All You Can Meat Reference Buffet | Situating the Global Environment

My key references for my thesis fall into roughly 4 categories: animal minds, animal ethics, the ?meat paradox,? and what it means to be human/animal

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Animal Minds

The first step in making most ethical arguments about the treatment of animals is determining which mental capacities they have. Can animals feel pain? Are they minded? How do we know? My thesis engages with work from both cognitive ethology and philosophy to answer these questions. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy pages on ?Animal Cognition? and ?Animal Consciousness? give a concise summary of arguments for the mindedness of animals that references many of the seminal works in both philosophy and biology that have contributed to animal cognition. Marc Bekoff, Collin Allen, and Richard Burghardt, a few ethologists who is very receptive (at least compared to their fellow biologists) to the idea of animal minds, edited an excellent anthology called The Cognitive Animal. The collection cites papers on language-like communication in prairie dogs, honey bee communication, and Betty the crow who bent a wire to reach food.

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Animal Ethics

Peter Singer?s Animal Liberation?(1975) earned animal welfare its current position in ethical philosophy. Since then, a number of philosophers have jumped on the band wagon making a variety of arguments for improving the welfare of animals in the meat industry, fur industry, animals used in experimentation, and companion animals. The Animal Ethics Reader edited by Susan J Armstrong and Richard George Botzler contains excerpts of classics from Singer, Regan, and Carol Adams as well as more recent work.? Bernard Rollin is another philosopher central to my project because his conception of animal ethics seeks to unite instrumental interests, normative theory, and animal science in what I consider to be a well-rounded approach to animal welfare. My thesis also asks a meta-question about how a normative claim about meat-eating is effected, if at all, by empirical claims (that will come out of my focus groups.) This is all very new territory for me, so I am using Knobe and Nichols anthology on Experimental Philosophy as a starting point.

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Political Economy of Meat Consumption

The fetishism of meat is the groundwork from which the ?meat paradox? grew. Lee and Heinz, in ?Getting down to the meat: The symbolic construction of meat consumption? (darn?they beat me to my creative title!) (2009), argue that the production process involved in industrial meat removes the animal from its origins, thus silencing its suffering. The production process to which they refer is known as ?Industrial Farm Animal Production (IFAP)? The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production published a thorough report on industrial meat production in America in 2008 that will serve as foregrounding for my normative argument.

The empirical portion of my thesis draws on prior research on the ?meat paradox,? which mostly comes out of psychology. Guenther, Jenesen, et. al. (2005) and Loughnan, Haslam, and Bastian (2010) are significant contributions, as is Driscoll?s (1995) study of attitudes towards animals, which I will be utilizing in my focus groups in order to find patterns between capacity attributions to animals, consumption patterns, and reflectivity around consumption practices.

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What it means to be human/animal

Whenever I am in need of some more inspiration for my thesis, I return to the ?Science? section of the New York Times that was dedicated entirely to animals last March. Natalie Angiers wrote about our ?Creature Connection,? which has been a hot topic lately and a subject of interdisciplinary interest. The mindedness and naturalness of animals challenge our conceptions of what it means to be minded, natural, human, or animal. Harriet Ritvo, in On the Animal Turn, argues that pointing out that humans are animals paradoxically reinforces boundaries between humans and animals that this type of statement is meant to dissolve (2007). Her piece is a nice summary of the trends popping up around animal studies, a subject which I hope my thesis both contributes to and draws on.

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References

?Animal Cognition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)?, n.d. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/.

?Animal Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)?, n.d. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/.

Armstrong, Susan J.? and Richard George Botzler. ?The Animal Ethics Reader.?

Bekoff, Marc, Collin Allen, and Richard Burghardt. The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition.

Bernard E. Rollin. Putting the Horse Before Descartes: My Life?s Work on Behalf of Animals. Philadelphia: Templet University Press, 2011.

Driscoll, Janis Wiley . ?Attitudes Toward Animals: Species Ratings.? Society and Animals 3, no. 2 (1995): 139-150.

Guenther, Patricia and Helen Jensen. ?Sociodemographic, Knowledge, and Attitudinal Factors Related to Meat Consumption in the United States.? Journal of the American Dietic Association 105, no. 8 (2005): 86-99.

Heinz, Bettina and Richard Lee. Getting down to the Meat: The Symbolic Construction of Meat Consumption ? Communication Studies ? Volume 49, Issue 1?, n.d. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10510979809368520.

Knobe, Joshua, and Nichols, Shaun. Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Loughnan, Steve , Nick Haslam, and Brock Bastian. ?The Role of Meat Consumption in the Denial of Moral Status and Mind to Meat Animals.? Elsevier (2010): 156-159.

Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: HarperCollins, 1975.

?PCIFAPSmry.pdf?, n.d. http://www.ncifap.org/bin/s/a/PCIFAPSmry.pdf.

About the author

Source: https://sge.lclark.edu/2012/02/02/all-you-can-meat-reference-buffet/

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