Christopher's Reviews > Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

This is a huge collection of moral dilemmas inherent in the human-animal relationship. I've struggled a lot in the past few years with my food choices. It's almost impossible now to avoid the knowledge that our modern meat production system is morally reprehensible. Animals are terribly mistreated for their short lives, then they're killed, and more likely than not, their bodies are thrown into waste piles rather than used for nourishment. I thought that I had arrived at a satisfying moral conclusion in my own life: I'm just not going to eat animals, and then I'll be clean from this awful mess. Maybe every now and then I'll treat myself to the meat from a happily raised and humanely slaughtered animal, but mostly I'm just going to deprive my huge appetite for flesh and eat, I dunno, green beans and potatoes and various disappointing veggie pucks.

But our relationship with animals is so much more complicated than the decision to eat them or not eat them. At every step, we must consider how much we value the lives of animals. Do we think an animal's life is worth as much as a human's? When asked if there is any significant difference between a human and an animal, about 47% of people say that there is no significant difference. But that's not how it plays out in practice. Humans are a muddle of contradictions. Here are some of the moral dilemmas this book raises, and that we should all at some point confront:

-Is it ever okay to eat animals? If you're going to eat animals, should you eat animals like shrimp, who don't have much of a nervous system and therefore probably are not capable of much suffering? Or should you eat the largest animals you can find? (A single blue whale can feed hundreds of people, while a chicken can only feed a couple, and during a crawfish feast, one person can consume dozens of lives.)

-What is worse, killing a chicken for food or cockfighting? This issue was surprisingly complex and unexpected. The majority of people will have no second thought about eating a grocery store chicken, but they recoil viscerally at the idea of cockfighting. But consider the lives of the animals. A grocery store chicken lives a terrible and short life. A fighting rooster lives the plush life of a pet, much longer than the usual life of a commodity chicken, and then spends the last part of its life in a violent frenzy that comes natural to it. I was surprised to come away from this chapter with the conviction that cockfighting is less morally corrupt than the simple act of buying a chicken from the grocery and eating it.

-Is it a moral act to keep pets, or is it slavery?

-What are the circumstances in which it is okay to use animals for scientific research? Is it any worse to conduct painful or deadly research on an ape or a cat than it is on a mouse or a bug? How many human lives do animal lives have to save before it's okay; is it a one human-one mouse ratio, or is it more like one human life equals 100 mouse lives?

-Okay, so you have decided that humans are no different than animals. Animal life is just precious as human life. Does that mean that you're morally justified in killing a security guard at an animal testing facility (one life) to save hundreds of animal lives? That doesn't sound right, does it, but why?

-Most people wouldn't think twice about calling an exterminator to do away with hundreds of ants or cockroaches or bed bugs in their house, but what about a squirrel? What about a raccoon, or a stray cat, or a pesky, home-invading monkey? It seems that the bigger, or the closer to human, an animal gets, the more we empathize with it. But where is the logic behind that? If all life is equal, termites should have every right to continued existence as us.

-What about owning a predatory pet, like a snake or even a cat or dog. Are you morally responsible for the birds your cat kills? What about the meat in your dog's food, or the mice you feed your snake? They are just doing what comes natural to them, but are you endorsing animal suffering by loving a predatory pet?

The world is a minefield of moral uncertainties. Thankfully we have books like this that help expose them and help us work through them.