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clairegannondorf's review against another edition
informative
sad
fast-paced
5.0
I went vegan for my health, as I had been battling an eating disorder for several years. When I went vegan, everything changed for me. It was like something clicked in my mind and body. I heard about this book after the author had been on The Chickpeeps Podcast. At the time I was definitely more focused on Veganism for health.
This book helped me make the connection to the animals and realize how sick and unethical factory agriculture is. I know that the world isn’t going to go vegan overnight, and you don’t have to be a vegan or an aspiring vegan to read this. You should read this book if you have any interest in ethical rights for living beings. If you want to know where your food is coming from- ya know, the ‘farm to table’ idea- this book will inform you of the amount of suffering that goes in to each meal with animal products on your table, especially if the animal product is coming from a factory farm.
One thing this book does really well is highlight the egg industry and how absolutely terrible it is. I get it, you want to eat eggs. If you are going to eat eggs after reading this book, AT LEAST make the switch to eggs that are raised from a friend with backyard chickens who have actual fresh air and a yard to roam in. The factory farming model for egg production is honestly worse than any other animal farming method, which is confusing right? Because it’s just the egg, not the actual chicken being killed. But with the events depicted in this book, witnessed by the author, the suffering these birds endure seems to be even worse than their demise. Fabulous book and a necessary read for anyone who eats animal products or doesn’t want to go back to eating animal products.
I do have to note that the organization- MERCY FOR ANIMALS- has apparently accepted monomial offers to promote cage free eggs, which baffles me because this book is adamantly fighting against cage free eggs, as ‘cage free’ doesn’t mean a thing when you still don’t have enough space in the barn to walk because of the amount of animals, along with stepping in bird feces 24/7.
This book helped me make the connection to the animals and realize how sick and unethical factory agriculture is. I know that the world isn’t going to go vegan overnight, and you don’t have to be a vegan or an aspiring vegan to read this. You should read this book if you have any interest in ethical rights for living beings. If you want to know where your food is coming from- ya know, the ‘farm to table’ idea- this book will inform you of the amount of suffering that goes in to each meal with animal products on your table, especially if the animal product is coming from a factory farm.
One thing this book does really well is highlight the egg industry and how absolutely terrible it is. I get it, you want to eat eggs. If you are going to eat eggs after reading this book, AT LEAST make the switch to eggs that are raised from a friend with backyard chickens who have actual fresh air and a yard to roam in. The factory farming model for egg production is honestly worse than any other animal farming method, which is confusing right? Because it’s just the egg, not the actual chicken being killed. But with the events depicted in this book, witnessed by the author, the suffering these birds endure seems to be even worse than their demise. Fabulous book and a necessary read for anyone who eats animal products or doesn’t want to go back to eating animal products.
I do have to note that the organization- MERCY FOR ANIMALS- has apparently accepted monomial offers to promote cage free eggs, which baffles me because this book is adamantly fighting against cage free eggs, as ‘cage free’ doesn’t mean a thing when you still don’t have enough space in the barn to walk because of the amount of animals, along with stepping in bird feces 24/7.
heatherreads10's review
medium-paced
2.0
I wanted to learn more about MFA and have been meaning to read this for a long time. I don’t think it’s an inherently bad book and it’s clear the author cares deeply about animals. I didn’t realize there would be so many graphic descriptions of what happens to animals which I didn’t enjoy reading about as I already knew all of this information and have read about/watched it many times before so it's often gratuitous to me at this point, but that's more of a personal thing. I more so wanted to learn about how the organization started, although I should’ve realized it would’ve included a lot about the undercover investigations. I did like the look into how the author got started in activism.
My biggest issue with this book is that it is so incredibly… capitalist. Therefore, I don’t agree with many of the things that the author thinks will make big change in the world for animals – in a system that is built around profit and infinite growth, there will ALWAYS be exploitation of both human and non-human animals. I appreciate that there’s a need in this current society for organizations like MFA to improve welfare in the short term and small steps can be important, but we also have to think far beyond just welfare. Instead, the author ended the book by talking about innovation and profit potential in the plant-based sector of the market. He wants to create a “humane economy” where plant-based foods are cheaper and the norm but says nothing about how most of the companies he mentions (many of which are large/multinational corporations) creating plant-based products would still be incredibly unethical and unsustainable – animal liberation must account for ALL animals. For example, he briefly talked about the abuse that migrant workers in slaughterhouses go through but in his version of a "humane economy," those people would simply be pushed to other exploitative and degrading work. Similarly, in the case of companies like Nestle which he talked quite a bit about, even if they somehow stopped producing all animal products, they are still a multinational corporation that greatly impacts wildlife habitats and exploits humans and nature at an incredibly frightening degree. A capitalist food system and economy will never be a “humane” one.
I do appreciate the lengths that the author and MFA have gone to to protect farm animals and doing what they can, but I think so many more things in this book needed to be discussed that were just left out. I think we have similar intent but a very different path and end goal so this book was not my cup of tea.
My biggest issue with this book is that it is so incredibly… capitalist. Therefore, I don’t agree with many of the things that the author thinks will make big change in the world for animals – in a system that is built around profit and infinite growth, there will ALWAYS be exploitation of both human and non-human animals. I appreciate that there’s a need in this current society for organizations like MFA to improve welfare in the short term and small steps can be important, but we also have to think far beyond just welfare. Instead, the author ended the book by talking about innovation and profit potential in the plant-based sector of the market. He wants to create a “humane economy” where plant-based foods are cheaper and the norm but says nothing about how most of the companies he mentions (many of which are large/multinational corporations) creating plant-based products would still be incredibly unethical and unsustainable – animal liberation must account for ALL animals. For example, he briefly talked about the abuse that migrant workers in slaughterhouses go through but in his version of a "humane economy," those people would simply be pushed to other exploitative and degrading work. Similarly, in the case of companies like Nestle which he talked quite a bit about, even if they somehow stopped producing all animal products, they are still a multinational corporation that greatly impacts wildlife habitats and exploits humans and nature at an incredibly frightening degree. A capitalist food system and economy will never be a “humane” one.
I do appreciate the lengths that the author and MFA have gone to to protect farm animals and doing what they can, but I think so many more things in this book needed to be discussed that were just left out. I think we have similar intent but a very different path and end goal so this book was not my cup of tea.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty and Animal death
heatherr's review
I've had this book on my Audible wishlist for a while but hadn't gotten around to it. I'm glad I finally started to listen to it. I was surprised when it opened with a story of a stealth rescue of chickens from Buckeye Egg Farm in Croton Ohio. At the time of the story I was living in the area and driving past there a lot. The place was hugely hated because of its affects on the people living around it. There would be hoards of flies every summer. The smell was awful and all the groundwater was contaminated from the feces.
Mercy for Animals was started by Nathan Runkle as a teenager and has grown into a huge voice in the animal welfare community. They have sponsored a lot of undercover investigations into abuses at factory farms. The undercover investigators are tough. I couldn't work in slaughterhouses or factory farms for months on end to document abuses. Sadly, it is getting harder to do this kind of work because of agriculture protection laws that punish investigators more than the people perpetrating the abuse.
This was a tough book to listen to because of the abuse that it details. I took a few breaks from it to listen to other books for a day or two.
The last section of the book discusses how technology might help solve the problems. Companies that make plant-based meat substitutes like Beyond Beef are profiled in addition to companies making meat out of animal stem cells. This will allow people to eat meat with any animals being slaughtered. It was nice that this book ended on an uplifting note after all the horrors that came before. This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story
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