Customer Reviews

Dead Meat

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I received this book as a gift yesterday and stayed up all night reading it and finished it. Luckily, I did not have any nightmares about animals being treated in the way in which Sue Coe describes and paints in this revealing book. I recommend this book to the world; everyone should be aware of the way we treat animals, from pumping them with chemicals and slaughtering them with a knife as they hang from a back foot, to eating them on our dinner tables. The people of the world need to have this information so that they can consciously make a decision about how they can change their contibution regarding these crimes which occur on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis in every part of the world.

This book was the reason I became a vegetarian.

While it's easy to skim lightly over even a well-presented and passionate text such as Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" without understanding the true horror of the meat that you eat, you can't so easily dismiss this book's drawings. They are blunt truths: rather than appealing to your reason, they speak directly to your decency. That makes their argument impossible to ignore.

If you are a meat-eater, you should be afraid to read "Dead Meat," because it will force you to understand the horrible process that turns a life into the food on your plate. But don't let that fear stop you from reading it- you shouldn't fear the book, you should fear the facts that it presents but that tragically exist quite independently of it.

Another horrifying book, this time about the animal food industry. An excellent introduction by Tom Regan points out the effects of the meat industry and the killing of nonhuman animals on the environment, on the human psyche, on social settings. Meat metaphors shape us at the most subcellular level of our awareness of the world. Christians methaphorically eat the flesh of Christ. Nazis use animal methaphors in order to justify their oppression of the Jews and other groups. Men use animal imagery to objectify women. Sue's artwork is fairly stylized but disarming. If you can see it in person, you should. It's a nightmare. There's no way to justify the oppression of so many nonhuman animals, especially because alternatives exist to almost everything for which humans use animals. Imagine if her artwork were photographs instead. She shows us disemboweled pigs, de-beaked chickens, whipped horses. These are linked to our everyday reality, for instance in her painting McWorld. Another interesting theme, rendered less explicitly, is the connection between the interlocked oppression of nonhuman animals by humans and women by men. For instance, an advertisement on the side of a truck packed with hogs for slaughter parked at the Thorn Apple Valley Slaughterhouse in Detroit, Michigan shows dancing pigs in skirts and reads GO GO GIRL EXPRESS. This sexualization of animals for slaughter and the meatification of women for sex is everpresent.

Some of the pictures in this book will stay with you for a long time, some may even make meat-eaters turn vegetarian. But, even more so than the pictures, the description of the horror of factory farms - to the animals and the workers - will disgust anyone with a heart.
I reccommend this book to longtime vegetarians, new vegetarians, and also to people who are just interested in maybe trying vegetarianism.
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If you are passionate about animals, you must read this book. The drawings alone tell the story. The introduction is very educational and will enlighten you. This book is very informative in the body and the drawings and a must read for anyone. It explains the horror that goes on in the slaughterhouses and even gives you a tour through them. I learned more from this book than any other in my personal library on this subject.

This book comes from someone with an animal rights background and a background in the arts as well. The images are so well done,perfectly disturbing and the stories,truthful and profound. A great read for anyone that wants to know the truth behind the industry.

Sue Coe's daring and disturbing voyages through the average day in the lives of the people and animals involved in the factory farming industry. This is the book that converted me to Veganism.

Though I am wary about drawing comparisons to the Holocaust, Sue Coe exposes the primitive, barbaribaric and ignorant side of 'civilized' human society that made the Holocaust to happen, the very same side of human nature that minute by minute allows the systematic torture, neglect and abuse of rights of sentient beings to go on, in secrect, out of sight of our dinner tables. The hellish world of factory farming is graphically exposed by first hand accounts and dark drawings.

To her credit Coe's accounts in the main remain focused and unsentimental, though one wonders how, with the things she witnessed, when her drawings alone are enough to get inside your head. This book should be categorised under 'Educational' and should be used as a text book in schools. Meat eaters, I challenge you not to defend your guilt in ignorance, educate yourselves, read this book.

 This book converted me to veganism.

 Sue Coe has a way of descibing everything that she sees and you almost feel like you are right there.    This book is a definte must for anyone that is wondering about the hidden side to meat.

 Coe tells us about the things you would never think would happen but these things happen. They do...everyday and it is so sad.

 The meat industry is exactly like a Holocaust. Sue Coe just helps us to realize that.

I first borrowed this book through interlibrary loan. When I had to return it, I purchased it from Amazon. The book is devastating. Every 2-3 pages, I had to put the book down as I was overwhelmed with empathy and blinded by tears. The art is hauntingly rendered, and the text is written in such a way that the reader is forced to come to his or her own moral conclusions. Details are given matter-of-factly with no emphasis on the author/artist's emotional reaction. None is needed: The facts are enough. Whatever naysayers might post, words like "sentimentality" and "demagogue" really have no place in the discussion or review of this book. Coe puts the images in front of you and lets you decide if the meat industry is one you want to support.

For the record and in response to the review by Afan of Sitagyl Manor, it does no good to compare the big biz animal industry to a humanely-run small farm. Also, it is not for humans to attempt to understand what animals might think or feel. It is, however, certain that animals are capable of feeling fear, and if you think they don't become frightened while watching the slaughter of their kind, seeing by the pattern that they are next in line, you have a very different understanding of animals than I have.

i don't have it yet but i might be gettung it at christmas and it should be just as good as all the other slaughterhouse books i have1 Read it if you like knowing what takes place in slaughterhouses as much as me!