Animals in Human Societies- The Brock Review

A special issue of the open-access interdisciplinary academic journal The Brock Review came out this weekend. It has a number of really interesting articles on a range of subjects relating to the subject of animals in human societies. I have not yet gotten to read all of the articles yet, but I am excited to sit down and read through the bunch.

You can read Animals in Human Societies here. And I happen to have an article on ‘happy meat’ in this one.

The article on happy meat came out of my MA thesis that looked at ‘humane slaughter’ practices in the alternative meat industry. There is, quite appropriately, a lot of focus on the horrors of the industrialized meat industry and factory farming. For my thesis, I wanted to critically analyze the ‘small-scale local’ alternative to this industry. One point of particular interest (not addressed in this article) is the movement of some long-time vegetarians back to eating meat because they think they can do it ‘humanely’ via the locavore movement. I wanted to begin to debunk the idea that ‘humanely raised/slaughtered’ animals on small-scale farms were an ethical choice. Further, many consumers claim to be more ‘connected’ to animals who are raised in these alternative settings, and so this article attempts to address the issue of connection in three ways and argues that really these forms of ‘connection’ are, in fact, all ways to disconnect from the animals who are killed for food. I’d love to hear any thoughts on this topic!

I’ve got a busy and adventurous day planned today, so stay tuned for a report on some potentially good vegan eats later on.