Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

What we refer to in our everyday language as emotions, feelings, and sensations are actually calculations. The monkey feels hungry or full, he senses the lion as more or less threatening, he feels temptation or repulsion for the bananas. In a fraction of a second, the monkey will experience a rush of sensations, feelings, and desires, which is the process of the calculation;

Perhaps the most basic emotion that defines mammals is the love between a mother and her offspring. Indeed, this emotion gives mammals their name. The word “mammal” comes from the Latin mamma, meaning breast. The emotional system that defines me and you as mammals is one where mothers love their offspring so much that they allow them to suckle from their body, and the youngsters, on their side, feel an overwhelming desire to bond with their mothers and stay near them. A baby mammal who for some reason was born indifferent to his mother would not survive for long. A mammalian mother who was born indifferent to her offspring due to a rare mutation may live a long and comfortable life, but her genes will not pass on to future generations. This system works the same way with cows, dogs, whales, and hedgehogs.

Like the experts on childrearing a century ago, farmers throughout history also focused on the material needs of calves, lambs, and foals, and tended to ignore their emotional needs (except in cases where this emotional need served the interests of humans). Thus, for example, the dairy industry, since the agricultural revolution and to the present day, is based on breaking the most basic emotional bond in the mammalian world and separating the offspring from the mother. A cow will not give milk unless she has given birth to a calf, and therefore dairy farmers make sure the cows will give birth to more and more calves. But the calves are separated from their mothers shortly after they are born, and they pass their childhood without the touch of their mother's tongue, her nipples, or her body. What Harry Harlow did on a small scale—to a few hundred rhesus mother monkeys and baby monkeys—the dairy industry is doing to hundreds of millions of individuals.

One reason we have such different perceptions of beef and dog meat is because we view cows** and dogs very differently. The most frequent—and often the only—contact we have with cows is when we eat (or wear) them. But for a large number of people, our relationship with dogs is, in many ways, not terribly different from our relationship with people:

In order to alleviate this discomfort, we have three choices: we can change our values to match our behaviors, we can change our behaviors to match our values, or we can change our perception of our behaviors so that they appear to match our values. It is around this third option that our schema of meat, eggs, and dairy is shaped. As long as we neither value unnecessary animal suffering nor stop eating animals, our schema will distort our perceptions of animals and the foods procured from their bodies, so that we can feel comfortable enough to consume them.

Psychic numbing is adaptive, or beneficial, when it helps us to cope with violence. But it becomes maladaptive, or destructive, when it is used to enable violence, even if that violence is as far away as the factories in which animals are turned into food.

Farmed animals are supposed to be stunned and rendered unconscious before they are actually killed.46 However, some pigs remain conscious when they are strung upside down by their legs in shackles, and they kick and struggle as they are moved along the conveyor belt to have their throats slit. Because of the speed at which the animals are supposed to be stunned and killed, and because slaughterhouse workers are often ineffectively trained, a number of pigs may also survive throat cutting and remain conscious when they arrive at the next station, where they are dropped into scalding water—a procedure done to remove their hair. Eisnitz describes how squealing hogs were left dangling by one leg while workers left to take their lunch breaks, and thousands of hogs were immersed in the scalding tank alive. And one worker she interviewed commented: “These hogs . . . hit the water and start screaming and kicking. Sometimes they thrash so much they kick water out of the tank. There's a rotating arm that pushes them under, no chance for them to get out. I'm not sure if they burn to death before they drown, but it takes them a couple of minutes to stop thrashing.”47

Bovines are communicative, emotional, and social creatures. They have multiple vocalizations and gestures to communicate their feelings, and in a natural environment they will nurture ongoing friendships with one another. Bovines are naturally gentle and docile, spending most of their waking time eating grass and chewing cud. And babies frequently engage in a variety of forms of play with each other when they are not suckling from their mothers.

“Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will bellow for days, and the calves, stressed, are prone to getting sick.”61 Weaning is recognized as a major psychological stressor by agricultural veterinarians,

After weaning, 534 was sent off to spend the next couple of months in a “backgrounding” pen, where he was to get used to confinement, eating from a trough, and consuming unnatural foods—which were comprised of massive quantities of drug-ridden corn, and protein and fat supplements to bring him from 80 to 1,200 pounds in eleven months.63 The rest of his life would be spent in a feedlot, an overcrowded, filthy, factory farm with flooring largely comprised of manure, where he would be confined with thousands of other steers awaiting slaughter.64

Once at the assembly line, the steers are stunned, shackled, bled, disemboweled, and skinned. As with hogs, the lack of skilled workers and the dizzying speed of the conveyor belt prevent precision in stunning, and many steers end up being pulled along while conscious.

In 2001, the Washington Post printed an article by Joby Warrick entitled “They Die Piece by Piece.” Warrick explained how, though steers were supposed to be dead before reaching the cutting room, this was often not the reality. Ramon Moreno, a slaughterhouse worker who'd spent twenty years as a “second-legger”—cutting hocks off carcasses as they sped past at the rate of 309 per hour—described the process to Warrick: “‘They blink. They make noises,’ he said softly. ‘The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around.’ Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. ‘They die,’ said Moreno, ‘piece by piece.’”68

“Broiler” chickens and turkeys are raised for their meat, and though in natural conditions they live up to ten years, in CAFOs they have a life span of seven weeks or sixteen weeks, respectively—which means that, whenever we consume poultry, we are, in fact, eating baby birds.

Often, in order to prevent them from pecking each other to death, a hot blade is used to cut off the front part of their beaks, without anesthesia, at birth. This procedure, known as debeaking, can lead to infection, the growth of neurological tumors, or death if the bird doesn't have enough of a beak left to use for drinking or eating.

While the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires other animals to be rendered unconscious before being killed, birds are exempt and are slaughtered while fully conscious. Their throats are slit by either hand or machine, and they are then dumped into scalding water to loosen their feathers. A number of birds end up being boiled alive.

struck. Similarly, until the early 1980s, American doctors performed major surgery on infants without using painkillers or any anesthetic; the babies' cries were explained as mere instinctive reactions.

Researchers have, for instance, demonstrated that neural pathways in neonates are developed enough for infants to feel pain, and neonates are no longer denied anesthetics. Scientists have also presented sufficient evidence that crustaceans are indeed sentient; some municipalities have therefore made it illegal to boil lobsters alive,

And despite the poultry industry's claims that humans cannot truly know how chickens feel, there is now evidence that strongly suggests birds not only suffer, but actively seek to anesthetize their pain. Researchers took a group of 120 chickens, half of whom were lame, and offered them two types of feed: normal feed and feed that contained an anti-inflammatory painkiller. The lame chickens consumed up to 50 percent more drugged feed than did the nonlame birds and walked better as a result. A second, similar study found that the more severe a chicken's lameness, the more of the drugged feed the bird consumed.

Because the hens have been genetically manipulated to lay twenty to thirty times as many eggs as their ancestors,85 their brittle bones frequently break, as the calcium in their skeletons is disproportionately diverted to eggshell formation. Another consequence of this artificial selection to lay unnaturally large numbers of eggs is uterine prolapse. When an egg gets stuck against the uterine wall, it can pull the uterus out with it. Unless the uterus is pushed back into the hen's body, other hens will peck at it until she bleeds to death or dies of infection; in each case, it usually takes two days for the hen to die.86

When they can no longer produce eggs profitably, the hens are pulled out of their cages, sometimes several in a handful, and their limbs, which are weakened and ensnared in the wires, often tear. When she is just over one year old, the egg-laying hen is sent to slaughter.

Cows raised for dairy are injected with genetically engineered growth hormones and are artificially impregnated every year, in order to maximize milk production.

Though the physical stress these cows endure is significant, it is quite possible that their greatest suffering comes from the emotional trauma they endure each year after giving birth. Their male offspring are used to produce veal,93 and the females are used for dairy production. As I mentioned earlier, cows are intimately bonded with their calves, whom they may nurse for up to a year. In dairy factories, however, the calf is removed usually within hours of birth so the cow's milk can be diverted for human consumption. Often the calf is dragged away from the mother, as the cow bellows hysterically.

Like human mothers, cows can become frenzied and desperate when they cannot find their offspring. They will bellow for days, frantically searching for their calves, and sometimes even turning violent., thrashing and kicking at workers. There are even instances of cows escaping and traveling for miles to find their calves on other farms.

Though cows have a natural lifespan of approximately twenty years, after only four years in a dairy factory they are considered spent and are sent to slaughter.95 A significant proportion of US ground beef is made from cows who had been used for dairy.96

industry. In fact, if it weren't for the dairy industry, the veal industry would likely not exist.97 Because the male calves who are born to cows used for dairy are of no use to dairy farmers, they are essentially disposed of. Days or even hours after birth, the calves are herded onto a truck—and some need to be dragged since they are not yet able to walk properly, a practice that is now considered inhumane by the USDA.98 These calves end up at auctions, where they may be sold for as little as $50 to veal producers,99 and since they are literally newborns, it is not unusual for calves in the auction ring to have hides still slick from the womb and the umbilical cord still dangling from their stomachs.100 For the duration of their short lives—though some are killed within days, most of these calves live for sixteen to eighteen weeks—they are chained or tethered at the neck and confined to stalls so tiny they can't even turn around or lie down normally.*101 And in order to produce the pale color that veal is known for, the animals are typically fed an unnatural diet lacking in iron, so that they are in a state of chronic borderline anemia.

There is a significant body of research demonstrating that fish and other animals from the sea possess both intelligence and the capacity to feel pain. Research on the intelligence of aquatic animals has, for example, yielded evidence that fish do not forget what they've experienced just moments before, but have a memory span of at least three months.

Oxford University scientist Dr. Theresa Burt de Perera determined that fish can develop “mental maps” of their surroundings that allow them to memorize and navigate changes in their environment—a task that is beyond the cognitive ability of hamsters. Because of such findings, it is now illegal in the city of Monza, Italy, to keep goldfish confined in small bowls.

And lobsters, some of whom have a lifespan longer than that of humans, possess over 400 types of chemical receptors on their antennae, which, according to Dr. Jelle Atema of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, may enable them to detect the sex, species, and even mood of another animal.

researchers have found that fish have a number of pain receptors in various parts of their bodies, and they emit neurotransmitters that act as pain killers much as human endorphins do.107

most of the feed used for farm-raised fish comes from the sea; it is estimated that for every pound of farmed salmon (the third-most-consumed fish in the US) produced, up to five pounds of marine life are used. Farmed fish are raised in aquafarms,

aquafarms hold tens of thousands of fish or other aquatic animals packed into overcrowded pens that are rife with parasites and disease. To control for illness, accelerate growth, and modify reproductive behaviors, the animals are given antibiotics, pesticides, and hormones and some are genetically modified.115 The chemicals are absorbed by the animals and also leech out into the environment, ending up in our digestive systems and our ecosystem. It is not uncommon for fish to escape from ocean-based pens, and when they do, they may spread disease or reproduce and contaminate the gene pool.

Commercially caught fish are often left to suffocate to death after being landed. Farmed fish are typically removed from their pens by a pump, and dumped into a slaughter area. There, various slaughter methods may be applied, including electrocution, which leads to a lethal, epileptic-like seizure; percussive stunning, which is administering a blow to the head with a club; live chilling, in which the animal is left on ice and frozen alive; suffocation; or spiking, where a spike is inserted through the animal's brain.

“Humanely” raised animals often suffer extensively. Even though they have more room to move around, they are often nevertheless still subjected to painful practices, such as castration without anesthesia (as with meat production) or having their offspring thrown into meat grinders (as with egg production) or removed hours after birth (as with dairy production). And almost all animals ultimately end up at essentially the same slaughterhouses.118 As such, the very notion of humane carnistic products is irrational.

most of us would find it cruel to slaughter a happy, healthy, golden retriever simply because people like the way her thighs taste—yet when the exact same thing is done to individuals of other species, we are expected to consider it humane.

Inherent in violent ideologies is an implicit contract between producer and consumer to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Sure, carnistic businesses go to great lengths to protect their secrets. But we make their job easy for them. They tell us not to look, and we turn away. They tell us the billions of animals who we never see live outdoors on peaceful farms, and as illogical as this is, we don't question it. We make their job easy because on some level most of us don't want to know the way things really are.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his famous exposé on the meatpacking industry. The Jungle documented the corruption of animal agribusinesses and the filthy, dangerous conditions that characterized meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses. Sinclair described factories where workers stood in half an inch of blood, on killing floors teeming with rats—living and dead—some of whom ended up processed along with the meat.

In 2006, the United Nations declared the livestock sector “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” The UN warned, “The impact is so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency.”166

Over 75 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon has been converted into pastures for feeding farmed animals.169

the most notable characteristic of all violent ideologies is invisibility, both symbolic (by not being named) and literal (by keeping the violence out of sight). I have, therefore, attempted to illuminate the hidden aspects of carnism, so that you might understand the truth about the production of meat, eggs, and dairy and why the system works so diligently to remain unseen.

There is a vast mythology surrounding eating animals, but all the myths are in one way or another related to what I refer to as the Three Ns of Justification: eating animals is normal, natural, and necessary.

When it comes to carnism, the media often fail to challenge the system and support carnistic defenses: they maintain the invisibility of the system and reinforce the justifications for eating animals.

One way the media maintain carnistic invisibility is through omission. The eleven billion animals who are killed every year for human consumption and the virulent consequences of contemporary animal agricultural practices remain conspicuously absent from public discourse.

When we view the tenets of an ideology as normal, it means the ideology has become normalized, and its tenets social norms. Social norms aren't merely descriptive—describing how the majority of people behave—they are also prescriptive, dictating how we ought to behave. Norms are socially constructed.

And it is true that we have been eating animals as part of an omnivorous diet for at least two million years (though for the majority of this time our diet was still primarily vegan). But to be fair, we must acknowledge that infanticide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are at least as old as eating animals, and are therefore arguably as “natural”—and yet we don't invoke the longevity of these acts as a justification for them.

History shows us again and again that, when people become aware of violent ideologies, they demand change. It is for this reason that the atrocities of carnism must remain hidden and the myths of carnism must remain intact—that we must believe we are informed consumers and free agents acting within a democratic system, exercising our own free will.

It is impossible to exercise free will as long as we are operating from within the system. Free will requires consciousness, and our pervasive and deep-seated patterns of thought are unconscious; they are outside of our awareness and therefore outside of our control. While we remain in the system, we see the world through the eyes of carnism. And as long as we look through eyes other than our own, we will be living in accordance with a truth that is not of our own choosing. We must step outside the system to find our lost empathy and make choices that reflect what we truly feel and believe, rather than what we've been taught to feel and believe. *

Carnism distorts reality: Just because we don't see the animals we eat, this doesn't mean they don't exist. Just because the system hasn't been named, this doesn't mean it isn't real. No matter how far they stretch and how deep they run, the myths of eating animals are not the facts of eating animals.

The Cognitive Trio is comprised of objectification, deindividualization, and dichotomization. These defenses are actually normal psychological processes that become defensive distortions when used excessively, as they must be in order to keep carnism intact.

But imagine how you would feel if your package of hot dogs included a label with the name, picture, and description of the pig from whom the meat was procured, or if you became acquainted with one of the pigs who was to become your food.

When it comes to carnism, the two main categories we have for animals are edible and inedible. And within the edible-inedible dichotomy, we have a number of other category pairs. For example, we eat domesticated rather than wild animals, and herbivores rather than omnivores or carnivores. Most people won't eat animals they deem intelligent (dolphins), but regularly consume those they believe are not very smart (tuna). Many people avoid eating animals they perceive as cute (rabbits) and instead eat animals they consider less attractive (turkeys). Whether the categories into which we've placed animals are accurate is less important than whether we believe they're accurate, since the purpose of dichotomization is simply to distance us from the discomfort of eating animals.

Dichotomization thus supports justification; it enables us to feel justified eating an animal because, for instance, he or she isn't smart, isn't a pet, isn't cute—isn't edible.

By distorting our perceptions of animals, the Cognitive Trio prevents us from identifying with them. To identify with others is to see something of yourself in them and to see something of them in yourself—even if the only thing you identify with is the desire to be free from suffering. Identification is a cognitive process, and when we think of animals as objects, abstractions, or items in fixed categories, we diminish this process. And because thoughts affect feelings, the less we identify with others, the less we empathize with them. This is what's known in psychology as the similarity principle: we feel more empathy toward those whom we perceive to be more like us. Consider, for example, how you might be more disturbed by the deaths of people in a plane crash who came from your city than by the deaths of other passengers,

Emily, once an anonymous dairy cow, came to be an individual who inspired compassion in the many lives she touched. People from around the world reported that they stopped eating animals simply from learning about her. Their carnistic defenses broke down and were replaced by compassion. Why else would a community of meat eaters and farmers aid a runaway cow in her flight from slaughter? Why else would the owner of a slaughterhouse donate his cow to an animal sanctuary that doubled as a vegan education center?

We discussed this gap in our consciousness in chapter 1. It is the missing link in our perception, our failure to connect meat, eggs, and dairy with their animal source. The gap blocks our disgust and our empathy. And it blocks our awareness of the incongruence between our values and our behaviors when it comes to eating animals. Witnessing closes the gap because it connects us with the truth. When we witness, we validate, or make real, the suffering the system works so hard to hide, and we also validate our authentic reaction to it.

The goal of all justice movements is to activate collective witnessing so that social practices reflect social values. A movement succeeds when it reaches a critical mass of witnesses—that is, enough witnesses to tip the scales of power in favor of the movement. Because mass witnessing is likely the single greatest threat to carnism, the entire system is organized around preventing this process.

Scientists have found that our mirror neurons, neurons in our brain that fire in response to actions, can be activated whether we are performing the actions or simply witnessing them.212 For example, seeing someone kicking a ball, crying, being harmed, or squirming with an insect crawling up their leg activates the same areas of our brain as those that would be activated if the events were happening directly to us. So, to some degree, we know what another feels not simply because we try to put ourselves in their shoes, but also because we are literally feeling the same thing.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton discusses this phenomenon in his book The Nazi Doctors, where he describes medical doctors who worked as killers by day, but were able to return home to their families as seemingly normal husbands and fathers. Most of us, however, don't dissociate to the degree necessary to directly carry out killing; we simply dissociate enough to support the killing that is carried out by others. When it comes to eating animals, dissociation prevents us from connecting the dots between what we're doing and how we might actually be feeling. Dissociation essentially renders us powerless to make choices that reflect what we truly feel.

Dissociation limits our self-awareness and thus presents an obstacle to our personal growth. Virtually all major psychological and spiritual traditions consider self-connection, or integration, the goal of human development. Integration is the synthesis of different aspects of ourselves into a harmonious whole: body, mind, and spirit; id, ego, and superego; values, beliefs, and behaviors; and so on. Like dissociation, integration is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. It exists on a spectrum. The more integrated we are, the more consistent our character is. For instance, if we're adequately integrated, we aren't a fundamentally different person in the workplace than we are at home or with our friends.

Another reason we may resist bearing witness to the truth of carnism is that witnessing hurts. Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to feel pain. Indeed, empathy is literally “feeling with.”

It's all too easy to forget, to fall back into the cocoon of carnistic numbing. Remember: your carnistic schema will pull you back into the carnistic mentality; your awareness of carnistic production will likely diminish if you don't actively work to keep yourself informed and try to deepen your understanding of the issue.* Make witnessing your credo.

Ultimately, bearing witness requires the courage to choose a role. Judith Herman points out that, in the face of mass violence, all bystanders are forced to take a side, by their action or inaction, and that there is no such thing as moral neutrality. Indeed, as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel stated, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”219 Witnessing enables us to choose our role rather than have one assigned to us.

The neocarnism I call “compassionate carnism” is expressed through the belief that it is possible to procure “humane” meat, eggs, and dairy; and this form of neocarnism reflects a backlash against the animal welfare argument for veganism. If farmed animal welfare were truly a possibility (which it is not, given the current system, and which it never could be, given that the very existence of farmed animals is itself antithetical to their welfare—farmed animals have been created by and for humans and are by definition exploited), then veganism wouldn't be needed. Compassionate carnism bolsters the myths that eating animals is normal and not eating animals is abnormal. Veganism, presented by animal agribusinesses and other institutions as extreme and radical, is juxtaposed with “humane” meat, eggs, and dairy, making compassionate carnism seem like a mainstream (normal) alternative to both extremes: the brutality of factory farming and the seemingly radical practice of veganism.