BOOK REVIEW : One Human Protest of Animal Treatment : INHUMANE SOCIETY; The American Way of Exploiting Animals <i> by Michael W. Fox</i> St. Martin’s Press $18.95, 268 pages

“Meat is murder. Dairy is rape.” Slogans like these may not be surprising coming from citizens wearing rope sandals and eating only fallen fruit. But when such sentiments issue from the pen of a scholarly vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, a University of London Ph.D who’s written 30 books, one pays special attention.

“Inhumane Society” is earnest and compassionate, if hand-wavy.

“The holocaust of the animals today will be ours tomorrow,” author Michael W. Fox writes, “(unless) we begin to assume the responsibilities of self-dominion and humane planetary leadership.”

Fox, who writes a column called “Pet Life” for McCall’s magazine, launches an all-out polemic against Americans for what he sees as their exploitative attitudes toward pets, farm animals, wild animals and even disadvantaged people. He lays the blame for these attitudes on monopoly capitalism, and proposes a familiar--if now a bit shopworn--solution. Replace the current global economic system, he says, with one that’s local, organic, sustainable, low-impact and vegetarian.

The author was radicalized early. He recalls being horrified as a boy by finding a sackful of decomposing kittens in a neighborhood pond in his native England. At that moment--he was 5--he resolved to become a veterinarian and to devote his life to helping animals.

Unlike most people who make impassioned vows at tender ages, Fox reports that he did just what he set out to do. When he finished his training and began to practice veterinary medicine, however, he soon became disenchanted. He saw his profession serving society’s economic needs at the often painful expense of the animals themselves. He has now publicly denounced veterinary medicine as it is practiced in Britain and the United States. He proudly calls himself a “pariah” of his profession and describes himself as a committed animal-rights advocate and vegetarian.

In “Inhumane Society,” Fox shows how dramatically the scope of the U.S. humane movement has expanded. Activists who once worked to eliminate the pain, fear and suffering that humans inflict on animals now champion basic animal rights that are all but indistinguishable from human rights. Among the tenets of today’s animal rights groups, writes Fox, are that all endangered species have a right to life, that animals should be protected from genetic engineering experiments, and that farm animals have a right to eat, sleep and reproduce naturally.

From first-hand experience in commercial animal husbandry, Fox describes, perhaps too graphically for some tastes, what the activists oppose.

For example, a propagation technique used by some factory farms involves cutting open pregnant sows, putting the premature piglets on robotic feeders, then sewing the sows up and immediately re-impregnating them.

Fox argues that Americans’ misuse of animals cannot be separated from the larger fabric of their materialistic society. He says, in other words, that so long as Americans compete for goods, animals will be used--and inevitably abused--as goods, rather than treated humanely as creatures deserving full rights of their own.

Fox’s book would be powerful if his small-is-beautiful economics were more concrete. But he never comes closer to practical proposals than such soft-focus, romantic abstractions as the following: “I am in favor of the development of appropriate technologies, industries, and food-production systems consonant with the principle of humane planetary stewardship that recognizes the right of all living things to a whole and healthy environment and the right of each living thing to equal and fair consideration.”

It would help, too, if the author’s prose style were as lucid as his ideals are laudable. But Fox’s prose is windy, repetitious, and sometimes downright impenetrable. He has an important sermon to deliver, but only the faithful choir will linger to hear all of it.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution” by Louis Rapoport (Free Press).