The Divine Life of Animals - Where do Animals go After They Die?

NYT review of Ptolemy Tompkin's book The Divine Life of Animals: One Man's Quest to Discover Whether the Souls of Animals Live On - Here:

In the relationship between humans and the animals over whom, the Bible tells us, we have dominion, Homo sapiens is the besotted fool.

For evidence that around animals, especially pets, we come undone, there is “The Divine Life of Animals,” Ptolemy Tompkins’s well-meaning but credulous investigation of whether there is an afterlife for his dog, your pet rabbit, Black Beauty or maybe Ch Roundtown Mercedes Of Maryscot, the Scottish terrier who won this year’s Westminster Kennel Club show, to pick just a few.

Of course, a man who wonders if animals have souls is a man with a foregone conclusion. It is no surprise that Mr. Tompkins asks, near the end of his book, “Do animals go to heaven?” and responds, “I am convinced that they do.” Mr. Tompkins is looking not for an answer, but a tradition to back it up. Like his father, the co-writer of the 1970s cult favorite “The Secret Life of Plants,” which hypothesized that plants may be sentient, Mr. Tompkins has an affinity for odd, in-your-face challenges to rationalism, which he has pursued in several previous books.

The disquieting thing about Mr. Tompkins’s hopeful, New Age earnestness is not that it sacrifices intelligence or humor — for the book is literate and often playful — but that in all this cloying spirituality there is no room for actual ethics or justice. It would seem impossible to write a book about animals’ souls and yet never mention today’s vibrant animal rights movement, but here we have it: no mentions of vegetarianism, antivivisection activism, humane farming. No politics. No people acting on any of what Mr. Tompkins would teach us.

The book should have been longer; Mr. Tompkins should have said more. But in its compact, cheerful form it still offers collated wisdom for a huge brotherhood of man, those of us who agree with Milan Kundera, as quoted by Mr. Tompkins: “To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.”