"Eating Animals"

New Yorker review of a new book about eating animals

I want to read this book. Ok, this is becoming more of a question for me, and I'm not unsympathetic to a PART/reason of this cause (although it needs more fatty and juicy reason yet), and I need to seriously start thinking about it, but I tend to agree with Pollan: "The problem with factory-farmed meat isn’t the meat; it’s the factory." But a few things stand out at first glance:

1. What's that Stalin quote: 5 deaths is a tragedy; 50 million is a statistic?

2. "Male piglets also have their testicles removed, a procedure performed without anesthetic." People have been castrating male domesticated animals for as long as domestication has existed - Should I tell you that I held a calf down once while it was castrated?, it was a very painful-looking pocket-knife procedure, although I can't say I wept over it, sorry - and I don't think anyone's EVER used anesthesia.

3. I love the billboard I recently saw which is replicated in this article. It features one smiling puppy and one smiling piglet, with the caption, "Why would you love one and eat the other?" Of course there's something arbitrary about this choice! Wouldn't the really political statement be to eat the dog now instead and keep the pig as the family pet? Some people in the world eat dogs; I don't consider them monsters or hypocrites. 

4. "C spotted one chick splayed out on the floor, trembling. Its eyes were crusted over and its head was shaking back and forth. C slit its throat."

5. The closing comments that the "logical conclusions" of the moral argument against eating animals fall into the same problems with just about every thing we eat and consume, and rather suggests, with Foer, that the problem is our maniacal and hedonistic consumption, that renunciation is a good lesson in this post-economic apocalypse that evidenced the same human problem, which is much deeper, much more dangerous and profound than just glazing the depravity with "Eating animals is bad," or even that "They suffer as a result." As far as logical conclusions go, I would like to start pointing out how many bugs and animal that the person making this argument has displaced and killed by living in their house, their city, driving their car, walking, using poisons, aerosols, supporting the construction of a new church building, supporting a company like Whole foods that builds buildings, clears lands, thereby displacing and killing untold numbers of fauna, etc. Regardless, I'm glad the conversation is actually moving toward productivity instead of sensationalism that auto-deconstructs under the weight of its own grandiose and hyper-moralisms. Now, if the same thing could happen with any number of contemporary problems that face us with our OWN extinction and suffering and annihilation and degradation!