Week 4-Shepherd

On chapter 3 the section I choose was the first section called “Animal”. What stuck out to me the most was the description of the words on the first page. Foer talks about the “slipperiness” of the words used for marketing food; words such as veal, free-range, happy and natural. How those words describe what the consumer wants to hear and be reminded of, those quaint little family farms of days gone by and not the factory farms that exist today. Reading that reminded me of my senior year high school AP Environmental Science teacher that taught us to only eat things that say organic or free-range or grass-fed because it meant that the animals were likely better treated than those on farms where they are mass-produced, so to speak. Now knowing that those “better treated” animals are hardly treated with more respect than the original way, it makes me feel better about buying what I have not what may have been the best option for the animal. However in contrast to that Foer also defines an animal as a “word to signify all creatures…except humans”. What strikes me a disconcerting is that even the Bible, one of the oldest books of all time, and which talk frequently of all the creatures on this planet, doesn’t even have a word equivalent to that of animal. It really makes one think about how we classify animals and why we choose to elevate ourselves above the rest and decided that they were acceptable to eat and treat like dirt.