Melanie Joy

WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS AND WEAR COWS:
AN INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM
ISBN:  9781573244619

Reviewed by Patrick Killough

 I.  biblio

The Title, WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS AND WEAR COWS is catchy and designed, I think, simply to make people pick up the book and thumb through it. If they get that far, they will probably continue. The title may mask a bit the sub-title, AN INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM.   Let's focus on the real priorities here and just call the book CARNISM for short. 

In CARNISM Dr Joy argues that the word "vegetarians" increasingly refers to people who cut back on or stop completely eating meat for reasons other than mere taste or personal health. True blue vegetarians oppose eating meat on ethical grounds derived from their empathy with the animals and fish offered to be eaten.  She has coined the words "carnism" and "carnists" to parallel the ethics (or lack thereof) underlying voluntary eating of meat by modern adult humans. Most of us are "carnists." 

Normally, we do not eat animals or fish while they are still alive. Nor do we eat road kill. In the case of chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, etc. someone (usually a giant corporation or its suppliers) first breeds them, raises them in captivity, slaughters them and markets them to us. We don't see this happening and that is a good thing. Why? People who do see secretly taken photos of how violent and cruel is what goes on at chicken farms or slaughterhouses, are sickened. Many vow never to taste another morsel of fin or turf. And it is very rare that feed lots or slaughterhouses take either the public or reporters on a tour of their facilities.

At work to keep us carnists forever, Melanie Joys argues, are powerful psychological and social (sometimes even religious) forces designed to place a veil between us and animals as beings in their own right, living individuals with feelings, with a certain intelligence and even the capacity to become pets and to be given names. Paradoxically, when we sit at table, we may simultaneously pet our beloved dog named Peanut while ourselves eating parts of an anonymous slaughtered bull or baby calf. Since we identify with and love Peanut, we may generously and affectionately reward him with some scraps of our meal.  

Studies show, we are told, that it is very hard to imagine ourselves eating a pet, someone else's as well as our own. Why then is is so easy to eat hundreds of pounds of fish and animals a year?  The book explores the mechanisms we use to distance ourselves from the way animals are raised and slaughtered. What is invisible has a way of becoming non-existent in our minds. That  pig we are licking our lips over is never thought of as a once sentient being with interests of its own. 

Carnists will remain carnists, it is argued in AN INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM, only so long as they prevent themselves from learning the facts about how much violence and suffering animals and fish go through before they are served up to us as food. Once carnists notice the facts, however, they tend to eat less and less meat and may even become vegetarians -- a good thing, in the author's opinion. Newly aware carnists are urged to take three steps: (1) eat less meat and fish, (2) support an advocacy group for animals of their own choosing, e.g. PETA and (3) continue to learn about carnism and share what they learn with others. Dr Joy names a few recommended animal advocate organizations, offers a short list of readings and provides a large bibliography, including scholarly articles.  

The material is clearly written, set before the reader in very short, concretely presented sections, replete with mental experiments and recorded anecdotes of emotional reactions of people working in slaughterhouses. WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS AND WEAR COWS is indeed the INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM that it promises to be. In my view, this little book is well worth reading and discussing in book clubs and otherwise.   -OOO-

http://www.biblio.com/Why_We_Love_Dogs_Eat_Pigs_and_Wear_Cows
-by-Melanie_Joy_-_16135885.html
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 II. bn

title: Improve your morals: eat less meat.

reviewer's rating: * * * *

Posted 10/12/2009:

Dr Melanie Joy's book subtitled AN INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM is a very good read. Its stated goals are clear, few and simple. They are also attained.

By book's end we have been asked many questions. They revolve around why humans eat or decline to eat the flesh of fish and animals. And why do we eat only a few creatures such as pigs, sheep, cows, chickens and turkeys? Why would it take imminent starvation before most us would be willing to sample the meat of porcupine, sea slug, hippopotamus or our pet cat? Why, in general, do we exempt pets, others' and well as our own, from inclusion on our menu?

What are vegetarians? For Melanie Joy this term is not apt for people who decline to eat meat or fish for reasons simply of health. Rather vegetarians, in the author's jargon, are people who think meat eating is morally evil. The moral reasons vegetarians reject eating animals and fish are varied. But Melanie Joy builds a case that we do not eat the flesh animals for whom we have "empathy." If the animal has a name or is known to us personally and affectionately, even a pet goldfish, we won't dream of eating it.

Biologically, humans are omnivores, not just carnivores. We can eat animal and fish flesh without harm. But we can also live without animal flesh. Most animal flesh we reject. We are fussy and selective in our meal choices. Dr Joy argues that various social pressures have placed a thick veil between the burger or Wienerschnitzel on our plate and the bull or calf that was systematically slaughtered to provide us our meal. Even if we don't know the pig in question, we are at least vaguely put off if its anonymous head is before us on a platter. We simply would not eat meat if we tore down the veil created by society, history and the animal raising and slaughtering industries.

And who are "we?" We are "carnists." We are the opposite of Joy's ethically defined "vegetarians." If Melanie Joy were inclined to pray to her God for the vast majority of Americans who are "carnists," she might implore: "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." Like Socrates, Dr Joy seems to believe that the first step from carnism to vegetarianism will be taken after her book tears down the veil between a Chicken McNuggett and Joe the rooster whose body we are munching on. Old Joe was once a living being, with interests of his own -- if left to his own devices. But he wasn't left alone. His mother was bred up to produce him. He was not allowed to roam free and seek out a mate. Carnism is possible only because human meateaters do not put faces on the sources of their meat.

Bottom line: through myriad examples of food production industry's cruelty to turkeys, baby calves and other meat sources, Melanie Joy skilfully and relentlessly makes a case that eating meat is a moral evil. Once a carnist has seen the light and agrees with the author, he is ready for the three-step self-healing process Dr Joy recommends:
 
(1) eat less meat, for starters;

(2) join or support organizations that uncover the cruelties of the food industry;

and

(3) keep on learning more and more about nutrition and our ability to live happy, healthy lives without eating meat. -OOO-

Another book also recommended: Drs Mehmet Oz and Michael Riozen: YOU ON A DIET

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Why-We-Love-Dogs-Eat-Pigs
-and-Wear-Cows/Melanie-Ph-Joy-PhD/e/9781573244619/?itm
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TITLE: Eat less meat. Support vegetarian causes. Learn more about the living beings whose faceless flesh appears on your plate.

10/13/2009

Rating: * * * *

Melanie Joy's world of human omnivores is divided into saints and sinners. Also called vegetarians and "carnists." There are amoral people who do abstain from meat for a defensible but merely pragmatic reason: their own better health. Such pre-empathetic, pre-moral humans have no special name. A neutral, non value-laden phrase like "non-carnivorous" comes to mind. Such pragmatic abstainers cannot be called saints, because their motives are pragmatic, not ethical.

Then there is the smaller band of people who do not eat meat for a noble, exalted, ethical reason. They are the folk who have been taught to "empathize" with the once living fish, fowls and quadrupeds systematically hunted, caught, raised and slaughtered for profit so that sinners may eat their flesh. Only ethical non-carnivores deserve the titles of saints or "vegetarians."

But all carnivorous humans, also called "carnists," are potential vegetarians. They are amenable to reason and conversion from the dark side to light.

Most humans, depending on their cultures, Melanie Joy notes, already have a very limited range of animal and fish products that they are willing to eat (unless they are starving): e.g., no hippos, sea slugs, termites or ants -- they are too "nasty." Ugh! Most American carnists are also not likely to eat horse meat but have no problems with the flesh of cows, bulls, sheep, goats, hens, roosters, shrimp or swordfish. Prediction: they may well have new problems before they have reached the end of this impressive little book! American carnivores, Melanie Joy's "carnists," also except from their tables pet dogs, cats and canaries, not just their own but other people's pets as well.

And that exception made by carnists: their limited caring for pets, gives Dr Joy hope that she can lead even weakly empathetic carnists step by step along a road to food-consuming holiness/wholeness: i.e., becoming vegetarian for the right reason: because they sympathize with, empathize with, see in their imagination the heads and faces of once living pigs and lambs and calves raised and slaughtered for their eating pleasure. And because they reject the cruelty and torture it takes to bring them their tasty, fleshy meals.

With Socrates, Dr Joy thinks that the step from knowing the good to doing the good is small and virtually automatic. Human carnists have simply got to be helped to rip down the veil placed between the meat they eat and the fish and animals cruelly slaughtered for their dining enjoyment. A veil placed by whom? By the catfish farm owners and the owners of CAFOs, "confined animal feeding operations" aka factory farms. We have met the enemy and he is CAFOs.
Q. E. D.

Build on human sympathy with a few animals, starting with your own pets. Blow on your few embers of empathy for animals. Link live animals to your dead meat. Make a larger fire.

With that simple but not ineffective method of converting carnists to vegetarians in mind, the author of WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS AND WEAR COWS: AN INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM piles example upon example of cruelty in the way pigs, chickens and others are bred, raised and slaughtered to provide food for inattentive, unperceptive carnivorous humans. If we will only learn to put faces on our food (who likes eating a roast pig's head?), to give those once living creatures names, personalize them, think of them with the affection we lavish on our pets, then the days of cruel meat producing and distributing industries are numbered.

Bottom line:

"There are three important steps you can take to get started: eat less meat, support an advocacy organization, and continue to inform yourself and others."

    (cited from Chapter 7, aptly titled "Bearing Witness: From Carnism to         Compassion.")

So, just eat less meat and keep on reading books about carnism and vegetarianism, and you will inevitably know and fall in love with the good that is vegetarianism, say "aha!," then automatically take baby steps into the world of the good, and while on the road to vegetarianism make the world a better place. A world where free-ranging roosters have the leisure to pursue and mate hens. A world in which

"you feel more integrated in your values and practices" (Ch. 7)

 -OOO-

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field
-keywords=melanie+joy%3A+why+we+love+dogs&x=0&y=0

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Iv. epinions.

Title:  Learning not to feel for the animals we eat

Reviewer's rating of WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS AND WEAR COWS: 
 *  *  *  *  (FOUR STARS)

October 14, 2009

Pros: Catchy title. Fast moving. Intricate explaining of the psychology of voluntary meat eating.

Cons: A didactic sermon on wrong ways of dealing with animals. Dense dissection of "psychological numbing."

Bottom Line: WHY WE LOVE DOGS, etc. will work best with readers who have never thought much about the ethics of voluntary meat eating. It just might change their lives.

Review:

This good book with the catchy title argues that we can bring ourselves to eat the flesh of fish and animals if and only if we "numb" ourselves to any natural empathy we have for fellow living beings.

" ... indeed, it is the process of learning to not feel that is the focus of this book" (Chapter One, "To Love or to Eat").


Let us deconstruct Fr Melanie Joy's title: WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS AND WEAR COWS.

-- Part One of book's title: WE LOVE DOGS because we have been taught to love them. If they are not our pets or sheepdogs or avalanche rescue dogs, well, they are at least somebody's! Pets have names. They sleep in our beds. Our children cannot imagine life without them. Pets have faces. We treasure their photos. Therefore, we do not eat their flesh.

Paradoxically, if pets sit or lie beside us at table, we slip them some of our pork ribs or chicken. We sustain, that is, the flesh of our living pets with the dead flesh of animals that are not pets. What in our psyche leads us to make such a distinction between pets and un-pets?

-- Part Two of book's title: WHY WE ... EAT PIGS. While we might contentedly savor our bacon, ribs and pork loins, many of us cannot bear to look at the head of a roast pig, much less eat it.  Why? Because we do not eat animals' faces. If we thought every day, over and over, that our meal was once a living sow with piglets to nurse and an imagined yard to move around in -- or a jaunty rooster in search of love --  we would either stop eating pork or cut way back on our addiction to fowl flesh. Why? That is what empathy and solidarity with living creatures would lead us to do.

We love our dogs. Why? Because we empathize with them. We want them to keep on living, be available for petting. We mourn their deaths.

By contrast, few of us own pigs. So we do not notice them. We pay no attention to how they are raised, torn from their mothers very early in life and slaughtered with often unspeakable violence and deliberate cruelty. "They" don't want us to see the faces behind the bacon on our breakfast plate. Who are "they?" They are big, big, BIG agri-businesses. They are the inventors and owners of CAFOs, "confined animal feeding operations" aka "factory farms." They are not likely to invite us to tour their often remote facilities. We have undercover journalists with hidden cameras to thank for what we know of CAFOs and slaughterhouses. Many of the workers in both types of facility are subject to great depression.

We eat pigs because we are allegedly trained by "them" not to notice how pigs for profit are tortured for our feeding enjoyment.

-- Part Three of book's title: WHY WE ... WEAR COWS.

We wear bovine products such as belts, suede jackets and shoes. 

Not only are we meat-eaters, we are also milk-drinkers, cheese and butter eaters and meat-wearers. The bulls, cows and calves whose bodies come to us in various guises and for various purposes did not lead happy, contented lives. They were not humanely harvested at the end of a long life. They were killed according to a commercial timetable. And they were often horribly tortured simply to speed things up, to make even more money in a competitive agri-business marketplace.

"We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is" (Chapter 3, "The Way Things Really Are").

-- Deconstructing Part Four of the book's subtitle: AN INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM. In Melanie Joy's world, people who eat animal flesh without giving it much thought are carnists. She seems to distinguish, by contrast, two kinds of abstainers from meat:

--(1) ones who do so for narrow personal self-interest: they thinks abstinence is healthy for them;

--(2) abstainers for a higher, trans-selfish cause: love of, respect for, empathy with the animals raised and slaughtered to feed humans. Only such ethical abstainers deserve the accolade "vegetarian."

Dr Joy's thesis is that all it takes to turn a carnist (eventually, step by Socratic step) into a vegetarian is knowledge. Bring us behind the veil allegedly shielding our sensibilities from CAFOs and slaugherhouses, and we will then take our first steps away from eating meat. Cutting our meat and fish consumption by as little as 10% can save many living animals from slaughter. And if demand for meat falls, agri-businesses are not dumb. They will stop supplying so much meat. And more roosters and hens can roam around again in old fashion open-air lots.
What else is in this provocative book?

-- Examples abound of cruelty to pigs, cattle, on catfish farms, in slaughterhouses. Page upon page of examples, anecdotes and quotations from a Beatle and other celebrities -- with ample citation of sources: often undercover private photographers and investigators.

-- Much theorizing there is about the psychological, social and even religious "schemas," and techniques used to keep carnists happily carnivoring away. How can this be? Dr Joy says that we are disgusted by the very idea of eating most animals of planet Earth. Disgust with meat is what is normal. Enjoying the dead flesh of this or that beast is what is abnormal and what needs explanation.
 
What is it that makes us feel too disgusted to eat our golden retriever while licking our chops in anticipation of our next Wiener Schnitzel?

The writing grows dense here and I leave it to you to pick up the book, if you care to, and sort out the ideational constructs allegedly at work in the world of meat eaters. We "numb" ourselves to the faces behind our food. If we did not, we would at least pause before chomping down on their corpses. And maybe we would go cold turkey (ouch!) and leap into sainted vegetarianism.
"The mechanisms of psychic numbing include: denial, avoidance, routinzation, justification, objectification, overgeneralization, dichotomization, rationalization, and dissociation" (Chapter 1)."

Melanie Joy promises to illustrate each of these forces at work erecting unpenetrated mental walls between the often brutalized beast whose flesh we devour and our personal moral values. And the author, to her credit, keeps that promise, more concretely and less numbingly than those nine abstract nouns might suggest. -OOO-

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