and religion inside out. Instead of focusing on the impact of religion on our treatment of animals, she reveals the distortions that our prejudices toward our nonhuman neighbors have had on religious teachings. A remarkable marriage of insightful scholarship and deep compassion, Kinship and Killing is a seminal work that will influence the direction of the debate on religion and animals for decades to come." -- Norm Phelps, author of The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights According to the Bible

Through close readings of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist texts, Katherine Wills Perlo proves that our relationship with animals shapes religious doctrine, particularly through the tension between animal exploitation and the bonds of kinship. She pinpoints four different strategies for coping with this conflict. The first is aggression, in which a divinely conferred superiority or karma justifies animal usage. The second is evasion, which emphasizes benevolent aspects of the human-animal relationship within the exploitative structure, such as the image of Jesus as a "good shepherd." The third is defense, which acknowledges the problematic nature of killing, leading many religions to adopt a propitiation mechanism, such as apologizing for sacrifice. And the fourth is effective-defensive, which recognizes animal abuse as inherently unethical. As humans feel more empathy toward animals, Perlo finds that adherents revise their interpretations of religious texts. Preexisting ontologies, such as Christianity's changing God or Buddhism's principle of impermanence, along with advances in farming practices and technology, also encourage changes in treatment. As cultures begin to appreciate the different types of perception and consciousness experienced by nonhumans, definitions of reality become complicated and humans lean more toward unitary accounts of shared existence. These evolving attitudes exert a crucial influence on religious thought, Perlo argues, moving humans ever closer to a nonspeciesist world.