Jeremy Bentham scorned polite society but loved his London cats, even the pasta-eating swashbuckler Sir John Langbourne. Life with Langbourne led to feline character-study (“His moral qualities were most despotic—his intellectual extraordinary; but he was a universal nuisance”) and set the philosopher brooding on the rights of birds and beasts. “The question is not, Can they reason?” he wrote in 1780, “nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
In Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik ably unpack Bentham’s riddle. Their first book, (2012), offered a deft portrait of a single virus. more diffuse but much more ambitious, is at once a model and also the inventor of the flash mob—a useful credential, since the 19thcentury crusade for animal protection was a marvel of culture jamming.
