In August, the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries killed a walrus named Freya who had made her home on the marina pier in Oslo. Freya was not sick or violent; authorities only feared she would become so. They warned people to stay away, but many failed to heed the warning, so Freya was shot and killed. This is a story of encroachment: not by Freya, but by humans into her habitat. Yet Freya paid the price.

Such a story is worthy of Esther Woolfson’s Between Light and Storm: How We Live with Other Species, a book that explores humanity’s troubled relationship with animals. Initially, Woolfson reminds us, humans had respect for animals, seeing them as fellow beings or even gods. Many cultures, for instance, associated birds with human souls.

But that reverence began to disappear with domestication and the development of Western philosophy and religious thought that argued for human exceptionalism — the idea that (a Judeo-Christian) god had granted humans the right to change the world as they desired, and given them dominion over all the creatures within it. Between Light and Storm is a compelling (though devastating) read about a patriarchal, capitalist system that has reduced animals to commodities. If animals are soulless automatons, Woolfson reminds us, then humans can use them for any and all purposes.

Using her own relationships to the animals around her, Woolfson explores the varied ways humanity has exploited them, for medicine, food, hunting, and even as pets. While critiques of factory farming and fur-trading systems are not exactly new, Woolfson presents new ways of looking at such issues. For instance, she quotes Rachel Poliquin in The Breathless Zoo that “taxidermy stops time” but Woolfson adds that it “magnifies it too. It refracts everything we want to say about ourselves and others. It is often not in any present cruelty — the cruelty may have taken place long ago or not at all. Often, it’s delegated cruelty, the cruelty of others.” But we aren’t we, too, complicit, looking at these creatures of the past?

Woolfson’s deep dive into the history of Western medicine is particularly shocking. She argues that everything we know about medicine today is built on the suffering of animals. Famous doctors of medicine and science used myriad animals in their experiments, including live creatures, often without anesthesia.

Woolfson cites recent books and studies (as well as her own experiences) that provide overwhelming evidence that animals have consciousness, admittedly different from humans, as well as a plethora of emotions. That alone should be reason enough to change our behaviors. “If we live in a world of sentience and consciousness,” she writes, “shouldn’t the knowledge alter the entire basis of our relationship with other species?”

Tradition, Woolfson argues, is too often used as an excuse for human behavior, no matter how cruel or ecologically destructive. She describes a centuries-old Scottish tradition where young gannets are hunted at their summer nesting grounds in Ness, North Lewis, Scotland. The guga, as it is called, is conducted under a veil of secrecy; everyone acts as if it were some religious or spiritual rite. “One Hebridean writer on ecology quoted by Murray believes that for a young gannet to be killed in this way is morally defensible if the killing is ‘providentially grounded ... replete with gratitude for the grace of God ...’ an argument not infrequently used by those who start wars, who conquer and occupy other people’s land believing their deeds not only acceptable but necessary and sanctified because God whispered something secret into their ever-receptive ear. No deed may reflect back on the righteous man.”

While Woolfson provides a compelling history of philosophy and actions towards animals, much of her analysis is Eurocentric. Though she touches on some non-Western voices in the beginning, this is only to discuss ancient beliefs. After this, the non-Western voices drop out of the text. In a book that shows how Western ideas have perpetuated these exploitative attitudes, alternative perspectives are painfully absent.

For its faults, though, Between Light and Storm provides yet another ringing wakeup call to the systematic commodification of animal life. As calls to real action to mitigate climate change accelerate, we must rethink our arguments on why polar bears or wolves should be saved. Instead of saving these animals for our sake, we can save them for theirs.