Comment

Jan 17, 2013
Why do vegans own cats? At 2 oz. of meat each, America’s cats eat the equivalent of 3 million chickens every day. Pet cats kill about one billion small animals each year. This is ten times the number used in biomedical experiments. Yet, bird watchers see no contradiction in both feeding wild birds and letting their tabbies feast on the songbirds they attract. This is just one of the many paradoxes in our relationships with other animals that Dr. Herzog explores. He describes research done on our attitudes to pets, hunting, cock-fighting, animal experimentation and vegetarianism. How can a dog be both a beloved pet in North America and dinner in China? But how beloved can your purebred pet be if he must suffer from cruel genetic disorders so that he can be registered with the AKC? Why are vegetarian adolescents more likely to have eating disorders? Human-animal interactions are characterized by unavoidable conflict between logic and our emotions. Consistency is impossible to achieve.