Jacob Hickey
English 110-H4
Professor Miller
Animals Like Us Journal
In today’s culture being a vegetarian is common, it is a fad or trend, if you will. Health and providing nutritious food for one’s body is increasing with outlets such as television commercials, magazines, and online stores taking aim to provide people with “healthy alternatives”. People are having trouble deciding between taking this route of living a healthier life, versus satisfying the wants of fast food and common meals such as Mcdonald’s cheeseburgers, Wendy’s fried chicken, and eating a Stadium hotdog. Then comes into context the morality of eating other animals. Many in today’s society are increasingly having trouble consuming many common creatures such as cows, pigs, duck, and chicken. However, that yummy, juicy, medium-well hamburger still calls everyone’s name now and then because of our culture. We live in a fast food and junk food world where we are constantly bombarded by signs and advertisements of McDonald’s and Burger King. Some people are better blocking out this noise than others and some are having trouble deciding whether to go the ethical, not eating meat or animals route, versus eating that juicy burger or piece of meat.
Humans are often egocentric beings. People are groomed and cultured to feel as though they are better than other animals we share this earth with. Many individuals can learn about themselves by meeting animals and being with them. I personally know many people that are with animals a lot who find it horrific that people eat them and thus go the vegetarian route because they can not fathom eating and killing these animals. In their opinion, they view people as no different from other animals, we all share oxygen and the great things earth has to offer. The only difference, in my opinion is that we have higher mental functions and abilities than other animals. Other than that, I feel we are all the same. However, a majority of people in the world, especially this culture, view themselves as better than animals and they justify this by eating them, including myself. Wallace provides examples of this when he describes people eating lobster, “A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle” (502). Personally, I am a sucker, now and then, for a great steak, chicken breast, or lobster as Judith Black was as described by Herzog, “Within a week, she was chowing down on cheeseburgers” (Herzog). People are omnivores who are built to eat meat which is why we have such a tough time staying away from it.
Hal Herzog in his passage, “Animals Like Us”, shares the experiences of being a vegetarian and what it is like in the view of Judith Black, who is the person being highlighted in this passage. Black viewed herself as a vegetarian even though she still consumed fish. Her husband, Joseph, tried to convince her, “there is not a shred of moral difference between eating a Cornish hen and eating a Chilean sea bass” (Herzog). This is interesting to note because David Foster Wallace in his own essay, “Consider the Lobster”, described the horrific and gruesome way in which lobsters are cooked such as this example, “the immersed lobster suffers from slow suffocation, although usually not decisive enough suffocation to keep it from still thrashing”, this sentence alone would make many readers think twice before they ate another lobster (507). In both writings, they consider sea life to be the same as other animals. In my opinion, they are viewed differently by many people because many lack arms, hands, legs, and feet, which are what many psychologically consider to be animals, like us. In the case of Judith, fish did not feel like animals as Herzog writes, “ While it is obvious that dogs and cats and cows and pigs are animals, it was equally clear to Judith that fish were not” (Herzog). This differs immensely from Wallace’s essay in which he makes the reader feel at times as if you are putting one of your loved one’s in a pot of boiling water, making the reader feel incredibly guilty for ever cooking or eating any type of animal as he describes, “lobsters boiled incrementally often display a whole bonus set of gruesome, convulsion-like reactions that you don’t see in regular boiling” (507). I know people who do it this way and learning how much lobsters suffer from Wallace would make me never want to cook lobster in this way.
