Leaving the Wild

Human values and choices determine an animal's lot in life even before he or she is born. Just as a sculptor's hands shape clay, so human values shape our animals--for good and or ill. The little-examined, yet omnipresent act of breeding lies at the core of Gavin Ehringer's eye-opening book. You'll meet cows cloned from steaks, a Quarter horse stallion valued at $7.5 million, Chinese dogs that glow in the dark, and visit a Denver cat show featuring naked cats and other cuddly mutants. Is this what the animals bargained for all those millennia ago, when they first joined us by the fire?