Deconstructing a Review of The Compassionate Carnivore

I guess I’m going to have to buy The Compassionate Carnivore and review it myself rather than continue to write about what a ridiculous notion it is and how delusional its author, Catherine Friend, is. I’ll purchase it from Amazon, as authors get a minuscule amount of cash for each book sale, and I shudder at the thought of Friend profiting in yet another way from the exploitation and slaughter of sentient nonhumans. Maybe I’ll read it at Barnes & Noble. I’ve never done that, but certainly plenty of people do, and now that bookstores have designed their spaces as reading-friendly, I assume no one would mind if I spent a morning reading an entire book that I don’t want to purchase.

Roger Yates directed me to "How to Love Animals and Eat Them, by Tim Lott in the UK’s Telegraph. Though deconstructing a review is a bit odd, there are a couple of points that are worth raising until I’m able to take notes on the actual text.

• I must admit to a juvenile satisfaction upon reading: "Anyone expecting a philosophical treatise will be disappointed. Friend’s writing style is hokey and sentimental with lots of exclamation marks and use of the vernacular – ‘whoa!’ ‘nope!’ ‘oooh’."
• "Central to her argument is that vegetarians do nothing to help animals because by ‘leaving the table’ they do nothing to ensure that the inhumane, non-sustainable factory farming of the big meat producers can be ameliorated by small farmers like herself." The book is a 300-page advertisement for exploiting and slaughtering sentient nonhumans. Whether the way she exploits and slaughters them is different from the way things are done in a factory farm is irrelevant to me. By leaving the table, contrary to what Friend apparently thinks, I’m saying no to "big meat producers" and Friend. I’m doing far more for animals than she is. In fact, she treats animals as commodities "produced" for profit and other gain (her palate–she likes to eat them), just like Jim Perdue. Catherine Friend=Jim Perdue in the only way that matters; she uses and kills them and doesn’t need to.
• Lott for some reason calls Friend "admirably practical in achieving her goal (although purists might also see her as conveniently flexible in her principles). To be a compassionate carnivore, you don’t have to cut out factory-farmed meat, you don’t have to eat organic (her own small farm is humane, but non-organic) you don’t have to shun conventional farming." Friend, therefore, demonstrates the strength of her convictions (that are full of holes) by saying you don’t really have to follow them.
• You all are going to love this next one, and it’s the main reason I want to read the book: "All you have to do is respect animals and be prepared to make a little effort to search for what Friend calls ‘happy meat’." Friend calls it happy meat? That’s a fascinating twist. That’s like a PeTA member calling himself a "new welfarist."
• Here’s where it gets a bit scary. Friend admits that the suffering of animals cannot be eliminated (because she isn’t considering eliminating their suffering by not using them, I assume), and then Lott writes: "It would all sound a bit of a cop-out, if it wasn’t so clear that Friend loves animals so much – to an almost nauseating degree, in fact." No matter what Friend writes in her book, there is a word for people who say one thing but do another: hypocrite.
• Lott writes: "She squares this to herself by two not entirely rigorous arguments. First, she likes meat so why shouldn’t she eat it? Second, so long as the animal lives a reasonably healthy and enjoyable life no moral law is being contravened." Ah, we finally get to the crux of the matter. She likes the taste of the flesh and secretions of sentient nonhumans, and she’s going to say and do whatever is necessary to make it all okay. I’d like to hear more about her "moral laws" and why what she does is acceptable. I suppose though she won’t use the word, speciesism is the answer.
• The other reason I want to read the book is that Lott refers to Friend’s suggestion to "cultivate some sense of sacredness about the animals you eat." I look forward to Friend invoking sacredness while she’s writing about the unnecessary slaughter of beings she claims to love.

My brain hurts thinking about what Friend must go through each day. All of the cognitive dissonance. All of the lies. All of the rationalization. If she really respected the lives of the animals, she wouldn’t have to write a 300 page defense. She’d just stop using and eating them, and her actions would speak for themselves.