Good luck enjoying eating salmon ever again

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cat videos,’ begins Henry Mance’s How to Love Animals, winningly. That is the paradox he sets out to unpick in this densely factual and intermittently horrifying book: how a world in thrall to cuteness, endlessly compelled to click on videos of kittens and owls having a special friendship, can remain indifferent to the suffering of almost all other animals, whether farmed, in captivity or in the wild.

That’s a tough brief. I’m not sure it’s a book I would choose off the shelf, because the subject matter is deeply unpalatable. The facts and figures — intensely researched and carefully woven into the two parts, ‘Killing Animals’ and ‘Loving Animals’ — speak for themselves. Billions of male chicks are destroyed each year as waste by-products of the egg industry. Even ‘crate free’ sows spend up to 40 per cent of their lives in tiny metal cages.