Bender Week 6

I found many logical fallacies in chapter five of Eating Animals. I would not have known what a logical fallacy was without Heinrichs pointing it out to me.  Now I can find many logical fallacies everyday and can spot and identify them. I spotted two logical fallacies that stood out to me that Foer put to use.

 The first use of a fallacy was false comparison. In the chapter he starts with saying that there is going to a pandemic soon. By using the word wil,l he is making it real and relevant to the audience. He then connects the wide spread illness with the treatment of animals. He is basically saying that because we treat animals wrongly in factory farms, we are all going to die of influenza. He does not exactly come out and say this, but he suggests it by starting with the threat of the influenza and transitioning right into the death of chickens.

The second logical fallacy I found was Foer using exaggerated information to appeal to the audience’s emotion. While describing the way the chickens die, he says that the immigrant workers become injured from breaking the birds’ necks. Yes, some workers are immigrants and may injure themselves, but there are most likely a large group of workers who are perfectly fine. He does not use percentages or numbers to give proof of how many workers get hurt, he just gives one example to prove his point. He connects emotional to this exaggeration of employee well being by making the audience feel sorry for workers’ conditions. This is a very dramatic chapter that Foer uses to grab in the readers and change their minds to think more like his.