Though increasing the number of vegetarians was not likely her goal, Charlotte Montgomery’s powerful report from the front lines of the Canadian animal rights movement could provoke many a reader to swear off a whole range of pub fare.

After attending an animal rights conference in 1997, Montgomery, a well-read journalist, asked herself why there were so few accounts of the people who devote their lives to the concerns of animals, and began to dig deeper. Her journey across Canada is chronicled here. She interviews Animal Liberation Front members who have done time in prison for freeing mink and rescuing lab animals, and also surveys more conservative factions that allow for support of hunting, whaling, and medical and cosmetic experimentation on rabbits and monkeys.

Along the way, we also meet anarchist vegans, a right-wing think tank associate who condemns direct actionists but heads up a Humane Society, and a truck driver who recalls the horrid conditions in which animals are transported to slaughter – many arriving dead on the scene, others barely able to hobble to their fate.

Montgomery is an engaging writer who asks logical questions about the issues, and then answers them in a detailed, accessible manner. Her range of topics includes everything from biotechnology, transgenics (implanting genes from one species into another), factory farms, hunting farms, and fur pelts to the treatment of pets, circus animals, and non-human Calgary Stampede performers. Also covered is the byzantine political world of the scores of Canadian organizations involved in doing something (or doing nothing, in some cases) to confront the issues.

It is refreshing to see a journalist bring a sense of moral outrage to a book but still value subtlety over sledgehammer. Clearly sympathetic to the radical strand of the movement, Montgomery nonetheless gives all sides a fair hearing, and leaves us with provocative questions about the way humans treat their fellow creatures.