Customer Reviews

Animal, Vegetable, or Woman?: A Feminist Critique of Ethical Vegetarianism

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There are some ethicists who seem to operate on a crude hydraulic model of ethical concern, which has as its primary assumption the belief that you can't be concerned with more than one kind of injustice without dissipating valuable energy. This is the underlying presumption behind George's "Animal, Vegetable, or Woman." She claims that to be concerned with giving animals moral concern takes away moral concern for women--as if the two are mutually exclusive. She ridiculously claims that pregnant women need to eat meat or consume dairy products to ensure the health of their fetuses (jeez, where does she get this nonsense from!?) and that consequently moral defences of vegetarianism are anti-woman. Never mind that Peter Singer has made a career from comparing speciesism to sexism, or that careful and profoundly feminist vegetarians such as Carol Adams or Deane Curtin think otherwise. It's difficult to figure out if George's primary motive is to trash vegetarianism or defend a strangely unfeminist woman-uber-alles kind of position. A shameful book.

This book is utter hogwash. George irrationally attempts to a imply that you are either feminist OR you eat meat. Unfortunately for her, eating meat and feminism (as well as civil rights, etc) fall under the same holistic philsophy that life is either respectable and that all beings should be free to walk their own path. I repeat, other species, colors, genders, nationalities, etc, are NOT here for the misuse and abuse of an elite few or collective many. She is no better than the bureaucracy that shamefully denied women (and blacks) rights when insinuating that women are "above" other sentient beings. I got news for George: she's an animal, too! And anyone with a clue about nutrition knows that meat and dairy products are abominable, causing disease and stress on the human body, ESPECIALLY the pregnant woman. Check out the health statistics and reports at any medical school library, in any compendium of studies - there is not one shred of evidence that dairy is or has ever been helpful! In fact, there are pages illustrating the heinous damage it wreaks on the human system. Why? Because no other animal nurses off another animal, that's absurd! And no other animal ingests milk after weening....Unfortunately once again for George, it is hard to take a feminist seriously if she can turn around and repeat the same horrors inflicted against female human animals on other animals in the animal kingdom. What a joke. Save your money and buy some Carol Adams or somebody reputable.....

This is a poorly constructed thesis and serves only to display the typical weak minded headonism of carnivores. Perhaps a person so simple could only serve one cause. I would also recommend ignoring the false information provided regarding health issues of veganism.

I bought this book because I have a passionately vegetarian friend who is constantly shaming me because I eat meat. She claimed I was ignorant and if I only knew what she did then I would change my mind. She even told me she was a fundamentally better person than I was because of her vegetarianism. I bought this book in self defense. It is hard to find a book that argues the real IMPLICATIONS both philsophical and practical of vegetarianism. I find that those vegetarians who are constantly imposing their views upon others really don't understand the issues very well, meaning that they are making moral arguments without understanding what it means to make a moral argument. George talks about how moral vegetarianism smacks of sexism, racism, and classism. I think she makes very cogent arguments on all of those points. She IS very intelligent and a professor of this stuff, so attempts to dismiss her arguments should be strongly scrutinized! This doesn't mean that vegetarians ARE bad people. IT means that when we actually think about the implications of a seemingly unassailable idea that one shouldn't eat animals, it turns out that there are many ideological inconsistencies. But this book also has good pratical application--it's not too tangled in abstract philosophy. IN the end George comes up with a good compromise that respects the dignity and needs of *all* living creatures, human and animal alike. See vegetarians and carnivores CAN get along...

In this slim but tightly packed volume, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Idaho Kathryn Paxton George has uncovered a brilliant glitch in the ethical vegetarian argument. Arguing that due to the necessity for women to consume protein during pregnancy to insure healthy fetal development and for children to consume protein found in meats for growth puposes, this renders them morally wrong in the stance of ethical vegetarians such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer. George compellingly uncovers how this is both wrong and unfair, simultaneously offering a new component to the ethical vegetarian argument that becomes necessary to factor in when one choses vegetariansim for moral puposes. George's argument segues into issues of class as well, and she suggests that vegetariansim may also be a kind of luxury when executed for ethical puposes. Uncovering how women were so boldy and deliberately ignored when moral philosophers created the argument against ingesting meat, George offers a glimpse into the still prevailing and disturbing notions of patriarchal power in constructing systems of right and wrong. The above review was originally written for "Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal," a publication of the Claremont Colleges.