Vegan Bookclub

I thought I'd post this review of Melanie Joy's "Why we love dogs, eat pig, and wear cows". I rated it 5 stars.

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I have seen some online vegan groups that I do not at all agree with which have vilified this author and a lot of vegan activists because according to them they weren’t using the correct wordings. This book for example would get criticised for using the words meat eater, and they would define carnism as partly opposed to meat eating. They would hate that the word violence is being used instead of exploitation even though it can be argued that they are pretty much the same thing. Yeah these people are a very interesting mental exercise, and I was surprised to find so many people agreeing with them while they do not have any good points really. I suppose intellectual bullying is everywhere, and veganism is not immune to such people.

That out of the way I believe this is a brilliant book which uses psychological defences to define the dominating ideology called carnism. I love that term, and have been using it a lot and for such a long time now. It is simple psychology stuff, and it is all undeniable and just out there. This book doesn’t deal with a lot of specifics so it cannot get much wrong. Psychological defences are ways we dissociate and get through life, but in cases of mass oppression they can get in the way collectively, not that they can’t get in the way individually. I don’t think it’s anything out there or revolutionary, but it does its job and defines the concept well. This is a good book to give to someone on the philosophy of veganism.

This book goes over factory farming, the basic statistics and injustices like a lot of other animal rights books. It is a good overview and is one of the shorter examples I read so far since this book is not very long. I like the shortness of it since it is not very pleasant to read about it, though hearing it in full in other books is important too! An emphasis here is on how it is hidden by the government, companies, society and how we hide it in so many ways ourselves.

The newer edition contains some neocarnism definitions which is very fun! We have neocarnism now! I love the impact this book had. The other books the author has sound very intriguing, and are most likely good.