tagged w/ Jonathan Safran Foer
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The Atlantic
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Dead Cow Walking: The Case Against Born-Again Carnivorism
By Marc Bekoff
Dec 27 2011, 8:53 AM ET 614
Pigs, chickens, and other animals raised for food are sentient beings with rich emotional lives. They feel everything from joy to grief.
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"Eating Animals," by Nicolette Hahn Niman, a livestock rancher, with help from deer hunter Tovar Cerulli and butcher Joshua Applestone, caught my eye because, at first, I thought this essay was authored by Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote a best-selling book with the same title. While Niman and her friends do rightly argue against consuming factory-farmed animals -- who live utterly horrible lives from the time that they're born to the time that they're transported to slaughterhouses and barbarically killed -- these three born-again carnivores, all former vegetarians or vegans, now proudly eat animals and think that it's just fine to do so. They gloss over the fact that even if the animals they eat are "humanely" raised and slaughtered, an arguable claim, they're still taking a life. These animals are merely a means to an end: a tasty meal.
The defensive and apologetic tone of this essay also caught my eye, as did the conveniently utilitarian framework of the argument. The animals they eat were raised simply to become meals because Niman and others choose to eat meat. I like to say that whom we choose to eat is a moral question, and just because these three now choose to eat animals doesn't mean that other people should make the same choice. Note that I wrote "whom" we eat, not "what." Cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals raised for food are sentient beings who have rich emotional lives. They can feel everything from sheer joy to deep grief. They can also suffer enduring pain and misery, and they don't deserve to have the good and happy lives provided by Niman and others ended early just so that their flesh can wind up on what really is a platter of death.
Wolves, lions, and cougars are not moral agents and can't be held accountable for their actions. But most humans know what they're doing and are responsible for their choices.
Cows, for example, are very intelligent. They worry over what they don't understand and have been shown to experience "eureka" moments when they solve a puzzle, such as when they figure out how to open a particularly difficult gate. Cows communicate by staring, and it's likely that we don't fully understand their very subtle forms of communication. They also form close and enduring relationships with family members and friends and don't like to have their families and social networks disrupted. Chickens are also emotional beings, and detailed scientific research has shown that they empathize with the pain of other chickens.
Raising happy animals just so that they can be killed is really an egregious double cross. The "raise them, love them, and then kill them" line of reasoning doesn't have a meaningful ring of compassion. And this isn't mercy killing (euthanasia) performed because these animals need to be put out of their pain. No, these healthy and happy animals are slaughtered, and if you dare to look into their eyes, you know that they're suffering. If you wouldn't treat a dog like this, then you shouldn't treat a cow, a pig, or any other animal in this way.
As a field biologist who studies animal behavior, I feel that the authors' appeal to what happens in the natural world -- "life feeds on life" -- is an illogical justification for their food choices. I've seen thousands of predatory encounters. I cringe when I see them, but I would never interfere. Wild predators, unlike us, have no choice about whom or what they eat. They couldn't survive if they didn't eat other animals. And indeed, many animals are vegetarians, including non-human primates, who eat other animals only on very rare occasions.
Jessica Pierce and I wrote about how appeals to nature are misleading and illogical in our book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. We argued that wolves, lions, and cougars, for example, are not moral agents and can't be held accountable for their actions. They don't know right from wrong. On the other hand, most humans do know what they're doing and are responsible for their choices. When it comes down to whose flesh winds up in our mouths, we can make choices, and in my view, eating animals is wrong and unnecessary, even when they are "humanely" raised and slaughtered. Let me add a caveat here because, as a world traveler, I do know that many people do not have the luxury of making a choice about their meals and must eat whatever is available to them. However, those who do have that luxury can easily eat an animal-free diet. And we can work to show others that a vegetarian or vegan diet can be very economical and healthy.
Niman and her friends also note that vegetarian and vegan diets have "never really taken hold." So what? This hardly means that we shouldn't try to do the right thing. They write, "The vast majority of Americans who do try vegetarianism or veganism -- about three-quarters of them -- return to eating meat. Rather than urging people to consume only plants, doesn't it make more sense to encourage them to eat an omnivorous diet that is healthy, ethical, and ecologically sound?" No, it doesn't. What it means is that these people should try harder and not give up just because it might seem difficult to change their meal plans. Perhaps they just need more time and encouragement from other vegetarians who can show them how easy it is to stop eating animals.
It's easy to add more compassion to the world and to expand our compassion footprint. Excuses such as "Oh, I know they suffer, but don't tell me because I love my burger" add cruelty to the world, even if the animals people are eating weren't raised on factory farms and killed in slaughterhouses. You're eating a dead animal who really did care about what happened to him or her. When I ask people how they can dismiss the fact that an animal was killed for their pleasure, they usually fumble here and there and offer no meaningful answer. When I ask them if they'd eat a dog, they look at me with incredulity and emphatically say, "No!" When I ask them why they wouldn't eat a dog, they can't really tell me, offering statements laden with dismissive phrases, such as "Oh, you know...." Because I often travel to China to help in the rehabilitation of Asiatic moon bears who have been rescued from the bear-bile industry, people sometimes ask me, "How can you go there? Isn't that where they eat dogs and cats?" I simply say, "Yes, it is, and I'm from America, where they eat cows and pigs, who are no less sentient and emotional beings." Animals really are very much like us.
No matter how humanely raised they are, the lives of animals raised for food can be cashed out simply as "dead cow/pig/chicken walking." Whom we choose to eat is a matter of life and death. I think of the animals' manifesto as "Leave us alone. Don't bring us into the world if you're just going to kill us to satisfy your tastes."
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Image: Kurt De Bruyn
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The Atlantic
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Dead Cow Walking: The Case Against Born-Again Carnivorism... more
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12-year-old Thomas Horn, who won $31,800 on "Jeopardy!" back in October, has been cast as the lead in the film adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's acclaimed novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close."
The "Jeopardy!" champ will star alongside Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks as Oskar Schell, a bright and precocious young boy who sets out on a journey to find the lock that matches a key left behind by his father (played by Hanks), who died on 9/11. Bullock is set to play Oskar's mother.
Read more here: http://www.examiner.com/movie-reviews-in-chicago/jeopardy-kids-winner-thomas-horn-cast-extremely-loud-and-incredibly-close12-year-old Thomas Horn, who won $31,800 on "Jeopardy!" back in October, has... more
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Everybody knows that the internet has a bacon fetish. It's one of the tastiest animal products, but as my friend the nutritionist says: "I love the smell of bacon in the morning. It smells like obesity." Some think this trend is coming to an end, but I'm not so sure. And that is what sparked this work of meme historical fiction.
Now to present you with the second piece of meme historical fiction ever written. This time Josh Heller has teamed up with darling of the genre, Andrew Fitzgerald to co-write this piece:
Bacon had retained it's grip over the internet for years. In the early days it seemed like a new bacon blog popped up every other day. Then on a fateful late summer morning, the New York Times released an article that changed everything. "It’s Hip to Be Round" claimed to show a new trend: male hipsters showing off their pot bellies. The moment this article hit the blogstands, the face of bacon as we know it.
Within hours hipsters around the world were mobilized. From the lofts of Williamsburg to the warehouses of Hackney emanded a change.
Historians time the start of the backlash to the destruction by looting and firebombing of the Brooklyn “offices” of popular “blog” This is why you’re fat. The rage of the thin was not to be contained just to that, the offices of Tumblr itself were next and authorities just barely rescued company founder David Karp from a slow herb-roasting in a health-conscious man-sized George Foreman Grill.
Within days, cooler heads prevailed, with such calming voices as writer Michael Pollan’s eventually drowning out the bloodthirsty (most notably Jonathan Safran Foer who famously called for Americans to “Burn down your McDonalds, Tear apart your Wendys, Rip your Arby's limb from pork-y limb...”). Pollan suggested that of all the high fat items to be singled out, perhaps bacon was the worst offender, and could be replaced. He suggested quinoa, a largely unheard-of grain.
Quinoanaise became a popular product for so-called "quinoatarians"
Within weeks items such as quinoa and eggs, quinoa cheese (veggie) burgers, and even the late night snack quinoa-wrapped hot dogs were available nationwide in great abundance. It was only perhaps six months later that a book deal was announced for popular FriendFeed account This is Why You’re Thin which featured many pieces of what the nutritiono-blogosphere termed “quinoaporn”.
This "quinoatarian" made a "quinbra."Everybody knows that the internet has a bacon fetish. It's one of the tastiest... more
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Great extract in this weekend's Guardian magazine from Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals, in which he describes both his personal and societal reasons for giving up meat time and time again.
I was most taken by his reference to the livestock sector being responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the transport sector (quote below). I was completely ignorant of this.
My vegetarian spouse, however, told me that this had been public knowledge for years.
I tried to respond but I had a mouthful of steak.
For me it's just a matter of taste.
Here's the quote: "According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40% more than the entire transport sector – cars, lorries, planes, trains and ships – combined."
Here's the article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/20/jonathan-safran-foer-eating-animalsGreat extract in this weekend's Guardian magazine from Jonathan Safran... more
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dlamb
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added this
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2 years ago
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this is funny. and it's the lead singer of gogol bordello.
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saskia
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added this
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4 years ago
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