A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Animals

  • Friday links

    – Chris Hayes: Postcard from Palestine – Endangered red wolves being hunted to extinction – Tea partiers fantasize about a “constitutionally pure” government – Jean Kazez on Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape – On not really believing in heaven – Corporations gain privacy rights as people lose them – Soldiers against torture – A Read more

  • Ethics and isolation

    Scu at Critical Animal has interesting take on the Anthony Bourdain-Jonathan Safran Foer debate I posted about last week. One of Bourdain’s arguments (which echoes an argument made by Michael Pollan, among others) is that embracing vegetarianism alienates you from human community. As Scu points out, however, sometimes this is a good thing. Not to Read more

  • Religion and animals reading list

    I received an e-mail alerting me to this list of books dealing with animals and religion. I’m not precisely sure why it’s on the site that it is (a site dedicated to online education programs), but it’s a good list. In fact, I’m adding Laura Hobgood-Oster’s The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals–a Read more

  • Jonathan Safran Foer keeps it real

    One thing that Eating Animals author Jonathan Safran Foer does really well in this debate about vegetarianism with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain is to keep bringing the discussion back down to earth from Bourdain’s hyper-idealized view of meat-eating. Safran Foer’s not interested in arguing that meat-eating is always, everywhere, and under any conceivable circumstances wrong; Read more

  • “Self-awareness is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon”

    From Wired, a report of laboratory monkeys (rhesus macaques, to be specific) that have shown signs of self-recognition (and thus potentially self-awareness): In the lab of University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Luis Populin, five rhesus macaques seem to recognize their own reflections in a mirror. Monkeys weren’t supposed to do this. “We thought these subjects didn’t Read more

  • A world without carnivores?

    I meant to link earlier to this piece from the NYT Opinionator blog by philosopher Jeff McMahan. He poses the following question: Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones. Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into Read more

  • On weekday vegetarians, flexitarians, and other part-timers

    A while back I wrote a post about the debate between vegetarians and “conscientious omnivores.” I proposed that this debate was largely irrelevant to the bigger problems that characterize the standard American diet: [T]his is an extremely specialized debate among a very tiny segment of the population. The vast majority of the meat consumed in Read more

  • A very brief argument for animal liberation

    From philosopher Steve Sapontzis: Very briefly, the argument for [animal liberation] runs as follows. Morality is goal-directed activity which aims at making the world a better place in terms of reduced suffering and frustration, increased happiness and fulfilment, a wider reign of fairness and respect for others, and enhanced presence and effectiveness of such virtues Read more

  • Ah the world, oh the whale

    I finished Philip Hoare’s The Whale this weekend, and I highly recommend it. It’s part memoir, part natural history, part literary criticism, part social and cultural analysis, and part mystical meditation. Hoare traces our history with the whale, focusing on the high-tide of the American whaling industry in the 19th century, followed by the more Read more

  • Other nations

    We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals … We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more Read more