While researching this book, Henry Mance worked briefly in an abattoir, or “a disassembly line”, as he aptly terms it. As he watched sheep being stunned, their throats slit and then hung up, still twitching, from metal hooks on a motorised track, Mance asked himself: “How did humans come to this?”
His book is an attempt to answer that question, as well as an exploration of how our attitudes to pets, livestock and wild animals have changed through history: “I wanted to know whether my love for animals was reflected in how I behaved, or whether – like my love for arthouse films – it was mainly theoretical.”
To understand the popularity of zoos, he talked to Damian Aspinall, owner of two safari parks. Every year in the UK and Ireland, 32 million people visit zoos and yet, Mance says, “we’re polluting our children’s minds” with this display of…