The Ethics of Animal Shelters (OUP, 2023)

The Ethics of Animal Shelters, a collective volume from the exciting project initiated by Kristin Voigt in collaboration with the Montreal SPCA, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2023.

The first part of the book is the “guidelines” that Kristin’s team of ethics researchers prepared to offer practical recommendations to shelter workers who encounter ethical dilemmas in their daily work. These recommendations are the result of a collaboration between the Montreal SPCA employees who spoke out about the issues that concerned them and made their work difficult, and the team composed of Valéry Giroux, Angie Pepper, Kristin Voigt, Frédéric Côté-Boudreau, Nicolas Delon, Sue Donaldson, François Jaquet, Will Kymlicka, Angela Martin and Agnes Tam.

The second part of the volume brings together chapters where some of these issues are explored more closely: “The value of death for animals: an overview”, by Nicolas Delon; “Caring in Non-Ideal Conditions: Animal Rescue Organizations and Morally Justified Killing”, by Angie Pepper; “Decision-making under non-ideal circumstances: Establishing triage protocols for animal shelters”, by Angela Martin; “What If They Were Humans? Non-Ideal Theory in the Shelter,” by François Jaquet; “Being Popular and Being Just: How Animal Protection Organizations Can Be Both,” by Agnes Tam and Will Kymlicka; “Companion Animal Adoption in Shelters: How ‘Open’ Should It Be?”, by Valéry Giroux and Kristin Voigt; and “Transformative Animal Protection”, by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka.