Shepherd-Week 6

In chapter four (“Hiding/Seeking”) or five (“Influence/Speechlessness”) of Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer I cannot seem to find any places where Foer uses a fallacy himself. However, I did find a place where instead of using the fallacy, he points out how the appeal to popularity fallacy was used and how it thus caused the factory-farming craze, as we know it today. Essentially giving us another example of this “bandwagon” fallacy in addition to the one we have already received from Heinrichs in Thank You for Arguing. The bandwagon fallacy most commonly appears in arguments from children. The “Everybody else het to do it so why can’t I?” is a well know example. The example Foer is giving happens in “The First Factory Farmer” section. He explains about how this woman, Celia Steele, accidentally ordered 500 instead of 50 chicks and began experiments with them to see how many she could keep alive while still maintaining an income. What was the “price break point” you might say. He goes on to say how it was the combination of this discovery and a rise in technology that made everyone hop on this particular bandwagon of not caring as individually for the chickens anymore but instead pushing for more and more profit with lower input.