Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism Hardcover – November 15, 2009

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.)
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"Through the use of narrative, often bordering on biography, the arguments being put forth by Joy are very well exemplified. The images conjured are ever so vivid that it would be difficult to stop once one starts reading it. The reader is immediately and often unknowingly drawn on. The volume is extremely readable, theory and jargon free as it is. However, that is not to say that the analysis is nonscientific or arbitrary. Rather, the arguments are firmly anchored to sound psychological theorization. People from all walks of life, across age and educational backgrounds would find this book immensely interesting. People advocating vegetarianism, professors and students of psychology, scholars from other areas of social science, and even public administrators in food departments would gain considerably from this extremely well written book." --Rita Agrawal, PhD, co-author, Applied Social Psychology: A Global Perspective

"One of the most thought-provoking books in decades. The realization that we've been conditioned throughout our entire lives to think and act a certain way toward animals, and that we've been so disconnected from ourselves and our fellow beings, gives us a chance to make our choices freely." --Heather Mills

"Institutionalized, socially sanctioned violence on an unprecedented scale causes the needless suffering of billions of animals every year. In her groundbreaking book, Melanie Joy shakes up the completely arbitrary thinking that enables people to, at the same time, treat some animals as friends and look the other way while others are ruthlessly exploited as commodities." --Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary and author of Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food

"Why We Love Dogs... is an altogether remarkable book that could transform the way society feels about eating animals. You cannot read this book without learning something new and without pondering your relation to the animal world. This is a profound and deeply satisfying book that is destined to become a classic." --Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of the best-selling When Elephants Weep, Dogs Never Lie about Love, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, and The Face on Your Plate

"This eye-opening book makes us question what we really mean when we say we love animals. Anyone who has ever loved a dog or a cat or a hamster or a bird will find abundant food for thought here." --John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, The Food Revolution, and Healthy at 100

"A thoughtful book full of substance and style. It should be required reading." --Kathy Freston, author of The New York Times bestselling Quantum Wellness