Book Review: Yoga and Animal Ethics
By Bhrigupada Dasa (Dr. Måns Broo). A review of Yoga and Animal Ethics by Kenneth R. Valpey, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
We often take it for granted that yoga leads to a better understanding of how to treat animals. After all, yogis practice ahiṃsā! But is there something more to the relationship between yoga and animals?
This is the question behind Kenneth Valpey’s (Krishna Kshetra Swami’s) erudite, well-argued and also sometimes playful book Yoga and Animal Ethics. Building primarily on parts of Patañjali’s Yoga-sūtra, the Bhagavad-gītā and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Valpey explores various ways in which the ideas in these ancient texts can help us towards a more compassionate but also more understanding way of viewing and dealing with the animal world. As he writes (p. 236),
My proposal in this volume has been that we human beings can benefit ourselves as well as nonhuman beings, individually and collectively, by learning from well-established principles and practices of yoga.
Valpey’s book is a major and sustained attempt to answer this “proposal”. Hindu authors of different denominations have, of course, written on this topic before (Satyaraja Dasa’s Food for the Spirit from 1987 is a good example, even though it focused only on vegetarianism), but as far as I know, nobody has done it in a way that is informed by and dialogues with contemporary thinking on animal ethics. As Valpey writes (p. 4), this book is “neither an instruction manual on how to do yoga, nor is it a rule book on how to treat animals.” Rather, it is something much more ambitious: a book meant to challenge and develop our thinking.
The book is divided into nine chapters spread onto three roughly chronological parts. The first part deals primarily with the Mahābhārata and the ways in which the epic presents yoga as a reaction to Vedic animal sacrifice, but it also takes a look at pertinent parts of the Manu Smṛti. Valpey manages to bring out lesser-known episodes as well, such as the story of Tulādhara and Jājali (3.4). In line with the desire of academic publishers today, each chapter can be read as an independent whole, but naturally they work best when read together with each other.
The second part focuses on the Yoga-sūtra. Valpey goes through the famous “eight limbs” of yoga, focusing on ahiṃsā, satya and the niyamas of svādhyāya and īśvara-praṇidhāna, but also on how animals are a part of the “mediational turn” that the Yoga-sūtra exemplifies.
In the third part, Valpey returns to the Mahābhārata, or rather, the Bhagavad-gītā, to discuss three approaches to animal ethics within its yoga of devotion: a devotionally inflected equanimity approach, a difference theory and an indistinction theory (coming very close to Matthew Calarco’s threefold typology of approaches to animal ethics: identity, difference and indistinction, a typology that Valpey turns to several times). I found this part to be particularly interesting. From here, Valpey moves on to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, focusing on the Krishna story in its tenth book, before coming to his general conclusion, where Govardhana hill and the events surrounding it play a central part.
Valpey reads these ancient texts with a sharp understanding for their meaning, but also for the contemporary world and its sensitivities. For example, discussing today’s meat industry in relation to ahiṃsā is not very surprising (4.1.1), but Valpey’s treatment of satya (truthfulness) in the same context (4.1.2) is eye-opening. Where is truthfulness in the ways in which living, breathing animals are turned into sterile, plastic-packed slabs of meat?
Of course, Valpey could be criticized for essentially cherry-picking his texts, extracting only the parts that fit into his agenda and ignoring the rest (for instance Mahābhārata has many stories that challenge some of the thoughts brought out here, such as the burning of the Khāṇḍava forest). After all, animal ethics is not the main topic of any of the three texts that he focuses on. How is his exegesis in line with truth (satya)? Such a criticism misses the point: Valpey is not here interested in offering a sustained textual exegesis. Rather, his idea is to bring out yogic ideas and practices that can inform and improve an already established discourse on animal ethics. He does so in ways that will prove challenging for both persons new to a yogic worldview and many who already profess one. I am sure that many Vaishnava devotees might be provoked by the author’s own program of ahiṃsā veganism in appendix C.
In a way, as both “yoga” and “animal ethics” are interesting for many people, Valpey’s book should be of interest for a large audience – not least because it is available in open access. Still, this is an academic text, full of references, footnotes, numbered subchapters and a sometimes rather difficult language. Valpey likes being playful with his English (e.g., “alimentary ambiguity”, “animating samādhi”), which will be fun for people familiar with the academic discourse that he is part of, but which makes for rather heavy reading for others. This is not a book that you’ll read in one afternoon by the pool; rather, this is a text to read slowly, or perhaps, to chew and masticate with much time and some effort as well. But don’t worry – when ingested in such a way, this cud is both tasty and nutritious, and the labour will be eminently rewarded.
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