Books: Why caring about animals benefits humans

Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. Bill Wasik: It really is a remarkable transformation during just a few decades where around the time of the Civil War—I guess this transformation begins in the kind of 1840s and 1850—you have the Midwestern producers start raising the animals and then shipping them by rail to various population hubs to be slaughtered locally. I was really struck by how this whole period sets up this dichotomy we still live with, where we’re incredibly devoted, maybe too devoted, to our pets, interested at least in some forms of wild animals like polar bears and elephants, and then mostly we just shut out thinking about the livestock that we consume. I mean, one of the things we talk about in the conclusion to the book is that one of the problems of caring about, for example, food animals, is that it isn’t just that they’re at a distance from us, but also the relationship between, say, our consumption—the things we spend money on—and how they’re treated is also just crazily mediated and systemic. And I think that climate change, of course, kind of looms over everything about animal treatment because one of the big important reasons that we need to think differently about food animals is not just their welfare, but also the fact that they are just an incredible source of carbon emissions, and that reducing our reliance on animal products will wind up being really, really important to getting to a sustainable future.