On Wednesday, October 28, the CNN site ran a piece by Safran Foer titled, "Eating Animals is Making us Sick." CNN is kind enough to make my job easy by noting the "story highlights" as follows:
STORY HIGHLIGHTS -- Jonathan Safran Foer:
-- Inhumane way we raise animals for slaughter poisons us all
-- Foer: Factory farming tied to global warming, swine and bird flu, other illnesses
-- He says animals loaded with antibiotics, live in gruesome conditions
-- System driven by food and pharmaceutical industries; Foer asks: Why no outcry?
You'll find the whole story on line at
http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/10/28/opinion.jonathan.foer/index.html
Check it out -- CNN counts clicks and we need to let them know animal friendly pieces are popular. Then
email it to your friends, post it on your Facebook page, do whatever you want to do to help spread the word -- you get lots of options at the end of the article.
The Saturday, October 31, Wall Street Journal published a section from Safran Foer's new book, heading it, "Let Them Eat Dog." The author suggests that it would be kinder to eat the dogs we are currently killing by the millions for lack of homes, than to factory farm animals for food. Anybody tempted to think that he seriously wants us to eat dogs needs to check out the text story of the NPR interview with him, which I will link to below, in which we see that the same piece is preceded in his book by a section titled "George," which is about his love for his own dog. That love inspired his compassion for other animals. The point of the ironic piece, including the enthusiastic endorsement of the recipe he provides at the end for "Stewed dog, Wedding Style," is to highlight our shockingly insensitive attitudes towards other animals.
These might be my favorite lines:
"Perhaps we could include dogs under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. That doesn't say anything about how they're treated during their lives, and isn't subject to any meaningful oversight or enforcement, but surely we can rely on the industry to 'self-regulate,' as we do with other eaten animals."
I do doubt, however, that everybody reading them will digest the bitter irony in the suggestion that we would do well to let the industry self regulate as it does for other animals. They may not realize that self-regulation has led to systems such as sow gestation crating, under which pigs live in individual crates so small that they cannot even lie down with their legs outstretched, or turn around, let alone go for a walk.
You'll find the article on line at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574499880131341174.html
Some comments from people who get what Safran Foer is trying to say are desperately needed. Please add one. And you can send an appreciative letter to the editor at wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Remember that shorter letters are more likely to be published. And please be sure not to use any comments or phrases from me or from any other alerts in your letters. Editors are looking for original responses from their readers.
Today's (Sunday, Nov 1) NPR interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, from the program All Things Considered, is on line at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114298495
You can listen to it on line, read the text of the interview, and also read the section from his book about his dog, George. Please post a comment below the story.
My thanks go to Andrew Umphries, Sean McVity and Bruce Friedrich for making sure we knew about these media stories.
Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn
Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com for a fun celeb-studded promo video and information on Karen Dawn's book, "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals," which was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Books of 2008." And check out Karen's new blog at www.ThankingtheMonkey.com/blog !