Reddit reviews Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals (P.S.)

There's a really excellent book I read about the psychology involved with our inconsistent views on animals.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Harzog

It's very fascinating and definitely worth the read. I usually have a harder time reading a non-fiction book cover to cover but I couldn't put this one down.

Basically, Herzog breaks the animal kingdom into three categories:

• Some we love - pets, companion animals, etc
  
  
• Some we hate - animals that we have contempt for - pests - creatures considered unclean, and associated with filth
  
  
• Some we eat - livestock - animals for human consumption
  
  The way we think about animals changes completely based on these categories. An animal can usually be put in one of these groups, and there's rarely any crossover or ambiguity. These divisions do change however across cultures, but the book is mostly about modern Western ideas on animals.

Read "Some we love, some we hate, some we eat". My friends dad wrote it. It's fascinating.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals (P.S.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061730858/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_Xv2MybR5BGKQW

Hal Herzog's book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, a quick google search should reveal several more sources

Relevant studies:

• Vegetarian versus Meat-Based Diets for Companion Animals (2016) - "Cats and dogs maintained on vegetarian diets may be healthy—including those exercising at the highest levels—and indeed may experience a range of health benefits."
  
• Cats and Carbohydrates: The Carnivore Fantasy? (2017) - "Because of the discrepancy in carbohydrate content between a natural prey diet and currently available traditional commercial cat foods, excess carbohydrate intake is often considered the primary cause of feline obesity [4,8,9]. It has been postulated that excessive amounts of dietary carbohydrates cause an overproduction of insulin resulting in excess fat deposition ... Nguyen et al. and Backus et al. confirmed increased weight gain and expansion of fat mass when cats had free choice access to a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet ... in comparison to a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet ... Coradini et al. also concluded that a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet .. resulted in increased fat deposition and greater weight gain when fed ad libitum compared to a high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet ... Based on the research discussed above, carbohydrates do not appear to be the biggest concern in the development of obesity. Overfeeding and thereby consumption of excess calories of any macronutrient is a much more important risk factor for obesity and should be the main focus of obesity prevention."
  
• VEGAN NUTRITION OF DOGS AND CATS (2014) - "It is the intention of this paper to provide general information on vegan nutrition of dogs and cats and furthermore to deal with how an adequate nutrient intake can be met with only plant based feeds" - Master's thesis from the Veterinary University of Vienna (translated from German).
  
  
  More : https://www.reddit.com/r/veganpets/wiki/faq
  
  
  

  Is the science settled on vegan pet diets? What are the benefits and risks?
  

  
  More research definitely needs to be done in this field. The provided studies show evidence that vegan diets can be healthy for dogs, cats, and other pets, but many of those studies were small: more evidence is required to prove it. However, it is difficult, expensive, and time consuming to gather enough scientific research to "prove" something. Just look at all the confusion in human nutrition research, which receives many times more funding and interest than veterinary nutrition research ever will.
  
  Does that mean we should avoid vegan pet diets in the meantime? Ultimately this is a personal decision, but this subreddit's stance is a resounding NO. Let's create a simple cost/benefit analysis to help make this decision.
  
  

  Benefits and Support
  

  
  

• Most, if not all, currently available peer reviewed research supports vegan pet diets as a healthy food source
  
• There are many reasons to believe vegan pet food may be healthier than meat-based pet food, even if all the studies have not yet been performed to prove it
  
• There are at least 23 different suppliers of vegan pet foods, many of which only provide vegan pet foods. How could these companies stay in business if all their customers became ill?
  
• All of the minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and other additives that go into vegan pet foods go into regular pet foods too.
  
• Thousands of cats and dogs have already gone vegan, as evidenced by their social media presence
  
• "through their diet, [cats and dogs] constitute about 25–30% of the environmental impacts from animal production in terms of the use of land, water, fossil fuel, phosphate, and biocides." - Source
  
• A cow, pig, chicken, fish, or other animal died to provide byproducts for your pets meal. How is your pet different from them?
  
  

  Risks
  

  
  

• Vegetables are less acidic than meat. Basic food may cause urinary crystal issues in cats, especially male cats. Most vegan cat foods are acidified (just like regular cat food), minimizing the risk of this issue. It's still smart to monitor your cat when switching over.
  
• Vegan diets feel risky to many. Some people claim that obligate carnivores, like cats, cannot survive on a properly formulated, nutritionally balanced "unnatural" vegan diet. In Zimbabwe, 164,000 crocodiles (obligate carnivores) are commercially raised on a vegan diet, it has been found cats digest >93% of the starches found in kibble, and cats readily digest the amino acids that are currently added to meat-based cat foods. In meta-analysis, cats have been found to do well on vegan diets.
  
• To be continued?
  
  There's a lot of potential good to come from a pet's vegan diet, even for their health. Any issues or risks that might arise can be monitored, discovered, and immediately reversed by returning to the pet's regular diet. Lots of benefit, low risk.
  

I think you'd enjoy the book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. It's written by an anthrozooligist who delves honestly into the very contradictory relationship we have with animals. He doesn't provide answers, so much as an in depth study into the place and role animals have in our lives and many preconceptions we simply take for granted.

I’ve been reading Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling and it is very interesting. I think people on this sub would like it since we all like snooping around and dissecting information haha. It’s almost like MTV’s Room Raiders but from a doctorate in psychology’s viewpoint. There’s subconscious meaning behind what types of pictures you hang on your walls and even which walls you hang said pictures on. He can go through someone’s room and paint a pretty accurate portrayal of their personality without ever meeting them. I would think it would be a good read if you’re dating around and want to get a better feel for someone haha. I’m only a few chapters in but it’s very interesting so far!!

I found out about Snoop because it was mentioned in another book I’ve been reading Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog. It’s a book on anthrozoology and talks about the history humans have had with animals, and some moral conundrums we have about them. Are we instinctually afraid of snakes or is it learned behavior? Do people really look like their dogs? (This one was interesting! Human couples that live together start to develop similar facial structures. That’s not true with dogs. We don’t start to look like our dogs but we may pick dogs that look like us. Women with shorter hair are more likely to adopt dogs with perky ears instead of floppy. And students were able to match humans with their dogs with a higher accuracy rate than they would by just random chance). Why do some cultures eat bugs but we think that’s gross, or why do some cultures eat animals that we keep as pets? They talk about the infamous trolly problem and replace it with animals and you can see your own morals start to shift and be questioned. With humans you’d think it’s better to pull the lever to save 5 lives instead of 1... but now replace that problem with 5 birds vs 1 dog and see if your answer is still the same. Very interesting.

Edit: oh oh! One more. And Then You're Dead: What Really Happens If You Get Swallowed by a Whale, Are Shot from a Cannon, or Go Barreling over Niagara. The author did an AMA on reddit which I found interesting so I bought the book and read it in a day. And the chapters are set up so you can just flip around and read what you’re interested in. My favorites include what happens if your window falls out of an airplane and you get sucked out, how many bees you’d have to get stung by at one time before you died (1,500 honeybees), and what happens if you’re in a free falling elevator (jumping won’t do anything. Lay down flat on the ground to disperse the impact... and because if you’re standing up once the elevator stops your intestines will continue to fall and impact themselves out your bottom. And then you die).

https://www.amazon.com/Some-We-Love-Hate-Eat/dp/0061730858/ref=asc_df_0061730858/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312065538926&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11024277544380194344&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032466&hvtargid=aud-801657747996:pla-449419458894&psc=1 This is also an interesting book to read that addresses the psychology of how we feel towards other animals. My omnivorous designer dog loving co-workers (that I love to death) had difficulty understanding my thoughts on how they don't truly love animals if they eat them and this book really helped that.

You should read this book. It's great! It talks about exactly what you're asking here.

I'm currently reading a very interesting book on human-animal relations called Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals and it's quite fascinating.

The gist of it is this (relevant to this question), the more closely we think of our pets as human members of the family, the more we feel obligated to spend money on them.

If you keep pets in the traditional/historic/farm way, then you absolutely would not spend thousands of dollars to prolong their life. You probably wouldn't even buy insurance or spend hundreds of dollars on surgery (unless you're higher income and it doesn't make a difference).

My point of view is you should do what's fair for the animal. That means feed it, exercise it, give it shelter and affection, groom it, and don't abuse it. Definitely fix it. But you're not obligated to bankrupt yourself, or even just pay out the wazoo to fix it. Honestly, I have two cats, I love them to death, I bring to the best vets, buy the most expensive food and litter, and make sure they enjoy life. But if they get so sick that I would have to go into debt for them to get better, I'll attempt to find help/another home, and if that doesn't work, they'll have to be euthanized.

(All of this is based on the premise that it is better for the pet to have a longer life--even if it's not enjoyable. But we're not animals, so we can't know that they want to live longer, rather than move onto some happier place/time/life.)

I also think modern society has on the one hand desensitized us to violence, but on the other hand, neglected to teach us how to deal with life and grief and move on. That's what you do when an animal gets sick and you can't help it. (That's also what you do when a human gets sick and you can't help them, though presumably you'll try harder to help a human family member.) It's a fact of life, and I think people who unnecessarily prolong the life of animal--at the cost of their own and their children's lives--are doing something... unrealistic? self-indulgent? selfish? being in denial? I don't know the exact word for it, but it doesn't sit well with me. But it's like stalking your ex's facebook profile, when you should be cutting off all contact; it's definitely psychologically unhealthy.

Anyone interested in this thought process should check out the book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog. Really interesting and entertaining read.

The best answer to that is with a large portion of the population caring for some dogs, caring about the abuse of dogs under other's care, it becomes too morally confusing to eat other dogs.

Some one else referenced Some we love, some we hate, some we eat, and it really is just the fact that these need to be distinct categories for things to be simple.

There is proof of dogs being humans companions for thousands of years (last I remember, don't have a source), and dogs have been beneficial companions. So that decision has just been made through time, and there really is no reason to change it. Except it is different in different cultures, and that also stays the same.