I can’t help wondering if we’ve evolved somehow to feel this way about dogs. Over the long haul, they have been far more useful to us alive than dead–as guards, herders, hunters, and even burden-carriers such as sled dogs. And unlike some other animals, they tend to continue growing in usefulness as they can learn and develop experience even into their old age. Cattle are useful to us both alive (as beasts of burden and givers of milk) and dead, as meat. Same goes for sheep and chickens, which when alive provide wool or eggs, and when dead provide meat. I don’t know what useful tasks pigs can perform aside from, maybe, sniffing out truffles. Horses were killed and eaten in many countries in Europe right up into the twentieth century.

I think what will serve us better than eating our pets is trying to find more sensible ways of raising and consuming the animals we do eat as meat. Our approach to rearing cattle is absurd–we feed them grain (which we could eat ourselves) when what they actually need to eat is grass, which we can’t eat. Our chicken and pig farms, and our slaughterhouses, are barbaric in their cruelty. We’ve turned the production of our meat animals into an industrial operation. It’s wasteful, it’s harmful, and it diminishes us as human beings. If these books can shock us into thinking and acting more sensibly, then maybe we should read them.