Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard To Think Straight About Animals (P.S.) Download Free (EPUB, PDF)
“Everybody who is interested in the ethics of our relationship between humans and animals should read this book.”—Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human Hal Herzog, a maverick scientist and leader in the field of anthrozoology offers a controversial, thought-provoking, and unprecedented exploration of the psychology behind the inconsistent and often paradoxical ways we think, feel, and behave towards animals. A cross between Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, in the words of Irene M. Pepperberg, bestselling author of Alex & Me, “deftly blends anecdote with scientific research to show how almost any moral or ethical position regarding our relationship with animals can lead to absurd consequences.”
Series: P.S.
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (September 5, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0061730858
ISBN-13: 978-0061730856
Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.8 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (122 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #67,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #27 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Animal Rights #135 in Books > Science & Math > Agricultural Sciences > Food Science #182 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Anthropology > General
Hal Herzog is fascinated with our moral relationships with animals, the contradictions we feel and the ethical problems when we avoid contradictions. A dog, he points out, is a member of the household in the United States, vermin in India, and food in Korea. We humans tend not to eat animals we either adore or despise. As Koreans and Chinese have started keeping pets, they have become more ambivalent about eating dog meat and relegate certain species to the dog trade.Herzog is an anthrozoologist who studies the interactions between humans and animals. He is also possessed with a quick eye for absurdity and a broad range of interests. In this book he has visited industrial farms and Appalachian cock fights, dogmeat markets, dolphin treatment centers, loggerhead turtle nests protection runs,animal research laboratories, and rescue refuges for injured animals. Even his family pets come up for scrutiny, when an animal rights neighbor called to ask if he was feeding kittens to his new pet boa constrictor and he experienced a revulsion that he did not feel about feeding them mice. And it led to a comparison of the food a snake needs compared to a cat- 5 pounds of flesh versus 50 each year which leaves a moral burden of owning a cat ten times that of a boa. Herzog writes well. I had trouble putting the book down, stopping only to ponder some of the questions he raises.Like most of us, Herzog eats meat, wears leather shoes, but thinks that animals should not suffer. He foreswears veal, spends more money to get chickens that roamed under open skies, and is more troubled by the use of laboratory animals for safe eye makeup than for medicine.
Some books are made for cover-to-cover readings. Others hold up nicely as "dippers" -- books you can read either intermittently or by selecting chapters and sections willy-nilly. Hal Herzog's SOME WE LOVE, SOME WE HATE, SOME WE EAT falls into the latter category. His chapter titles are clever, while the sub-headings provide the actual topic. For instance, we get "Pet-O-Philia: Why Do Humans (and Only Humans) Love Pets?" and "Prom Queen Kills First Deer On Sixteenth Birthday: Gender and the Human-Animal Relationship" and "Delicious, Dangerous, Disgusting, and Dead: The Human-Meat Relationship." The titular games set a tone, actually, as Herzog introduces anthrozoology in chapter one as a "new science of human-animal interactions," then has fun with it, being serious all along, of course.The pleasures in the book are mostly of the "interesting tidbit" and "food for thought" variety. For instance, in the chapter "The Importance of Being Cute," Herzog explains how the Nazis managed to raise dogs above Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals in the social construct because Hitler, believe it or not, loved animals. In the same chapter, he wonders what it is like to be a spider. Do spiders have feelings too? Here we get into the squishy side of this "new science" as Herzog includes an anecdote (real or apocryphal, I can't say) of an arachnologist who constructs a web of rubber tubes and sits in the middle of it to find out."Pet-O-Philia" examines our tendency to turn pets into people (benign shades of the Nazis?) by dressing them in clothes and sleeping in bed with them. "Friends, Foes, and Fashion Statements" tackles the tendency for breeds to become popular. It discusses the controversy surrounding pit bulls and rottweilers.
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