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Sat 03 Mar 2003The comfort of creatures
Philosophy: On sight of this book, a person not unconnected with these pages coined an elegant if politically incorrect aphorism: "Animals," she said, "are the new blacks." John Banville reviews The Philosopher's Dog by Raimond Gaita.
Certainly there has been an increasing trend recently to bring to the subject of animals and our treatment of them the same kind of sentimentality and wishy-washiness that marked so much of liberal attitudes to racial injustice in the past. It is good to be able to report, then, that Raimond Gaita is as hard-headed in his way as any NAACP or anti-apartheid activist.
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