The Spiritual Nature of Animals

October 15, 2017
Part meditation, part spiritual/theological exploration, part collection of anecdotes, part history, and all heart, this is a hard book to pin down. Stange, a veterinarian, spent her life caring for animals, but the difficult cases took a toll. She realized she could not continue to hold herself responsible for an animal's failure to heal. Thus began her wide-ranging look at the world's great religions and how animals prominently figure into their defining myths. The bond that humans and animals share is deep but can often be damaged or broken when humans forget to give animals a place in the scheme of things. In her quest to understand animals better, Stange learned not only to tune into their body language more closely, but also to actually perceive the processes occurring in their bodies. Stange discusses approaches that seem New Agey, but they just might convince people to consider other ways of caring for animals. She also questions whether euthanasia is always the kind thing. Mostly, this debut work turns a loving, gentle eye toward animalsand humans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)