Summary of the book "Eating Animals" - By Jonathan Safran Foer

Key Concepts in this book:

1. Factory farms resemble a factory rather than a farm.
2. Both ethically and hygienically, factory-raised fowl is repulsive.
3. Hog farming is the cruellest kind of animal husbandry.
4. Fishing and aquaculture are waging an extermination war on all aquatic life.
5. Factory farm and butcher workers become cruel and vicious.
6. Meat consumption is unsustainable in terms of the environment.
7. Regulatory authorities and the law are frequently bent to the meat industry's will.
8. Meat prices are low because they do not reflect the full cost of manufacturing.
9. Today, factory farming makes us sick, and the next global pandemic will certainly result.
10. There is no rational reason why dogs should be treated differently from pigs, chickens, or fish.
11. Without becoming vegetarian, it's nearly hard to eat ethically.

Who can benefit the most from this book:

• Anyone interested in how meat is produced today and what the consequences are for people, animals and the environment.
• Anyone who thinks of food as an important part of their lives, from full-blooded meat-eaters to vegetarians and vegans.

1. Factory farms resemble a factory rather than a farm.

Barns, meadows, red wooden homes, and calmly grazing barnyard animals come to mind when most people think of a farm.

This is the end of the story. Industrialized factory farms streamlined production operations that show no resemblance to the "farms" in most customers' perceptions, accounting for 99 per cent of the land animals farmed in the United States today. A factory farm is more akin to an assembly line, with each animal being treated as a separate item that must be processed as fast and cheaply as possible.

Factory farming's philosophy may be summed up in one word: efficiency.

Farm animals have been developed to be so fast-growing over the last century that they are butchered as soon as they reach adolescence. Because of their unnaturally rapid growth, they typically develop serious inherited health problems and are unable to survive outside of the factory farm.

Animals who are sick or injured are left to perish where they fall. Any type of assistance, including simple rest and water, is deemed ineffective and thus is not supplied.

The animals' internal clocks are constantly pushed to grow thanks to artificial lighting and airflow. Simultaneously, their food is fortified with vitamins and antibiotics in order to keep continuously ill animals alive till slaughter.

Through mechanized herding, feeding, and slaughter, labour is reduced to a minimum, but the few humans employed are often underpaid and under constant stress, resulting in blunders and even deliberate sadism.

If you believe the animals used to make your chicken nuggets or pork chops have ever seen the sun or felt grass under their feet, you're living in a bygone era.

Animals have become a faceless, nameless mass that is processed.

2. Both ethically and hygienically, factory-raised fowl is repulsive.

Birds are separated into broilers (fast-growing hens intended for meat) and layers (slow-growing chickens bred for eggs) according to the factory farmer's efficiency mindset (fast-laying chickens bred for laying eggs).

Layers now produce eggs at twice the pace they used to, while broilers' daily growth rate has surged by 400 per cent, thanks to improved breeding practices utilized since the dawn of factory farming.

Chickens are practically a whole species on artificial life support as a result of their tremendous growth, rendering them completely unviable outside of the farm.

Layers live in coops piled nine storeys high, with less than a square foot of housing area per bird on a factory farm. Broilers are housed in flocks of tens of thousands on the floors of large buildings.

In such confined spaces, birds frequently go wild, continually pecking at each other. Their beaks are chopped off with a scorching hot blade to prevent this. This is the same as cutting a human's fingers off, depriving clever and naturally curious beings of their major exploring tool.

Adolescent birds suffer pain and terror upon slaughter because the stunning and murder machinery frequently fail, leaving them writhing in pain till the end.

The meat is then injected with various broths to make it resemble chicken in appearance, flavour, and taste. Immersing it in "faecal soup," a cooling liquid teeming with pathogens and faeces from deceased birds, is the masterstroke, allowing it to absorb 20 per cent more weight. The technique almost ensures that any infections that individual birds may have carried cross-contaminate the meat.

As a result, the poultry industry makes a 20% profit by selling faeces and bacteria to consumers as chicken flesh.

3. Hog farming is the cruellest kind of animal husbandry.

Pigs raised in factory farms suffer from a variety of issues. The suppression of pigs' so-called species-specific characteristics is perhaps the most stressful aspect. Pigs naturally want to be pigs, wallowing about in muck, playing, making nests, and communally resting in the hay. They can't perform any of those things when they're confined to cramped, steel-and-concrete-lined multi-tiered factory farms, and they suffer immensely as a result.

Sows take the brunt of it. They are put into cramped gestation boxes where they are unable to walk, much less nest and prepare for their piglets as is their natural instinct.

From the beginning, the piglets are aware of their misery. Because they would bite their other out of desperation on an industrial farm, their tails and needle teeth are removed within 48 hours of birth.

The testicles of the piglets are also removed (without anaesthetic) because today's consumers prefer castrated meat.

Initially, the piglets are housed in stacked wire cages, where faeces and urine trickle from one animal to the next. They are eventually confined to enclosures so small that they are unable to move, thereby conserving calories and rapidly gaining weight. "Overcrowding pigs pay," according to a trade publication.

Because the smaller piglets do not grow quickly enough to be profitable, they are "thumped" to death, i.e. grasped by their rear legs and bashed headfirst into concrete.

When repeated beating fails to kill them, they run around in anguish with bizarre injuries, such as an eyeball hanging out of its socket.

4. Fishing and aquaculture are waging an extermination war on all aquatic life.

Factory farms and modern industrial fishing tactics share the same efficiency mindset as factory farms.

We often overlook fish suffering, treating them more like a faceless commodity than individual animals. As a result, they are frequently treated much more harshly than many other animals, and they are systematically exterminated. Within the next 50 years, scientists estimate that every fished species will be extinct.

Salmon are forced into such crowded conditions and dirty water by underwater farming that they bleed from their eyes, cannibalize each other, and attract so many sea lice that many fish faces are eaten to the bone (a phenomenon known as a "death crown").

Farms with a death rate of 10% to 30% are regarded to be successful. The fish are starved for seven to ten days before being slaughtered, after which their gills are slashed and they are left to bleed to death while writhing in misery.

Although wild fish live longer than farmed fish, their deaths are just as painful and cause significant collateral damage. Bycatch refers to aquatic life other than the target species that are caught and killed during the fishing operation.

Trawling, in which a funnel-shaped net is dragged on the ocean floor for hours in the hopes of catching shrimp, is by far the worst offender. Bycatch, on the other hand, is thrown back into the sea dead in an average of 80-90 per cent of cases.

Long-lines, another common commercial fishing method, kill over 4.5 million sea animals each year as bycatch, though not as ruthlessly as trawling.

Both fishing methods cause excruciating pain to the hapless fish, who are either dangled on hooks for hours or scraped over the ocean's bottom.

5. Factory farm and butcher workers become cruel and vicious.

At factory farms, there are no real farmers.

Only desk jobs and menial duties, such as slaughter, have remained unaffected by automation. Employees who work in low-paying, stressful, and degrading environments might become brutalized, making them vicious toward animals who are already suffering.

Workers have been caught on camera ripping the heads off chickens, fracturing their bones, spitting tobacco juice in their eyes, and stamping on them to make them "pop."

Sadism is also induced in pig farms. Workers have been caught beating pigs with wrenches, shoving iron poles and cattle prods into their vaginal and rectum cavities, chopping off their snouts, and drowning them in the muck. Workers were also seen skinning a pig while it was fully conscious in one video.

Other creatures are also subjected to maltreatment. Employees at slaughterhouses have willfully dismembered fully conscious cattle and used baby turkeys to play baseball with.

This is a fairly regular occurrence. In 32 per cent of slaughterhouses audited, deliberate acts of cruelty were seen regularly. Consider what unexpected audits would have revealed!

Managers appear to be unconcerned about their employee's activities, and fines, much alone charges, are uncommon.

6. Meat consumption is unsustainable in terms of the environment.

One of the most important environmental decisions you can make is whether or not to eat meat. According to the United Nations, livestock accounts for around 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, or 40% more than the transportation sector.

An omnivore emits seven times the amount of greenhouse gas as a vegan. Meat-heavy diets are becoming more popular around the world, particularly in nations with fast-growing populations, such as China. As long as this tendency continues, greenhouse gas emissions will skyrocket.

The rise in meat consumption is especially concerning for developing countries suffering food or water shortages. By 2050, the amount of food diverted to feed livestock would be enough to feed 4 billion people, and animal farming already consumes 50% of China's total water use.

However, environmental issues do not only present in far-flung locations such as undeveloped countries. Animal farming alone produces 87,000 pounds of animal faeces each second in the United States, the majority of which comes from industrial farms.

While animal excrement can be a useful fertilizer, such large amounts spread over such a short space are simply too much for the ecology to handle.

Worse, the waste is extremely hazardous, polluting 160 times more than untreated municipal sewage. In the United States alone, chicken, cow, and pig faeces have polluted 35,000 kilometres of rivers. Even in the limited places where regulations do exist, they are flagrantly disregarded, and 13 million wild fish have been poisoned by excrement in just three years.

In disgusting lagoons the size of Las Vegas casinos, liquefied poo collects, oozing into streams and into the air. Families that live near hog farms frequently complain of nosebleeds, headaches, diarrhoea, and burning lungs, while their land's value drops.

7. Regulatory authorities and the law are frequently bent to the meat industry's will.

Food industries wield enormous power over government institutions. They urge Congress to repeal negative rules, press authorities not to enforce those that are in place, and dispute any unfavourable court decisions, much like cigarette firms do.

Take the following example from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): It is in charge of promoting the nation's health through nutritional guidelines, but it is also in charge of promoting the agriculture industry, which is ironic.

Because of this conflict of interest, the USDA cannot state that "eating less meat is healthy," because it would be attacked by meat industry lobbyists.

Consider animal rights: Animals deserve legal protection, according to 96 per cent of Americans, and 62 per cent believe that severe legislation governing the treatment of farm animals should be enacted. Despite this, it is permissible to confine 30,000 hens to a small, fully enclosed area with a small, locked door and name them "free-range."

Animal cruelty on factory farms is so heinous that even the most rudimentary animal protection legislation would outlaw it. Customary Farming Exemptions (CFE) are granted to any methods that are common in the sector to get around this.

Surprisingly, even the most heinous animal cruelty can become lawful overnight if it is widely adopted by the industry. And, as we all know, the industry will go to great lengths to boost efficiency.

The use of antibiotics on factory farms is another illustration of industry domination. Several respected organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), have recommended a ban on the overuse of antibiotics in livestock since it reduces their efficiency and can even result in infection resistance.

In the United States, the industry has so far succeeded to defeat such a ban.

8. Meat prices are low because they do not reflect the full cost of manufacturing.

Factory farming has made meat extremely cheap – absurdly cheap, in fact – from an economic standpoint.

House and automobile prices have climbed by roughly 1500 per cent in the last 50 years, but the price of eggs and chicken flesh hasn't even doubled. Why?

One explanation is that the meat industry's costs are paid by the rest of society. Factory farms are not responsible for the handling of their waste, the research of new antibiotics to replace those that are becoming outdated due to their overuse, or the lives lost to the viruses that their agricultural methods cause.

However, the fundamental force behind today's absurdly low meat prices is the complete lack of any effort to treat animals humanely.

We could never afford to consume the quantity of meat per capita than we do now if cattle were raised on small family farms using conventional methods, allowing them to wander to pasture, munch on grass, roll in the dirt, and walk in the sun.

Instead, in order to keep prices down, we've crowded increasingly sick animals into even smaller spaces, fed them increasingly enormous amounts of poisons, and made them suffer even more.

But how much does cruelty cost? Although the price of meat hasn't kept up with inflation, the process of producing it has become so gruesome that most people aren't interested in learning how it's done. What should the cost of tormented flesh be?

9. Today, factory farming makes us sick, and the next global pandemic will certainly result.

We are sickened by factory farming. Consumer surveys claim that 83 per cent of chicken meat sold is contaminated with salmonella or campylobacter. In the United States alone, 76 million cases of the food-borne disease occur each year.

Because factory farms use about 25 million pounds of antibiotics for non-therapeutic purposes (i.e., not to treat illness), we should expect additional antibiotic-resistant disease strains to emerge.

Our food is prepared terribly, and it is making us sick.

In addition to the disease that plagues us today, factory farming has the potential to usher in a doomsday scenario. The WHO believes that another influenza pandemic is overdue, one that will hit every country on the earth and for which we are woefully unprepared.

The Spanish flu took roughly 50-100 million people in 1918, making it the most well-known pandemic in history. Avian influenza, a disease spread from birds to people, was recently identified as the virus.

Because birds, pigs, and people are all susceptible to one other's flu viruses, they provide a deadly breeding environment for viruses to develop. A pig infected with influenza viruses from two different species has the potential to mix these diseases into something new and lethal.

Where can one find pigs or hens crammed into small places in filthy conditions, bleeding from open sores, and not being looked after when they get sick?

Consider the fact that 30 to 70 per cent of factory-farmed pigs will have a respiratory infection by the time they are slaughtered.

The next global super-flu will almost certainly emerge in a factory farm.

10. There is no rational reason why dogs should be treated differently from pigs, chickens, or fish.

Most people consider dogs to be intelligent, emotional creatures who serve as more than just pets. Most of us would be outraged if we saw dogs suffer since we know they are sophisticated enough to feel pain and fear just like humans. We understand and would think carefully about eating a dog (at least in a Western culinary context).

But take a step back and contemplate why we give dogs such a special place in our hearts. Is it a result of their intellect?

Pigs are even smarter than dogs, with learning abilities that rival those of chimps. They work together in groups, communicate in their own language, and help other pigs in need.

Fish and fowl are also far smarter than previously imagined. Fish create social bonds, utilize tools, and interact with one another, whereas chickens have been discovered to be as least as intellectual as mammals, probably even primates.

Why do we neglect the suffering of pigs, fish, and chickens who experience pain and anxiety just like our beloved dogs? From a sentimental standpoint, one could claim that dogs have a particular position because they are so close to our daily lives, but that is all it is: an emotional argument.

From a purely rational position, we should be concerned about the pain of pigs, chickens, and fish in the same way that we are concerned about the suffering of dogs.

11. Without becoming vegetarian, it's nearly hard to eat ethically.

Vegetarianism is the only ethical and rational choice for anyone even mildly concerned with saving the environment, promoting the welfare of other living beings, or just avoiding the next global flu pandemic.

Choosing what to eat (and what not to eat) is one of the most potent ways we can declare our values and put an end to the influence that the meat industry has today.

While some "ethical" meats are not factory farmed, you may reasonably assume that any meat you buy without doing extensive investigation is factory-farmed.

Even ethical meat has flaws: most slaughterhouses are owned by meat industry behemoths, ensuring that earnings continue to flow to the worst offenders.

Some may read this book as an invitation to switch to ethical meat while continuing to eat factory-farmed meat. The opposite could not be further from the truth.

The very least we can do is stop funding industrial farms completely. Through specialized farms and wiser animal agriculture, an honourable version of omnivory may be conceivable, but for the time being, vegetarianism is the most ethical option to make.

Vegetarianism has been characterized as romantic by some. But ponder which is more sentimental: eating everything you want whenever you want, or rationally understanding that there are more significant aspects than transient cravings and sentiments?

Almost all of our meat is produced on factory farms, resulting in enormous misery for animals, significant environmental harm, and a wide range of current and future health issues for people.

The following are the questions that this book addressed:

What is the current method of meat production?

• Factory farms resemble a factory rather than a farm.
• Both ethically and hygienically, factory-raised fowl is repulsive.
• Hog farming is the cruellest kind of animal husbandry.
• Fishing and aquaculture are waging an extermination war on all aquatic life.
• Factory farm and butcher workers become cruel and vicious.

What is the impact of the meat business on humans and the environment?

• Meat consumption is unsustainable in terms of the environment.
• Regulatory bodies and the law are frequently bent to the meat industry's will.
• Meat prices are low because they do not reflect the full cost of manufacturing.
• Today, factory farming makes us sick, and the next global pandemic will certainly result.

Why is it unethical and irrational to consume meat?

• There is no rational reason why dogs should be treated differently from pigs, chickens, or fish.
• Without becoming vegetarian, it's nearly hard to eat ethically.