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

How sick and schizophrenic can it get? Loving one animal like a lifelong human partner while feeding it parts of many other, tortured animals is a good start.

I find it really hard to deal with this cognitive dissonance because it is so extremely obvious that the actions are unlogic and not consistent, but possibly I am just pedantic. As long as it is just a question of philosophy, faith or soft sciences, I can nearly understand the believers that avoid being confronted with different opinions.

But if one has the mashed meat of animals in a can and gives it to his beloved dog or cat, one might think that there should be any kind of feedback loop that lets the people think things like treating all animals with friendliness. Well, not even close to that, the opposite seems to be the case. This leads to actions like:

Shopping fur coats while petting a tiny Chihuahua.
Giving the kids money for the petting zoo feed while eating a fat, bloody steak.
Buying things made of leather, be it for fetish or furniture use and hoping that one´s cat may like the new couch.
Getting very fat on a meat diet together with your pet.
Loving pets, beeing indifferent about eaten animals and hating reptiles or critters with full disgust.
Hating cockfights and direct violence against animals while accepting and ignoring factory farming. The same behavior can be seen if someone saves a child in a plight or emergency and ignores all dying babies on the planet.
And so on.

Ok, I get it, subtle coherences are hard to understand, as already mentioned. But if it is so easy to see that one should consequently change to full torturer or full lover, it is just applied madness, my beloved cognitive dissonance in perfection. If one wants to be worthy of the love of a pet, she or he should treat all animals with respect and not just the ones in his closer environment. But hey, humans do the same thing with their own kind.

The author stays objective and tries to give a wide overview of all topics and behaviors without being instructive or trying to proselytize. He simply shows the immense unlogic, inconsistency and bigotry humans have adapted to and how irrational our actions can be. Simple conditioning on a certain aspect of the appearing of a creature like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness
and the species has had luck and is petted. No cuteness, no empathy. But we do the same with beautiful and ugly, charismatic and boring, fit and fat humans too, so at least this behavior follows a logical pattern.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogniti...