Real Rating= 3.5

This book mentioned my favorite animal shelter (best friends animal society) and made references to literally half of my AP Lang summer reading list, which was a complete surprise. I really liked this book because it was controversial and made me think about my morals and values. The author tried to be relaxed and joking, which at times was a little odd. But other than that, good layout and writing.

I agree with the basic premise of this book. Our attitudes about animals are logically inconsistent, and when people are extremely logically consistent, that leads to absurdity. Hypocrisy is inherent in the relationships between humans and animals, and complications are impossible to escape from.

However, this book only gets 2 stars because I don't think it was terribly well-written. It is anything but cohesive. There are hundreds of "mini-essays," each relating an anecdote, study, or philosophical idea, wrapped up with a pat conclusion. This results in incredible breadth but very little depth and sometimes patently ignoring what I see as extreme oversimplification and shoddy reasoning. Let me provide a few examples with my objections (some are pretty long, but most are short):

1. This one just seems to have so many logical flaws and unexplained assumptions that although what he is saying may be perfectly true, I just can't get past his terrible reasoning. While exploring the idea about animals living with humans because they unconditionally love us from page 79:

"If pets were so great at providing unconditional love, you would think that everyone would be bonded to the animals in their homes. (Unexplained assumption number one - that because an animal loves you unconditionally, you will necessarily bond with it). They are not. in a 1992 study, 15% of adults said they were not particularly attached to their pets. In informal polls I have taken in my class, roughly a third of my students indicate that someone in their family actively dislikes or even hates the family pet. (Assumption number two - animals provide unconditional love to everyone they meet. In my experience, it is perfectly normal for a pet to be more attached or loving to certain people in a house, usually the ones who also show it affection and take care of it). The demography of pet-keeping also presents a problem ... This view predicts that people living alone would have the most need for unconditional love and thus have the highest levels of pet ownership. (#3: WHY? because people with roommates or family already have their love quota fulfilled? #4: people always do what is statistically beneficial for them, i.e. "i live alone and have a deficiency of love so I should get a pet.")This is not the case. In fact, adults living alone have the lowest rates of pet ownership, (lots of things could contribute to this. This must include people whose lifestyles otherwise prevent pet ownership: every college-aged person in a dorm room, people who work or travel a lot, people who live in apartments by themselves that don't allow pets, which is more likely to happen if you are single, people who are allergic, etc.)while adults raising school-aged kids have the highest. (This in no way refutes the unconditional love hypothesis. Many parents get pets for their kids so that they can have that sort of relationship with a pet that includes unconditional love, as well as responsibility and kindness, and see it as beneficial to their kids all around). Interestingly, while adults with children have the highest rates of pet ownership, as a group, they are less attached to their animals than people who live along with pets. In fact, pet attachment drops a notch with each additional person added to a family. Pets in homes with young children really get the shaft. For example, only about 25% of pets in families with children are groomed every day compared to nearly 80% of pets who reside with adults who do not have kids. (There is no reason to assume that this fact is a direct cause of the nonexistence of unconditional love from a pet. People who do not have children have more time and disposable income to spend on pet grooming. They also are more likely to have a pet that requires grooming, while a family may choose a pet specifically because it is low maintenance in the grooming department. By this logic, because families with 4 children necessarily spend less time and money per child than families with 3 children, the parents with more children love each of their children less, and those children love their parents less. Very silly in my opinion.)

Phew! moving on to the shorter objections.

2. The explanations he provides about the studies he cites often either do not have enough information to make sense, or don't make sense. One such study about whether men or women have more susceptibility to the cuteness of babies and pets was summarized this way:

"Women, however, are more susceptible than men to creates that are cute. British researchers recently reported that two groups of women are particularly sensitive to differences in the cuteness of infants: those of reproductive age and those taken birth control pills that raise their levels of hormones progesterone and estrogen." These seem pretty clearly not be "two" groups of women. Women who are taking birth control pills are the same women that are of reproductive age, unless there is some new fad of seven year old girls and seventy year old women taking the pill just for the fun of it. Although not all women of reproductive age take birth control pills, one group seems to fit pretty clearly into the other, so that his suggestion that hormones such as progesterone and estrogen are the causation for this kind of behavior has some serious logical flaws and kind of just seems like a tricky way to avoid a more detailed explanation.

Mostly, though, the author bugged me by summing up what seemed like a complicated study in a few sentences, followed by the words "the research is clear that ______," when I felt like from what he said, the research was NOT clear, and his conclusion was utterly unsupported.

3. I guess this isn't really a complaint, just something I thought was funny, but he made me feel like a stereotype.

"Three out of four animal rights activists are women, and most of them are politically liberal, well-educated, solidly middle class, and primarily white. Nearly all of them have pets." p. 241

"The typical vegetarian is a liberal, white, well-educated middle- or upper-class female who is less likely than the average person to adhere to traditional values. She usually gives up red meat first, and then expands her list of rejected foods to chicken and fish, and, in the case of vegans, eggs and dairy products." p. 196

Although I ultimately agree with Herzog, this book was really an exercise in being continually annoyed by his rhetorical style. It got all of my debater dander up and within 70 pages I had to keep notes about all of the ridiculous things he said. Since I didn't know anybody physically near me who would find my complaints interesting, I channeled them into the longest review I've ever written.

One thing I hate about some books like this – the ending. This book I found interesting, talking about why we eat some animals and not others and such. I did learn a lot (like people spend a ton of money to swim with dolphins and try to heal all kinds of things – those poor dolphins!) And the link between animal cruelty and serial killers is not really there (I always heard this one and the data doesn’t seem to support it. And a lot of people who are cruel to animals as kids are not serial killers….). Very interesting, but the end is kind of like we are all hypocrites except for the “radical” guy who actually lives in line with his beliefs – he is vegan – OMG! – and doesn’t kill animals – he will take them out of his house if he doesn’t want them in there and stuff like that. Crazy…the end of the book also tried to downplay veganism as a solution to a lot of the hypocrisy people have with their feelings about animals, like it is too hard and no one actually is vegan so why bother? The end of the book is just like we are all hypocrites so why bother? Just do whatever you want. Eat what you want, love whichever specific animals you want and whatever. Don’t even try and be more in line with your beliefs or think about it. It made me very angry. I’m sorry but taking a whole book to point out how bad something is, or how we shouldn’t do something, or how inconsistent something is and then being all eh whatever! Is a cop out. Yes it might not be what the majority of people want to hear, but come on! If you are presenting an argument then do it! Don’t chicken out at the end because you personally don’t want to live up to what you just said, or don’t want people to be upset by what you said or whatever your reason is for not following your own advice. Seriously I do not get it. How is whatever let’s just keep things the way they are even though I just wrote 300 pgs about how bad they are any good. Other than the ending I thought it was a good book.

It was difficult for me to read this book. It had lots of challenging ideas about ethics and morality that I'd rather not think about. I plowed through it in an effort to reach my yearly reading goal though, and was rewarded. It gives lots to think about and organizes all of the stories and info in such a way that you never feel overwhelmed.

I liked this book a lot more than I expected to (it wasn’t some treatise on how people who eat meat are evil or anything) and there were a lot of really great insights as well as just fun facts and fascinating accounts about bizarre things I knew nothing about (like Appalachian cockfighting).

Highly recommend. It’s very fair and measured and will NOT make you feel too guilty about your leather watchband or your burger. Probably. Maybe. Yeah I’m gonna go with probably.

This is an interesting little book exploring the relationships between humans and animals, and the hypocritical behavior that is unavoidable in anyone who tries to care for animals. Why do we feed mice to snakes, but not kittens? Why do cockfighters love their birds, but sentence them to death? How did humans come to have pets?

The book doesn't have a ton of answers, it is content with raising the questions and telling the stories of people whose lives revolve around animals: from animal rights activists to meat farmers. Overall, I found it an enjoyable read.

So this was a weird one for me. I initially looked into getting this book because I thought it was a vegan book (it's not). I decided to read it anyways and it had some good, bad, gross, and somewhat annoying parts.
I can't say it was bad just because I disagree with a lot of it. Facts are facts, and opinion are opinions!

Hal Herzog's book is filled with anecdotes, most of them personal, regarding animals that we love, hate and eat. He has exhaustively researched his topic, both intentionally and just through living life.

I was drawn to the book since 20 years ago, I was a staunch defender of animal rights myself. It didn't go as far as throwing blood at people wearing fur, or protesting outside the Capital for animal rights. But I must admit, it was a passionate belief of mine that we must treat animals well, as how we treat animals (and the young and elderly, basically, those unable to fight for themselves)reflects how we treat human beings in a society. And to some extent, I still believe that. Much like Herzog, however, I never went so far as to become vegan. Why? Because as Herzog points out, in today's society, it is almost impossible. But there is a more moderate view, which is the one Herzog is presenting for the reader in his book.

I had a hard time with this book, though. While the writing was okay (not great, not terrible....), the exhaustive anecdotes and accompanying viewpoints and reflections wore me down. The structure of the book never varied, which is to be expected, but it became wearing upon this reader. I just couldn't embrace the style of Herzog presenting a never ending list of talking to people from every employment field and walk of life about their experiences with animals; whether it was rats or fighting roosters. I have never found myself so wishing for an actual expert opinion in a book like this before--not to say there weren't any, but this book is truly about Herzog (as an American 'Everyman') and his experience researching this book! He totally lost me with the cock fighting. It simply wasn't interesting enough to really hold my interest. Maybe this is a book for a man, or a PETA member, or someone who(still )passionately embraces animal rights (although that is not the view Herzog takes), but he just wasn't able to truly engage me in this story. Although I really wanted to be.

This isn't a bad book. I'm sure it hit the mark with many readers. It just wasn't the book for me.