Meat Market : Animals, Ethics, and Money
by
Erik Marcus
A Favorite of 2,
Read by 6,
Owned by 9,
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Meat Market elevates the debate over animal agriculture. Erik Marcus exposes and clears away the exaggerated claims and counterclaims put forth by the meat industry and its opponents. In the process, Marcus presents a thorough examination of animal agriculture
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First of all, did you know we killed 10 BILLION animals in the US alone last year? Yikes. That number always blows me away…
Erik's thesis: There are a lot of compelling reasons to become vegetarian/vegan. The three major ones: nutrition reasons, environmental reasons & ethical reasons. His focus is on (and he thinks animal's rights activists' focus should be on) the ethics issue.
His big point: Our farms aren't what they used to be and animals are not treated the way they used to be treated. We now have factory farms. Animals are now commodities–not a whole lot different than scrap metal. The definition of a commodity is that it is essentially undifferentiated, meaning that, as a consumer, I'm just gonna buy the cheapest version of it. Now, if I'm the producer of these commodities, that means that I'm competing to deliver the cheapest price possible–and I'm constantly trying to shave a penny here and a penny there. If I fail to find ways to cut costs, I'll simply be driven out of business by my competitors who do find ways…
That's cool with scrap metal but when you cut costs in the production of animals, you're doing so at the great expense of animal welfare.
Imagine what happens when you commoditize and demand the reduction of cost to the production of animals, specifically to eggs as an example: Now, if my competitors can deliver an egg for less than 10 cents, I better be able to do the same thing. The only way I can do that is to pack as many chickens into the smallest space as possible requiring as little human labor as possible. Among the things you get in this scenario are chickens getting their beeks burned off so they won't peck at themselves and other chickens once they're put into battery cages so small they can never flap their wings their entire lives. Apply it to pigs and you get things like castration without anesthesia so you can save a few cents per, and real pleasant stuff like that.
I fundamentally believe that if more people had more awareness, they would, as consumers, DEMAND more humane treatment and be willing to pay more for that. This book is a step in that direction.