Human nature is a mass of contradiction and ambiguity. We hurt what we profess to love, we kill with kindness, and we deny any culpability. Almost nothing exemplifies our contradictory nature like our relationship with animals. Erika Ritter examines this relationship from many different angles in her new book.

Ritter, a longtime CBC Radio broadcaster and playwright, previously wrote a novel, The Hidden Life of Humans, partially from a dog’s point of view. Her new book takes as its focus a powerful medieval morality tale: a greyhound was killed in a fit of rage by its owner, who mistakenly thought that the animal had mauled his child. The owner later discovered that the child was in fact alive and the dog had actually killed a serpent.

The Dog by the Cradle returns to this story repeatedly, analyzing the way it relates to the different topics discussed in the book – such as the complexity of animals’ thought processes, or how humans treat the livestock many of us include in our diets. This is an interesting structure, but the book’s most engaging segments are Ritter’s interviews with several fascinating characters who work on the frontlines of human-animal interaction, such as slaughterhouse reformer Temple Grandin.

Ritter points to a number of examples to illustrate our often paradoxical relationships with animals. The public mourning of downed thoroughbreds makes headlines, yet we continue to go to the track en masse, prompting owners to endanger their horses by forcing them to race ever faster. People lobby for bigger poultry cages, but refuse to give up their chicken dinners. Fortunes are spent on pampered pets, while millions of strays fill shelters.

While a large library of books about our relations with animals already exists, the writing in them tends to be either overly emotional or grimly detached. Ritter deftly avoids both extremes. The result is a passionate, thought-provoking addition to the canon.