ut Innocent Creatures and Merciless People searches for answers to questions that people of good will have always asked about the treatment of animals. The book shines a light on practices and industries that leave us uneasy when we hear about them, because they are so plainly inconsistent with the just and compassionate societies we aspire to be.

With fresh and compelling arguments, in a style the late Christopher Hitchens described as "beautiful and witty prose," former presidential speechwriter Matthew Scully asks us to look clearly at often horrific abuses in animal agriculture, blood sport, scientific research, and other industries, using reasoned moral judgment to advance an ethic of love and respect for our fellow creatures.

The book collects three decades of published writings -- from The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and elsewhere -- as a sequel to Scully's 2002 Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, a work many readers have called life-changing. "Dominion," wrote New York Times reviewer Natalie Angier, "is a horrible, wonderful, important book. . . . [A] beautiful book, rich with thought, and a balm to the scared, lonely animal in us all."

Because animals are all so powerless before us, as Scully writes in a preface to Fear Factories, they are "a test of conscience for us all. Far from being some minor, peripheral ethical dispute we can leave to the philosophers or worry about some other time, the way we treat animals is a crucial, urgent, defining issue for humanity."