I totally agree with Herzog about people's inconsistent thinking being something we can't truly get around.

Unfortunately, Herzog's writing was painful for me and largely unscientific. The book is mostly anecdotes and armchair-philosopher-type thoughts. In the first chapter he discussed how we have to take scientific studies with a grain of salt because of biases that can creep into the presentation or confounding factors, but then he presents tons of studies' findings as fact without mentioning how they could be/are not necessarily reliable. And THEN he presented tons of contradictory anecdotes, trying to prove points about things, and not recognizing those contradictions. It was too much sometimes, especially on gender differences in feelings about animals where he kept saying women tend to be more sensitive but then also showing tons of his male friends who are sensitive. I get that there is a difference between statistics and anecodtes; does Herzog?

All in all I was hoping for a book that presented more findings of studies, or maybe case studies from the author (it sounds like he's done some interesting research and the cockfighting chapter seemed like the best researched for sure). What I got was a jumble of anecdotes with random findings thrown in seemingly haphazard. Definitely agree with another reviewer that his style was too buddy-buddy for my taste. The weird thing is that I agree with Herzog's final conclusion that people are simply full of contradictions. I just wish he had gotten there in a more studied way rather than telling me such a crazy number of anecdotes.