I recently reviewed a book (Anthrozoos, Vol. 20(1)) with the charmingly buoyant title of "Killing Animals." The book’s introduction includes the sobering news that we humans kill more animals today than we have at any point in history. That’s some 55 billion yearly, not including fishes, according to a recent estimate from The Humane Society of the United States. (If it’s any help, that translates to well over a thousand per second.) Needless to say, some 98 percent are put to death so that we can put them into our mouths. And the vast bulk of these killings are unnecessary, because we could have eaten something else.

For anyone with an inclusive concept of ethics, killing on this scale must represent one of humanity’s bleakest failings.

The hopeful news is that we now know more about animals than ever before. It’s getting harder to ignore the reality that they are highly sentient, and thus deserving of not merely kindness, but justice. There are signs we are on the cusp of turning the corner in our long and troubled relationship to other animals. This week, I present just three among myriad harbingers of this long-awaited threshold.

In more marine news, the journal PLoS Biology has published a paper (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1868071) that rebuts a recent theory by South African biologist Paul Manger (http://outside.away.com/outside/news/20060818_1.html) suggesting that dolphins and whales are far less astute than their large brains would suggest. Lori Marino from Emory University heads a list of 16 coauthors, all cetacean experts, who marshal evidence from evolution, neuroanatomy, and cognition and behavior studies in the wild and in captivity. Their slightly cheeky concluding statement: "Rightfully oblivious to Manger’s contentions, cetaceans continue to provide an enormous body of empirical evidence for complex behavior, learning, sociality, and culture."

But why wait for humans to come to your defense when you can coauthor your own paper instead? That’s just what three bonobos—Kanzi Wamba, Panbanisha Wamba and Nyota Wamba—have done, in a paper coauthored by their human colleague and leading primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh that addresses society’s mistreatment of animals (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=17484674). The bonobos, each with large vocabularies in American Sign Language, collaborated with Savage-Rumbaugh in responding to questions related to their physical, social and emotional well-being. This unprecedented case of non-human authorship in a peer-reviewed journal (The Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science) article acknowledges these animals’ right to have a legitimate voice—their own voice—in determining the adequacy of their living environments. In a press release, journal editor Kenneth Shapiro notes that given the extraordinary psychological, sociological and cultural capabilities of great apes, "moral philosophy and legal precedent conclude that these abilities constitute personhood and agency. So why not authorship?"

Why not, indeed. Makes good reading with a tofu stirfry.