Eating Animals

Monday 1:30 p.m.
I didn't go to the jobbie today due to the sneezing and sniffling. I lay in the bath and listened to Radio 4 for a bit and heard J. S. Foer plug his book about Eating Animals.

I know there's someone who comes to this blog who can't avoid eating meat. Eskimos can't avoid eating meat. Folk who live in places where you can't grow vegetables can't avoid eating meat. I love eating meat. I just don't do it very often. I ate a dead fish on Friday night in a fish supper and much enjoyed it. Anyway, here's the review of the book from the Telegraph.


"He starts by asking why we don’t eat our pets. Most people would not eat an animal they had given a name and perhaps shared food with. But the case for not eating dogs, for example, is the same one for not eating chickens, pigs or cows. We can identify with, and therefore spare, any intelligent creature capable of affection. The problem is that many of us rarely encounter the animals we eat – for if we did, we might begin to see the same such characteristics in them.
When Safran Foer goes in search of farm animals, he is horrified by what he finds. Wild chickens live for between 15 and 20 years; but those in a “concentrated animal feeding operation” (a factory farm) live nasty lives mired in their own filth, with only 67sq in of space (less than the width of two of this book’s pages) in which to flap. Pigs have it even worse: pregnant sows locked in crates often go insane, chewing on their bars and drinking their own urine. Though cows have the best lives of all farmed animals, the conditions of their slaughter are gruesome. In one shift, a slaughterhouse worker can kill up to 2,050 cattle; inevitably there are missed kills and animals are sometimes dismembered and skinned while still alive. Safran Foer reports the chilling testimony of one worker who cannot forget the time a pig nuzzled him like a puppy, minutes before he beat it to death with a pipe.
The most convincing argument for eating meat is its naturalness: we are doing what our ancestors have done for thousands of years. However, as the farmers visited by Safran Foer argue, modern farming techniques are far from natural. Factory farms look “more like something out of Blade Runner than Little House on the Prairie,” he says. Animals are bred to produce the maximum amount of meat so their limbs often collapse under their weight; turkeys can barely walk, let alone fly; chickens are stuffed with antibiotics; and lakes of untreated animal waste now disfigure the American countryside.
So is Safran Foer’s case for vegetarianism unanswerable? It is certainly compelling. But he runs the risk of sentimentality when he compares our responses to sick livestock and sick pets. For just as we owe different levels of loyalty to people – your own child, as opposed to one you have never met – not all animals, or indeed all species, deserve the same concern. He seems to recognise this when discussing fish, where his argument is not focused so much on cruelty as on the ecological consequences of over-fishing. It must also be noted that there is a greater availability of ethically farmed meat in Britain than there is in America, where 99 per cent is factory farmed.
None the less, this book, written with clarity, force and passion, will lead any reader with a discomfort about eating meat to think carefully about where it comes from. Is animal suffering the most important thing in the world? asks Safran Foer. “Obviously not. But that’s not the question. Is it more important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That’s the question.”
Eating Animals
by Jonathan
Safran Foer