Eating Animals Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Eating Animals

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Zusammenfassung von Eating Animals

Name: Eating Animals
Rating: 4.3 (87 reviews)
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer

The (a)morality of our eating habits and traditions

4.3 (87 Bewertungen)

21 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

'Eating Animals' by Jonathan Safran Foer is a thought-provoking exploration of the ethics and environmental impact of eating meat. The author presents a compelling argument for considering a vegetarian or even vegan lifestyle, while acknowledging the challenges and complexities of making such a change.

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Eating Animals
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Factory farms are more factory than farm.

When most people think of a farm, they think of barns, pastures, red wooden houses and barnyard animals grazing peacefully.

This is history. 99% of all land-animals farmed in the US today come from so-called factory farms: industrialized, streamlined production facilities which bear zero resemblance to the “farms” in most consumers’ imaginations. A factory farm is more like an assembly line, where each animal is another unit to be processed as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The logic behind factory farms can be summed up with one word: efficiency.

Over the past century, farm animals have been bred to be so fast-growing that they are slaughtered as soon as they reach adolescence. This unnaturally rapid growth induces such severe hereditary health-problems that they are often unable to survive outside the factory farm.

Sick and injured animals are left to die where they fall. Any form of care, even mere rest and water, are considered inefficient and thus not provided.

Artificial lighting and ventilation ensure the animals’ internal clocks continually push them to grow. At the same time their feed is supplemented with vitamins and antibiotics to keep perpetually unhealthy creatures alive until slaughter.

Labor is minimized through automated herding, feeding and slaughter, but the few workers used are usually poorly paid and under constant stress, leading to mistakes and even deliberate sadism.

If you believe that the animals your chicken nuggets or pork chops are made from have ever seen the light of day or felt grass under their feet, you are living a fantasy of bygone times.

Today, animals are a nameless, faceless mass being processed.

Factory farmed poultry is both ethically and hygienically revolting.

As per the factory farmer’s efficiency ethos, chickens are divided into broilers (fast-growing chickens bred for meat) and layers (fast-laying chickens bred for laying eggs).

Due to optimized breeding used since the advent of factory farming, layers now lay eggs at twice the rate they used to, and broilers’ daily growth rate has increased by 400 percent.

Hog farming is the height of animal cruelty.

Pigs reared on factory farms suffer on a multitude of levels. Perhaps the most stress-inducing is the way that pigs’ so-called species-specific behaviors are suppressed. Pigs naturally want to act like pigs, rooting around in mud, playing, building nests and sleeping communally in hay. When they are confined to cramped, steel-and-concrete-lined multi-tiered factory farms, they can do none of those things and suffer greatly.

Sows endure the worst of this. They are hormonally manipulated to be pregnant virtually constantly and are forced into tiny gestation crates where they cannot move, much less nest and prepare for their piglets as is their natural instinct.

Fishing and fish farming constitute a war of extinction against all aquatic life.

Modern industrial fishing methods and fish farming share the same efficiency ethos as factory farms.

We easily ignore the suffering of fish, seeing them more as a faceless commodity than as individual animals. Thus they are often treated even more cruelly than many other animals, and are in fact being systematically annihilated. Scientists predict a complete collapse of all fished species within the next 50 years.

Employees at factory farms and slaughterhouses become brutal and sadistic.

There are no real farmers at factory farms.

Labor has been automated so thoroughly that only desk jobs and menial tasks, such as slaughter, remain. Low-paying work in highly stressful and dehumanizing working conditions can brutalize the employees, making them sadistic towards the already suffering animals.

Eating meat is environmentally unsustainable.

Whether to eat meat or not is one of the most significant environmental choices you make. According to the UN, livestock produces around 18 % of global greenhouse gas emissions, a full 40% more than the transportation sector.

An omnivore contributes seven times the greenhouse gas a vegan does. Meat-heavy diets are becoming more common globally in countries with rapidly expanding populations like China. As this trend continues, greenhouse gas emissions are set to grow radically.

The meat industry often bends regulatory authorities and the law to its will.

Food companies exert tremendous influence over public institutions. Much like tobacco companies, they lobby congress to eliminate unfavorable regulations, press authorities not to enforce ones that exist and challenge any unfavorable court decisions.

Consider the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): It is charged with promoting the health of the nation through its nutritional guidelines, but paradoxically also with promoting the agricultural industry.

The price of meat is low because it does not reflect the true production cost.

From an economic perspective, factory farming has made meat very cheap – impossibly cheap, in fact.

In the past 50 years, the prices of houses and cars have increased around 1500 percent, but the price of eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled. Why?

Factory farming makes us sick today and will inevitably cause the next global pandemic.

Factory farming is making us sick. According to consumer reports, 83% of chicken meat sold is infected with either salmonella or campylobacter. Some 76 million cases of food-borne illness occur in the US alone every year.

Since factory farms use almost 25 million pounds of antibiotics annually for non-therapeutic use (i.e. not to actually treat sickness), we can expect more antibiotic resistant strains of pathogens emerging from factory farms.

There is no rational justification for treating dogs differently from pigs, chickens and fish.

Most people think of dogs as intelligent, emotional creatures, more companions than mere animals. Suffering inflicted on dogs would make most of us angry, because we know that dogs are evolved enough to experience pain and fear, just like humans. We empathize and would certainly think twice about eating a dog (at least in a Western culinary context).

But step back for a moment and consider why we afford dogs this special status in our hearts? Is it because of their intelligence?

It is almost impossible to eat ethically without being vegetarian.

For anyone even remotely interested in preserving the environment, protecting the welfare of other living things or just avoiding the next global flu pandemic, becoming a vegetarian is really the only ethical and rational choice.

Choosing what to eat (and what not to) is one of the most powerful ways we can demonstrate our values, and stop meat industry giants from wielding the power they do today.

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Worum geht es in Eating Animals?

Eating Animals (2009) offers a comprehensive view of the modern meat industry and demonstrates how the entire production process has been so completely perverted that it is unrecognizable as farming anymore.

The book explains the moral and environmental costs incurred to achieve today‘s incredibly low meat prices.

Wer Eating Animals lesen sollte

Anyone interested in how meat is produced today and what the consequences are for people, animals and the environment.
Anyone who thinks of food as an important part of their lives, from full-blooded meat-eaters to vegetarians and vegans.

Über den Autor

Jonathan Safran Foer is a promising young novelist from New York who has written the international bestsellers Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

Contemplating the responsibilities of fatherhood lead the author to question what kind of diet he wished to provide his firstborn son. Eating Animals documents his findings and reflections on the topic.

Kategorien mit Eating Animals

Gesundheit & Ernährung Gesellschaft & Kultur Natur & Umwelt

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