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book quote: eating animals
9 years ago
commissions are OPEN
designs currently for sale are HERE Having little exposure to animals makes it much easier to push aside questions about how our actions might influence their treatment. The problem posed by meat has become an abstract one: there is no individual animal, no singular look of joy or suffering, no wagging tail, and no scream. The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place on the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
Some have tried to resolve this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn’t be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn’t do it.
Killing an animal oneself is more often than not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.
-Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (bolding mine)
Some have tried to resolve this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn’t be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn’t do it.
Killing an animal oneself is more often than not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.
-Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (bolding mine)
