Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism [Paperback]

Melanie Joy PhD (Author), John Robbins (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2011

In this paperback edition is a foreword by activist and author John Robbins and a reader's group study guide. This ground-breaking work, voted one of the top ten books of 2010 by VegNews Magazine, offers an absorbing look at why and how humans can so wholeheartedly devote ourselves to certain animals and then allow others to suffer needlessly, especially those slaughtered for our consumption.

Social psychologist Melanie Joy explores the many ways we numb ourselves and disconnect from our natural empathy for farmed animals. She coins the term "carnism" to describe the belief system that has conditioned us to eat certain animals and not others.

In Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows Joy investigates factory farming, exposing how cruelly the animals are treated, the hazards that meatpacking workers face, and the environmental impact of raising 10 billion animals for food each year. Controversial and challenging, this book will change the way you think about food forever.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Despite a penchant for melodrama, Joy (Strategic Action for Animals) offers an absorbing examination of why humans feel affection and compassion for certain animals but are callous to the suffering of others—especially those slaughtered for our consumption. She takes Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, and Jonathan Safran Foer's well-trod route and investigates factory farming, exposing how cruelly the animals are treated, the hazards that meatpacking workers face, and the environmental impact of raising 10 billion animals for food each year. She uses her factory farm–to–table narrative to buttress her real thesis: meat-eating or carnism, is an oppressive ideology as noxious as racism. Joy casts meat eating as genocide, comparable to the Holocaust, and factory farming on a par with the American enslavement of Africans. She might lose some readers in her zealotry, but there is great value in her contention that all systems of oppression depend on our ability to dissociate or find elaborate rationalizations to keep from recognizing the suffering of a socially sanctioned inferior. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"An absorbing examination of why humans feel affection and compassion for certain animals but are callous to the suffering of others." --Publishers Weekly

"I think Gandhi would have loved Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. For this is a book that can change the way you think and change the way you live. It will lead you from denial to awareness, from passivity to action, and from resignation to hope." --John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution

"An altogether remarkable book that could transform the way society feels about eating animals." --Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of The Face on Your Plate

"A thoughtful book full of substance and style. It should be required reading for anyone interested in what we eat and why." --Kathy Freston, author of the New York Times bestselling Veganist and Quantum Wellness

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Conari Press; Reprint edition (September 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573245054
• ISBN-13: 978-1573245050
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (162 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #24 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Agricultural Sciences > History
  • #34 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Animal Rights

More About the Author

Melanie Joy is a social psychologist, professor, and personal coach. She has been involved in the animal liberation movement since 1989 and has worked as an activist, educator, and organizer. Her academic areas of specialization include the psychosociology of violence toward animals and humans and organizational behavior. She has written a number of articles and has been interviewed for magazines, books, and radio on her work. She teaches Psychology and Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Saybrook Graduate School and a Master's Degree in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

113 of 123 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars When Values and Behavior Clash February 3, 2010

By Bradley Larsen

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Melanie Joy's Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows illuminates the moral incongruence at the heart of the American diet: how we can love our pets and value kindness to animals generally, yet consume meat from corporations that severely abuse and slaughter 10 billion sentient creatures a year. Dr. Joy explores the many ways we numb ourselves and disconnect from our natural empathy for farmed animals. She points out that in the affluent industrialized world, we don't eat meat because we have to, but because we choose to. We like the taste and everybody else is doing it. Joy coins the term "carnism" to describe the belief system which holds that it is ethical and appropriate to make the choice to eat animals.

Dr. Joy notes that following a carnist rather than a vegetarian or vegan dietstyle is made less distressing by the fact that most of the billions of animals Americans eat each year are literally hidden from sight. Animal agribusiness spends a fortune creating the fiction that these animals live outside on idyllic farms. Dr. Joy encourages readers to become informed about the violence and suffering bound up with mainstream food choices, and to begin reducing consumption of animals products. She sees regaining empathy for suffering farmed animals as part of a vital process of personal and societal integration, wherein values, beliefs, and behavior come into harmony.

These ideas resonate with me because my wife and I dearly love our two cats, Justa and Justine, and our Bernese Mountain Dog, Pearl. Each one has a unique personality and shows great will power in realizing goals and desires. Like the humans in the household, they fully experience pain and suffering as well as contentment and joy.... One revelation in Joy's book is that farmed animals are essentially no different from our pets--each one is an individual with a desire to live without pain and to express his own nature. Subjugating farmed animals to a lifetime of unrelenting suffering ended only by a brutal death is not supported by the values of most (pet-loving) Americans. It really is time to transform our meat-centered culture: for the animals, for the environment, for our own physical and spiritual health. Read this book to find out how. Read more ›

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Portable, Yet Profound January 6, 2002

By Carol Martzinek

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The ideas in this book are presented in a series of essays. Even if you only read a few pages a day, you'll learn something valuable. I found the quotes used at the beginning of each section to be very inspiring, and have copied several of them into my journal. The book is a perfect size to be easily carried in a knapsack or purse if you want to read a section a day as a daily meditation. Overall, this book has been helpful to me in my quest to begin practicing an attitude of gratitude.

162 of 184 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Hunter Finds Thie Book Compelling November 23, 2009

By Joseph Laur

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I've been a meat eater- a carnist- my whole life,as well as a dog lover, and have been a hunter since I was 12 back in Wisconsin. I found Dr. Joy's book compelling, thrilling to read, and pointing the finger at the culture we've all grown up in, not at individuals.

I was able to take in her message because it was presented in a non blaming, non shaming way.

I may still hunt and bring home an animal to the table every now and then. I know the paradox and pain of what I'm doing for my food.I accept it even as I wrestle with it. But I will never purchase or knowingly eat another morsel of factory meat. I've been to Auschwitz and Birkenau, and seen how mechanized slaughter works, and how inhumane it is, whether it's people, pigs or pugs. Joy points out what "we" are doing- there's no blame in her tone. The systemic structure of carnism, just like the systems of racism, sexism, totalitarianism, is evil at it's core, precisely because there is no "we" there, seeing what "we" are causing to done in "our" name. Thanks to Dr Joy for sending a message to open our eyes. After reading this book, we know, and must take responsibility for our choices.Negligence starts tomorrow.

I may still hunt and kill an animal on occasion, and many will berate me for that. But I will no longer be party to wholesale slaughter.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful... November 2, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

This book actually succeeded in changing the way I view my life. I started reading a small section of the book every day at my desk before I started the day along with keeping a daily journal and over the course of a few months, I have found that I get so much more joy out of life. I notice and appreciate beauty that has always been surrounding me, but that I've never taken note of before.
It's wonderful and I recommend it to everyone. It makes a great gift, too! (especially for someone who always seems to see the glass as half empty!) What's better than the gift of joy?

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lesson to learn in every short passage... March 19, 2002

By juryco

Format:Hardcover

I love this book more than any other that I own. The reason is that I read one passage every night before I go to sleep and it gives me so much to think about in improving my life. I limit myself to reading only one per night so that I can concentrate on the points of the particular essay of the night. I am almost to the end of the book and plan to begin rereading it and continuing to do so until I have the messages embedded in my brain and heart!!! This book is for everyone--I recommend you buy more than one copy and give them as gifts because I don't think you'll want to lend your copy out!!!

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading for Y2K International Year of Thanksgiving January 24, 2000

By [e-mail]

Format:Paperback

Talk about personal feng shui! Read this book it shows you how to give in abundance. It will instruct you how to place your thoughts and actions in line with the universal laws of love, gratitude and forgiveness. I loved it. Thanks again MJ Ryan.... from the angel in Tucson.

74 of 89 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Need to Put Glass Walls on Slaughterhouses September 21, 2009

By M. JEFFREY MCMAHON TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Why do so many people find great delectation in their beef, pork, and chicken products but cringe at the thought of eating meat from a dog? Why can people sympathize so deeply with dogs, but remain coldly detached from the "necessary" slaughter of cows, pigs, and chickens for their eating pleasure?

Melanie Joy, a psychologist, professor, and author, explains these inconsistencies in Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. She points out that many people engage in selective empathy, feeling for some animals but not others, based on what they've learned.

She asserts that much of our beliefs about animals and what is appropriate for eating is based on illogical thinking, physic numbing, misinformation, and denial. Being told that it's okay to eat meat over and over from childhood to adulthood, being denied access to the slaughter of animals, and pushing animals' suffering from our imagination results in being a carnist, someone who eats meat, not from necessity, but from choice.

I find the author's arguments, logical, convincing, and morally compelling. If we have to force ourselves to be ignorant and block our empathy in order to eat meat, then we're fooling ourselves at the detriment of animals and our own moral integrity.

Thinking about animal suffering clearly, seeing the horrors that animals suffer without sugar-coating their slaughter with mythologies, considering the options we have as omnivores, and freeing ourselves from the lies (repeated they become false truths), and vegetarianism becomes the logical conclusion.

The author wants us to stop denying the trauma and torture that animals suffer because of many people's choice to be carnists.... She makes it clear that any normal human being who no longer denies the suffering of animals cannot enjoy partaking in them as meals.

To unravel our conditioned denial, the author has to give graphic accounts of what really goes on in slaughterhouses. Quoting Paul McCartney, she writes "that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." Her exposé chapters on the killing of animals are meant to be just that, a glass wall, to allow us to see exactly what meat eating really entails.

Another book that I recently read that helped me examine the ethics of eating, which I strongly recommend, is The Face on Your Plate by Jeffrey Masson. Read more ›