Americans Love Animals
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Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. [...]
Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. [...]
How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious.
Damn. Looks like I need to read this book.
Americans don’t love animals. Not really. We say we love dogs and cats, yet we murder 3-4 million homeless innocents every year because we overbreed them. We chain them up, beat them, set them on fire, starve them, kill them for trivial reasons. Let’s face it–humans are the most vile species ever to inhabit the earth.
Brenda, you have a point about how terribly we humans treat “pets.” But it’s also true that many individual humans truly love their individual “pets.” They do. They really do.