Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who's the Cruelest Species of Them All?

Shamu's mother was harpooned.

She was killed in the wild by the crew that captured the first in a series of young orcas that have since been trained to do tricks at San Diego's Sea World marine park, known sequentially as America's most famous performing sea mammals.

And maybe that's all you need to know to realize just how far humans will go. Maybe that's all you need to know -- were you beside me on those bleachers, years ago, cheering Shamu? -- to see blood, even faded and vestigial, on your hands.

Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello's Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (Prometheus, 2007) is a book so jam-packed with literal crimes against nature that it's hard to read more than a few pages in one go. Williams works for the Humane Society of the United States. DeMello is an administrative director of the House Rabbit Society.

Together they have painstakingly assembled statistics, news reports, anecdotes, and observations exposing the sufferings of so many creatures in so many industries -- food, fashion, entertainment, medicine -- as well as hobbies ranging from hunting to ostensibly positive pet-ownership that you recoil from revelation after revelation about Chinese cat-fur coats, say, or "spent" racehorses that are slaughtered for dogfood. On information overload, you blink: Wait … my species does that?

Indeed it does.

It hunts over 22 million mourning doves in the US every year.

It rounded up tens of thousands of pet dogs in China in 2006 and slaughtered them in an alleged health campaign.

It gorges on salmon factory-farmed in such overcrowded tanks that their skeletons become malformed and their skullbones burst through their skin in a condition called "death crown."

Imitating rap stars and other fashion icons, it has enthusiastically revived a moribund fur and exotic-animal-skin industry.

It wears the hides of alligators that were either slashed and bled to death or flayed alive.

It indulges in cosmetics tested by the weeks-long application of toxins to the eyes of rabbits locked in stocks.

It bets on battles between fowl drugged with steroids, strychnine and amphetamine and bred specially to tear out each other's eyes, rip each other's flesh and break each other's bones in fight after big-money fight.

It shoots zebras and yaks in Texas.

We tell ourselves that we already know enough about this: at least the basics, all we need to know. Yet just as car accidents don't let you look away, this book's breadth and specificity compels you to linger and learn more, then more again: collecting grisly tidbits to marvel at. To sling later at idiots. To arrange side by side along those moral lines that will shimmer in some future sand as you wonder which shampoo to use, which clothing brands to buy or what to eat.

This is the rest of the tour that Eric Schlosser began in Fast Food Nation -- paced not quite at a bovine plod but still deliberately, somberly slow -- of that bustling, bloody world-within-a-world in which terrible things happen to animals. The evidence is everywhere: in the bedroom closet, the medicine cabinet, the fridge, the restaurant, the cupboard full of cleansers under the sink. It's at the pet shop, circus, zoo, aquarium, boutique. Even if you're a pleather-clad vegan sitting perfectly still in an open field, you are implicated -- used -- as an ostensible statistic, who by virtue of belonging to Homo sapiens can still be considered a potential eventual customer for countless cosmetics, comestibles, clothes, drugs and other future products whose marketing schemes are already under way. The macular degeneration, diabetes or fondness for fur-trimmed jackets that you might or might not someday develop is reason enough for wealthy powerful companies to justify inflicting untold things on untold creatures: "Even with all of our laws," Williams and DeMello muse, "and even with a nation of caring people, we still tolerate -- and many of us unwittingly participate in -- an unprecedented degree of animal cruelty. How can this be so?