Why watch some birds but eat others?

I’m reading Melanie Joy’s Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, which sounds a good deal like Hal Herzog’s Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Both Joy and Herzog claim psychology as their primary disciple, and both explore the physio-cultural reasons people respond to animals as they do. Both were probably polishing manuscripts about the same time for 2010 releases. But their subtitles point to diverging emphases: Herzog’s Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals versus Joy’s An Introduction to Carnism—The Belief System That Enables Us to Eat Some Animals and Not Others. Herzog begins his book with a profile of a lapsed vegan who seems to need raw meat to satisfy nutritional needs. Joy begins with a dinner party, describing the enticing smells of a roast: the hostess then announces that the entrée is Golden Retriever.

            The dinner party is an imagined scenario, a shocking announcement of Joy’s agenda: to expose and question cultural assumptions about eating animals. In the introductory chapters, she calls attention to a shift between empathy and apathy. She argues that people must employ various defenses so they can distance themselves from, and virtually erase through “psychic numbing,” the slaughter and preparation of animals for food.  Similar numbing enables people to survive traumatic experiences—abuse, war, natural disasters. In Joy’s view, “psychic numbing” is “maladaptive, or destructive, when it is used to enable violence, even if that violence is as far away as the factories in which animals are turned into meat” (19). While Herzog indirectly defends the eating of meat, Joy is out to challenge the cultural constructions that cast “carnism” as the norm.  More on how she proceeds with this argument in future blogs. . .