Update Day: Pets

UPDATE!!: Wherein I direct you to Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent review of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. Excellent in large part because it manages to remain levelheaded in that New Yorker sort of way, which as I mentioned previously is not something that people writing or speaking either on the subjects of pets or vegetarianism manage to do very often.

For example, she manages to succinctly sum up the crux of the problem when she writes:

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. This inconsistency is the subject of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” Unlike Foer’s two previous books, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” his latest is nonfiction. The task it sets itself is less to make sense of our behavior than to show how, when our stomachs are involved, it is often senseless. “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list,” Foer writes.

Like I said in my fairly recent post on the subject, while there are certain ethical issues at stake in my view towards animals, it is more interesting for me to think how 'we' and various other cultures imagine humans relation to (various kinds of) animals or more generally how 'humaness' and 'animality' is variously constructed and understood. The fact that most people I know and meet alternatively fawn over their pets and dismiss or even mock any sympathetic sentiment for any other kind of animal is thus interesting to consider, though only facilitates the most defensive kind of intellectual engagement on the topic of animals, if that. Which is ok, because I get the feeling that most people would rather not be so engaged.