EATING ANIMALS

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

BACK BAY BOOKS                       2009

PART II

Chapter 2: All or Nothing or Something Else

1. George

• I spent the first 26 years of my life disliking animals. And then one day I became a person who loved dogs. I became a dog person.
• Sixty-three percent of American households have at least one pet. Americans spend $34 billion on their companion animals every year.
• George can respond to a handful of words but our relationship takes place almost entirely outside language.
• The list of our differences could fill a book, but like me, George fears pain, seeks pleasure, and craves not just food and play, but companionship.
• I wouldn’t eat George, because she’s mine. But why wouldn’t I eat a dog I’d never met? Or more to the point, what justification might I have for sparing dogs but eating other animals?

 

A case for eating dogs

• Despite the fact that it’s perfectly legal in 44 states, eating “man’s best friend” is as taboo as a man eating his best friend.
• The French who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.
• Its for good reason that the eternal taboos – don’t fiddle with your shit, kiss your sister, or eat your companions – are taboo. Evolutionarily speaking, these things are bad for us.
• Unlike all farmed animals, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually.
• This amounts to millions of pounds of meat being thrown away every year. The disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem.
• Rendering – the conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets – allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain.
•  Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world full of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.
• If we let dogs be dogs, and breed without interference, we would create a sustainable, local meat supply with low energy inputs that would put even the most efficient grass-based farming to shame.

 

Stewed dog, wedding style

• First, kill a medium-sized dog….

 

2. Friends and enemies

• The differences between dogs and fish couldn’t seem more profound.  Fish signifies an unimaginable plurality of kinds, an ocean of 31,000 different species.
• Dogs, by contrast, are often known by personal names. I am among the 95% of male dog owners who talk to their dogs.
• The Internet is overflowing with video footage of fishing. No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face.
• Is such concern morally out of place when applied to fish, or are we silly to have such unquestioning concern about dogs?
• Is the suffering of a drawn-out death something that is cruel to inflict on any animal that can experience it, or just some animals?
• Just how distant are fish (or cows, pigs, or chickens) from us in the scheme of life? If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?
• The lives of billions of animals a year and the health of the largest ecosystems on our planet hang on the thinly reasoned answers we give to these questions.
• If and how we eat animals cuts to something deep. Meat is bound up with the story of who we are and who we want to be from the book of genesis to the latest farm bill.
• It raises significant philosophical questions and is a $140 billion-plus a year industry that occupies nearly a third of the land on the planet, shapes ocean ecosystems, and may well determine the future of the earth’s climate.

 

War

• For every ten tuna, sharks, and other large predatory fish that were in our oceans fifty to a hundred years ago, only one is left.
• Our situation is so extreme that research scientists at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia argue that “our interactions with fisheries resources have come to resemble wars of extermination.”
• War is precisely the right word to describe our relationship to fish – it captures the technologies and techniques brought to bear against them, and the spirit of domination.
• We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.
• More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mindset: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or “externalize” such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering.
• Industrial fishing is not exactly factory farming, but it belongs in the same category and needs to be part of the same discussion – it is part of the same agricultural coup.
• Captains of fishing vessels today watch from electronics-filled rooms and plot the best moment to rope in entire schools at a time. If fish are missed, the captains know it and take a second pass.
• GPS monitors are deployed along with “fish-attracting devices’ (FADs), transmitting information to the control rooms of fishing boats about how many fish are present and the exact location of the floating FADs.
• Once the picture of industrial fishing is filled in – the 1.4 billion hooks deployed annually on longlines (on each of which is a chunk of fish, squid, or dolphin used as bait); the 1,200 nets, each one thirty miles in length, used by only one fleet to catch only one species; the ability of a single vessel to haul in fifty tons of sea animals in a few minutes – it becomes easier to think of contemporary fishers as factory farmers rather than fishermen.
• Factory farming’s success depends on consumers’ nostalgic images of food production – the fisherman reeling in fish, the pig farmer knowing each of his pigs as individuals, the turkey rancher watching beaks break through eggs – because these images correspond to something we respect and trust.
• But these persistent images are also factory farmers’ worst nightmares: they have the power to remind the world that what is now 99% of farming was not long ago less than 1%. The takeover of the factory farm could itself be taken over.
• What might inspire such change? The details are important, but they probably wont, on their own, persuade most people to change. Something else is needed.

 

3. Shame

• Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely – yet not entirely – forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification.
• We can recognize parts of ourselves in fish – all of the familiar pain responses – but deny that these similarities matter, and thus equally deny parts of our humanity.
• What we forget about animals is what we begin to forget about ourselves. There is a war not only between us and them, but between us and us.
• My family lived in Berlin in the spring of 2007, and we spent several afternoons at the aquarium. I was particularly taken by the sight of sea horses.
• Sea horses, more than most animals, inspire wonder – they draw our attention to the astonishing similarities and discontinuities between each kind of creature and every other.
• I came to feel a certain kind of shame at the aquarium. Shame in being human: the shame of knowing that 20 of the roughly 35 classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed “unintentionally” in seafood production.
• The shame of indiscriminate killing for no nutritional necessity or political cause or irrational hatred or intractable human conflict.
• I felt shame in the deaths my culture justified by so thin a concern as the taste of canned tuna or the fact that shrimp make convenient hors d’oeuvres.
• I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity – a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history – but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
• Nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed.
• My son not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but shamed me into reconsideration.
• And then there’s George, asleep at my feet. Sometimes she’ll wake from a dream panting, jump to her feet, get right up near me – her hot breath pushing against my face – and look directly into my eyes. Between us is …what?

 

Chapter 3: Words/meaning