Names the belief system that enables people to love some animals while eating others carnism, and explains how invisibility, justification, and objectification obstruct empathy and choice.

Foreword

(A foreword by John Robbins, writer and environmental/animal rights activist, son of Irma Robbins, one of Baskin-Robbins’s cofounders. —ak)

Most people love pets such as dogs and cats as family, yet treat other animals as dinner and abuse them. Every US state has animal laws, but livestock receive markedly different treatment. Deceptive advertising for factory farming abounds.

This book clearly explains that contradiction and the system rationalizing it. We must restore our relationships with all animals. This concerns human responsibility as well as animal rights. Gandhi said a nation’s greatness can be judged by its treatment of animals. He would have liked this book.

Chapter 1. To love or to eat?

Chapter 1 opens with an imagined dinner. A friend invites you over and serves delicious stew. Asked for the secret, your friend says it contains dog meat, not beef. Your appetite vanishes and disgust sets in. Your friend quickly says it was a joke: it really is beef. But the disgust does not completely disappear. Only the meat’s identity changed from beef to dog—what happened?

We react differently to dog meat and beef not because of physical differences in the meat but because of differences in our perception of it.

The problem with eating dogs

A shift in perception is so powerful because perception substantially defines our reality. How we perceive something determines our thoughts and feelings, which in turn determine behavior. Many people react differently to dog meat and beef because they perceive dogs and cows differently.

We encounter cows almost only when eating or wearing them. Our relationships with dogs are entirely different: we name them, play and sleep with them, buy gifts, take them to hospital when sick, and bury them when they die. We love dogs and eat cows because of differences in perception, not fundamental differences between them.

Culture also shapes perception. Hindus, for example, would probably react to beef as Americans react to dog meat. This difference comes from our psychological schemas: mental ‘frameworks’ formed through interactions with beliefs, ideas, perceptions, and experiences. Schemas automatically interpret and organize incoming information.

Hearing ‘nurse,’ most people imagine a woman, because their schema contains a generalized image of nurses. Schemas are mental classification systems, and we have them for every topic. We classify animals as predators, prey, pests, pets, food, and so on, determining our relationships with them.

Other classifications sometimes overlap, but with ‘meat,’ most animals are either food or not food. Encountering meat from a nonfood animal evokes the living animal and disgust at eating them.

Schematically, perception proceeds like this:

Dog meat (stimulus)
Inedible animal (belief/perception)
Mental image of a living dog (thought)
Disgust (emotion)
Rejection (behavior).

This is cyclical. Beliefs guide behavior, which reinforces beliefs. Not eating dogs while eating cows strengthens the belief that dogs are inedible and cows edible.

Acquired taste (sidebar)

Taste has innate elements but is largely learned. Nevertheless, people rationalize their tastes and find departures disgusting. Some cultures find eggs disgusting as chickens’ ova. We find eating fried tarantulas in Cambodia disgusting.

The missing link

Why do we classify only some animals as edible?

The criterion is absence of disgust, which research suggests is largely learned. A highly organized belief system teaches us “not to feel,” resulting in lost empathy.

From empathy to apathy

Why block empathy? Most people do not want to cause animals pain, yet eat them. This inconsistency between values and behavior creates moral discomfort. Three choices can avoid it:

Change values
Change behavior
Change perception

Meat schemas concern the third choice. Distorting perception through psychological schemas reduces discomfort enough to permit eating meat. The first tool is psychic numbing, which is not inherently bad: it helps us endure a violent world. But numbing that enables violence is problematic.

Various psychological mechanisms enable psychic numbing:

Denial
Avoidance
Routinization
Justification
Objectification
Deindividualization
Dichotomization
Rationalization
Dissociation

Later chapters explore examples and unpack how this belief system operates.

Its first defense is invisibility. Hidden abuse lets us eat meat without imagining living animals, safely insulated from the disturbing process of raising and killing them. The first step in dismantling meat-eating is dismantling the system’s invisibility and exposing it.

(Carol J. Adams argues in The sexual politics of meat that meat-eating contains a patriarchal attitude: ends justify means, objectifying others is essential to life, and violence can and should be hidden. This connects well with this book’s “system.” —ak)

Chapter 2. Carnism: “It’s just the way things are”

Dogs evoke words like loving, intelligent, cute, and loyal. Pigs evoke wet, dirty, stupid, lazy, fat, and ugly.

Asked why they think this way, most cannot explain. Asked why they eat pigs, they often say, “That’s just how things are.”

Our meat-eating leads to ten billion land animals slaughtered annually in the US alone. If our best reason is “that’s just how things are,” something is seriously wrong. The author attributes countless people’s thoughtless meat-eating to carnism.

Carnism

Many vegetarians eat vegetarian for ethical reasons, and most people have feelings about vegetarians. Occasional vegetarian film or TV characters reflect these stereotypes. We call people eating vegetarian for ethical reasons vegetarians or vegans. What do we call people who consider eating meat ethically justified?

We call them meat eaters, but is that right? We do not call vegetarians “plant eaters,” because vegetarianism is a belief system. “Meat eater” suggests meat-eating is unrelated to beliefs, obscuring its underlying belief system.

The author names this hidden system carnism: believing eating animals is ethically justified. Carnivorous animals must eat meat to survive biologically; human carnists need not. Unlike “meat eater” or “carnivore,” carnism conveys a philosophical choice, not merely a biological characteristic.

Vegetarianism is visible, but carnism is invisible, hard even to recognize as a belief or philosophical position. Why is it invisible? Why did it lack a name? It is not merely a belief system but an ideology, specifically an unusual kind resistant to scrutiny.

Carnism, ideology, and the status quo

An ideology is shared beliefs and the practices based on them. Feminism, for example, shares the belief that women and men ought to be equal. It is easy to understand feminism or vegetarianism as ideologies.

But where do the beliefs of “everyone else,” ‘normal’ people, come from? Believing sexism or meat-eating is justified? “Normal” simply means beliefs and behavior followed by the majority. Before the Scientific Revolution, geocentrism was “normal,” and challenging it could cost your life. Mainstream thinking is simply ideology so pervasive it seems common sense or fact. This explains carnism’s lack of a name.

Entrenched ideologies become invisible. Patriarchy is a prime example: masculinity is worth more than femininity, so men have greater social power. It existed for millennia before feminists named it.

Vegetarian ideology has long been visible and named: Pythagoreanism 2,500 years ago, vegetarianism since the nineteenth century. Departures from the mainstream stand out.

Carnism was named only recently for several reasons. The best way to keep an ideology entrenched is invisibility, best maintained through namelessness. Without a name, we cannot discuss it; without discussing it, we cannot question it. It remained unnamed because invisibility prevented recognition, while actively pursuing namelessness to remain invisible.

Carnism, ideology, and violence

Invisible ideologies are hard to question, especially those actively hiding themselves like carnism. The author calls these violent ideologies because they depend on actual physical violence.

Remove that violence—stop killing animals—and the system cannot exist. There is no meat without slaughter.

(Carnism depends on killing animals, yet actively conceals both animals and slaughter, showing only ‘meat.’ Animals must exist for meat to exist, but for meat to exist, animals must die, be dismembered, and cease to exist: a contradictory relationship. Carol J. Adams uses the absent referent in The sexual politics of meat to describe it. —ak)

Modern carnism rests on enormous violence sustaining meat-industry profits, so violent most people do not want to witness it. People connect with other sentient beings. Even without being animal lovers, most do not want animals to suffer. Carnism therefore has defenses to make these people support meat-eating.

Unnatural born killers (sidebar)

Records of the Napoleonic Wars, American Civil War, World War I, and World War II show soldiers taking various measures to avoid killing enemies, such as firing into the air. Research suggests training is needed to sufficiently desensitize soldiers to killing.

Chapter 3. The way things really are

If you are an average American, you eat meat daily. Ten billion land animals are slaughtered annually in the United States alone: 307 per second. Annual US livestock-industry revenue is about $125 billion. (130 trillion won, about 30% of Korea’s 2019 national budget. —ak)

Where are all these animals?

Where are the animals?

Nearly all livestock are born in factory farms and remain confined until just before death. The sole design criterion is minimum investment, maximum profit. From a business perspective, animal welfare is an obstacle. Factory farming is the most inhumane system in human history.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

Denial is the most effective way to distort reality; invisibility is the most effective denial. Chapter 2 examined symbolic invisibility, enabled by avoidance, a form of denial.

Chapter 3 examines practical invisibility. Without knowing reality, we cannot penetrate carnism’s defenses. Farms are remote, entry prohibited, buildings nearly windowless, trucks often unmarked. We cannot actually see the system, because it actively prevents us.

(The book describes the abuse and deaths of pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, and others; I omit those passages. For details, I recommend the free film Dominion. —ak)

Pigs: More intelligent than dogs, highly social and friendly. Describes their ‘processing’ from birth through slaughter into market ‘products,’ and the suffering involved.
Cattle (for meat): Describes their suffering through Michael Pollan’s account of ‘steer 534,’ whose life he followed while writing The omnivore’s dilemma.
Chickens and turkeys (for meat): We consider birds stupid, but research shows intelligence and sociability. (The author keeps emphasizing intelligence because our prejudices reinforce carnism’s justification. —ak)
Chickens (for eggs): Male chicks are ground to death; females spend their lives laying in cramped cages. Genetically modified to lay ten times as many eggs, they suffer various health problems and die.
Cows (for milk): Injected with genetically engineered growth hormones and forcibly impregnated to ‘produce’ milk. Male calves become veal; females become dairy cows.
Calves (for meat): Males are slaughtered after only 16–18 weeks. Raised with iron deficiency for desirable ‘meat quality,’ they suffer greatly because ‘humane’ electric stunning fails frequently.
Fish and other marine animals (for meat): Carnists often consider fish not animals. Say you eat vegetarian and people ask, “So you only eat fish?” Yet marine animals feel pain and possess intelligence.

The genetics of trauma: Pigs and humans (sidebar)

Human post-traumatic stress disorder and pigs’ porcine stress syndrome appear to share genes, and both are partly heritable. Genetic predisposition and exposure to traumatic experiences matter in pigs as in humans.

They die piece by piece (sidebar)

The author introduces Joby Warrick’s 2001 Washington Post article. Cattle should be killed before ‘processing,’ but production speeds often mean killing is incomplete. They scream, blink, and look around alive as their tails are severed and bellies split.

Can they suffer? (sidebar)

Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth-century utilitarian who advocated animal welfare, acceptance of homosexuality, and women’s suffrage, argued that moral consideration of a being should depend solely on “Can they suffer?”, rather than arbitrary criteria like “Can they speak?” Historically, however, prejudice has held that oppressed groups such as animals and slaves suffer less. Because suffering is subjective, others’ pain has been easily dismissed. Scientific advances now allow objective studies, such as the development of nociceptive pathways in mammals.

(For utilitarianism, see Utilitarianism: A very short introduction. For utilitarian animal liberation, see Animal liberation. For animal consciousness, see Sentience table. —ak)

At death’s door: Nonambulatory animals

(The Korean term for “downer cow” is “anjeunbaengi so,” which seems inappropriate; I substitute a translation of “nonambulatory livestock.” —ak)

Nonambulatory livestock are animals too sick or injured to stand or walk.

They are dragged into slaughterhouses using hooks, chains, and bulldozers. (After the 2004 mad cow disease outbreak, the United States prohibited some nonambulatory animals from human consumption, extending this to all in 2009.)

This unconscionable … torture must stop. Only we can help (sidebar)

If slaughterhouses had glass walls

Sir Paul McCartney said everyone would be vegetarian if slaughterhouses had glass walls, believing truth would stop meat-eating. But we already know meat is animals’ corpses. We simply choose not to know more.

All violent ideologies are similar: “knowing without knowing.” An implicit “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” contract exists between producers and consumers. They tell us not to look; we turn away.

We simultaneously want freedom to make informed decisions as free thinkers and active consumers. This is impossible if we do not even realize we are making a choice. True freedom of choice requires knowing reality.

Chapter 4. Collateral damage: The other casualties of carnism

Collateral victims are livestock-industry workers, residents near polluted sites, meat consumers, and taxpayers: carnism’s other victims are humans. Its harms return as health problems, environmental destruction, and taxes.

Workers spend most of their working hours without respite in toxic environments, suffering physical injuries, respiratory disease, reproductive-system disease, and brain disease, without adequate welfare benefits. Nearby residents encounter toxic waste, suffering miscarriages, infections, and other illnesses.

Meat consumers unknowingly ingest pollutants. Meat retains hormones, antibiotics, toxic herbicides, and potentially dangerous bacteria and viruses.

(For whistleblowing on government collusion with medicine, pharmaceuticals, dairy, and livestock industries, see Part IV of The China Study. —ak)

How safe are we?

In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed sanitation and safety problems in meat distribution.

Public outrage prompted legislation. Few know it is not properly enforced. Faster production lines and insufficient federal inspectors have instead worsened conditions.

Infection, inspection, and the USDA

The 1906 legislation required USDA inspectors to examine animals’ sanitary condition.

But 1980s ‘revisions’ transferred this task to livestock producers. Quality-control standards are excessively lax too: entrusting your wallet to a thief.

Human animals in slaughterhouses

Many slaughterhouse workers are undocumented Latin American and Asian immigrants, working with little training in poor conditions.

Slaughterhouse work ranks among the United States’s most dangerous jobs. Workers wear hockey masks, for example, because kicks from animals slaughtered while still alive frequently break teeth.

Learned slaughterers

Workers do not enter slaughterhouses because they are evil; working there desensitizes them to violence.

Violent acts exposed by animal rights activists show serious trauma, rather than that workers are demons.

Our planet, ourselves

Even outside the industry, no one escapes carnism’s harms. Livestock farming is a major cause of every serious form of environmental destruction:

Air and water pollution
Biodiversity destruction
Soil pollution
Deforestation
Greenhouse gas emissions
Depletion of drinking water

Democracy or meatocracy?

Violent ideologies, sustained through deception, secrecy, concentrated power, and coercion, are inherently incompatible with a free society. Even if a larger system such as a state appears democratic, it cannot be so while harboring violent ideologies.

In a democracy, government makes and enforces policies for citizens’ interests. Excessively concentrated power corrupts democracy. A few companies dominate America’s $125 billion livestock industry, and their owners’ power is closely intertwined with government.

How government and business intertwine

Government and business intertwine in various ways.

Revolving doors: Officials and corporate executives exchange positions.
Corporate political funding and lobbying. They are not just above the law; they shape it to their liking.

Warning: Meat-eating may harm your health

Cigarette packaging carries health warnings, yet meat packaging has none, although meat-eating is far more harmful than smoking. Imagine buying hot dogs with this warning:

Warning: Eating meat increases your risk of death from heart disease by 50%, and your risk of colon cancer by 300% (passage omitted).

Chapter 5. The mythology of meat: Justifying carnism

Invisibility is a major feature of violent ideology. Chapters 3 and 4 exposed symbolic and tangible aspects; Chapter 5 examines justification, replacing meat’s reality with mythology.

At petting zoos, children and adults want to connect with animals, and animals approach and connect with humans. This desire seems almost instinctive. Yet people see no problem with eating meat. Where has empathy gone?

The three Ns of justification

Eating meat against our instincts requires thorough justification. The interconnected myths enabling it are what Melanie Joy calls the three Ns of justification.

Eating meat is normal.
Eating meat is natural.
Eating meat is necessary.

These justifications have supported every exploitative system, including slavery and the Holocaust.

(Chapter 1 of How to create a vegan world adds “nice,” calling them the four Ns of justification. —ak)

While an ideology works, the three Ns go unquestioned; looking back after its collapse, they seem ridiculous. Early twentieth-century debates on women’s suffrage illustrate this. Male legislators said restricting votes to men fulfilled the founders’ intentions, and women’s voting would irreparably damage the nation … bringing catastrophe. (See Minnesota House of Representatives on equal suffrage. —ak)

The three Ns penetrate social consciousness so deeply they guide behavior before thought. As mental/emotional blinders, they conceal the gap between beliefs and actions; if we notice it, they explain it away.

Introducing the mythmakers

Although falsehoods form our psychological/emotional safety net, concealing truth requires continual energy. ‘Mythmakers’ throughout society continually feed us information reinforcing the three Ns.

Mythmakers are society’s foundational systems and their representatives: associations and experts in medicine, health, education, and more. Some pose as reasonable moderates, making our reasonable claims look “extreme and irrational,” such as veterinarians criticizing factory farming while continuing to eat meat.

Experts also sustain violent ideologies by pathologizing opposition: defining rejection of meat as an eating disorder symptom or warning of meatless diets’ dangers against established evidence. In a sense, they too may be victims raised within and shaped by carnism.

Others, including industry representatives, actively and deliberately make myths. One example is the alliance between the American Dietetic Association and National Dairy Council. The ADA accredits universities awarding nutrition degrees; the NDC is its leading corporate sponsor.

Mythmakers mainly maintain inherited myths rather than create them: many meat myths have existed for ages. The system resembles a bee colony, persisting even as individual bees die.

Questioning authority (sidebar)

Introduces Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. Forty male participants act as “teachers,” administering shocks to actors playing “students” under an “expert’s” instructions. Teachers believe the shocks are real. Despite distress, most administer extreme (fake) shocks as instructed. Two exceptions mattered: 1) obedience fell when the “expert” was not seen as expert; 2) without the expert in the room, participants deceived them to avoid administering shocks. Put differently, an “expert” appearing on the TV in our “living room” saying “milk is good” may be difficult to resist.

(Unfortunately, Milgram’s experiment faces reproducibility concerns, and Gina Perry even argues he may have manipulated data. —ak)

The stamp of approval: Legitimation

All myths ultimately aim to legitimate the system. Once an ideology is legitimated, the three Ns are protected by every social institution and take root through every channel. Behavior conforming to it seems legal, rational, and ethical; departures seem illegitimate.

The two most important agents of legitimation are the legal system and news media.

Legislation: Attempts have been made to legislate ideology and enforce compliance. US law classifies beings as persons or property; persons have rights, property does not. Animals lack legal personhood. (Legislative campaigns seek legal rights for animals. See Animal bill of rights. —ak)
News media: Used to maintain carnism’s invisibility and reinforce meat-eating’s justification. One method is omission: not discussing slaughter. Another is prohibition: in 2004, CBS refused a PETA advertisement as violating internal rules.

Occasional media exposures treat reality as isolated exceptions, but abuse in factory farming is routine, not exceptional. News media deliver the three Ns into our living rooms.

Eating meat is normal

Treating an ideology’s tenets as normal normalizes the ideology; tenets become everyday social norms. Norms prescribe, rather than merely describe, exerting power over how we should behave.

Norms keep us on prescribed paths because conformity offers least resistance. They reward compliance and punish deviation. Eating meat is easier than abstaining, both practically and socially.

Eating meat is natural

We consider meat natural because humans have hunted and eaten animals for millions of years. Although hunter-gatherers mainly ate plants, occasional meat-eating is real. But infanticide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are also “natural.” Naturalness and justification are different.

Turning “natural” into “justified” is naturalization. Naturalized tenets seem to follow nature’s (or God’s) laws. (See the naturalistic fallacy. —ak)

History, religion, and science support naturalization.

History supplies selective “facts” demonstrating the ideology existed in the past.
Religion makes the ideology sacred.
Science supplies a biological foundation.

Eating meat is necessary

This connects with the belief that eating meat is natural.

If natural, meat-eating seems a biological imperative without which we cannot survive. This is every violent ideology’s paradox: “Killing is necessary for the greater good. One group must die for another to live.”

The myth of free will

Most Americans reject harming animals, so eating them requires coercion. Effective coercion must appear otherwise, ideally making people believe they act through free will.

We begin eating meat through parents and surroundings long before independent thought, continuing uninterrupted. This is how carnism takes away free will.

Inside the system, we see only through carnistic eyes. Understanding reality requires viewing the system from outside.

Chapter 6. Through the carnistic looking glass: Internalized carnism

Our world resembles The Matrix. Our minds are trapped in carnism’s matrix: living under its coercion rather than as we want, as passive consumers rather than active citizens. We have internalized carnism.

The cognitive trio

Carnism distorts reality so we see pigs as things rather than living beings, abstract groups rather than individuals, and food. The carnistically distorted cognitive trio works in harmony: objectification, deindividualization, and dichotomization.

Objectification: Animals as things

Language enables objectification: “it” rather than “he/she,” beef rather than cow, “something” rather than “someone.” Institutions, legislation, and policy also enable it: treating animals as property to buy and sell (Chapter 5).

Objectification removes meat-eating’s moral discomfort.

Deindividualization: Animals as abstract groups

Deindividualization abstracts individual animals, assuming every group member shares identical traits. Group identity is not inherently bad; seeing animals only as groups is the problem.

(When a politician does wrong, if she is a woman, people say, “I won’t vote for women again,” deindividualizing women. Haters react similarly when a criminal happens to be transgender, an immigrant, or Black. —ak)

Dichotomization: Animals as categories

Dichotomization mentally divides beings into two opposing categories. Categorization is not itself problematic; dichotomies create black-and-white thinking. They rigidly divide the world on inaccurate grounds and assign different values to each side.

(Forcing nondichotomous things into two categories is a false dichotomy; considering those categories opposed is binary opposition. Categorizing humans into gender binaries, Black/white, disabled/“normal,” and setting them against each other is common to the logic of all hatred. —ak)

Believing animal classifications are accurate matters more than their actual accuracy, because dichotomization aims to create enough distance to eat without discomfort. It supports meat-eating’s justification.

Technology, distortion, and distancing

Technology’s role in the cognitive trio is indispensable: making psychological distortion and distancing more effective, deepening the gap between beliefs and behavior as never before.

Distortion and disgust

The cognitive trio distorts animal perception, obstructing identification: finding something of ourselves in others or of them in ourselves. Objectifying and abstracting others obstructs identification and therefore empathy.

Finding commonalities through identification increases empathy, which increases disgust at eating animals.

Disgust at injustice (sidebar)

Recent research (Tsouderos) suggests a relationship between disgust at food and moral disgust at injustice: movements of facial muscles (levator labii), for example, are identical.

Psychological damage control: Disgust and rationalization

Despite many defenses, disgust sometimes penetrates them all. People then attempt rationalization.

Rationalization mentally supplies rational explanations for irrational situations. It works because carnism distorts the world rather than reporting it as it is. The system’s fundamental irrationality makes rationalization easy.

Picking out the dog meat: Disgust and contamination

Disgust has a distinctive psychological property: close association with contamination. If a fly falls into soup, even immediately removing it and scooping out the surrounding soup can leave the whole bowl disgusting, perceived as contaminated.

The dog-meat stew in Chapter 1 may be similar. Briefly believing the meat is dog rather than beef makes the stew seem irreparably contaminated. Unlike a fly, this is ‘imagined’ rather than physical contamination. Disgust has this conceptual quality.

A matrix within a matrix: The carnistic schema

Carnism is psychological as well as social. Its psychological system is an inner matrix within the social carnistic matrix. The author calls it the carnistic schema, comprising the cognitive trio and other mechanisms discussed here.

Psychological schemas automatically classify incoming information, as explained earlier, but also filter which information enters at all. Psychology calls this confirmation bias: selectively accepting schema-congruent information and filtering out the rest.

The carnistic schema lets us readily accept absurd situations and ideas: advertisements with pigs dancing happily over coals saying “Eat me,” or carnists detecting minute differences in vegan foods’ flavors and textures and complaining they taste bad.

The way out: Cracks in the carnistic matrix

In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo:

I am trying to free your mind. But I can only show you the door. Opening it and walking through is up to you.

Our situation is similar, the author says. You read this because you sense something wrong. The book shows the door; opening it and stepping outside carnism’s matrix is our responsibility.

Chapter 7. Bearing witness: From carnism to compassion

Chapter 7 opens by quoting Helmut Kaplan:

Our grandchildren will ask, “Where were you during the animal holocaust? What did you do to stop these terrible crimes? Don’t tell us again that you didn’t know.”

The author tells of Emily, a cow who dramatically escaped just before slaughter while queuing to enter a slaughterhouse in November 1995. Workers searched for lost ‘property,’ but residents hid her and misled police to protect her. Moved by the story, the owner changed his mind and sold Emily for $1. She lived in an animal sanctuary until dying of cancer aged ten.

Before escaping, Emily was anonymous; now her story is known worldwide, still symbolizing truths hidden by carnism: needless violence and humans’ ability to connect with animals. Her statue symbolizes the sacredness of bearing witness.

Seeing with the heart: The power of witnessing

The author imagined Emily’s experience: the dark factory, other helpless, terrified cows. Witnessing means not merely objective observation but heartfelt connection and empathy.

Witnessing closes carnism’s mental gap. This matters because that gap blocks empathy and disgust at meat-eating. Witnessing allows us to verify all the truths the system conceals.

Individual witnessing closes personal cognitive gaps; collective witnessing changes social consciousness. All justice movements seek, through collective witnessing, to align social practices with social values. They succeed when witnesses reach critical mass. Mass witnessing is carnism’s greatest threat, so the whole system is organized against it.

Witnessing takes various forms:

Demonstrations
Vigils
Banners
Lectures
Art

Wired to care? (sidebar)

Recent research suggests empathy has biological foundations. Mirror neurons respond to observing another’s action similarly to performing it ourselves. Rather than merely trying to take another’s position, we literally feel something similar to some degree.

The author considers this hugely significant. If empathy is hardwired into the brain, hence automatic, empathy is the default and its absence suppresses instinctive impulses. Carnism’s defenses may oppose human nature.

(This argument needs refinement. Even before mirror neurons were discovered, no scholar doubted empathy’s neurophysiological basis. Their existence and hardwiring are separate questions, as are hardwiring and automatic responses; automaticity does not imply human nature either. —ak)

From apathy to empathy

All violent systems are threatened by public witnessing because survival depends on its precise opposite: mass dissociation. Dissociation is psychological/emotional separation from genuine experience, lacking a sense of being fully present.

Dissociation can be adaptive for victims, but maladaptive for perpetrators or those condoning violence. In carnism, it maladaptively helps the public accept slaughter. Humans as well as animals suffer from it: dissociation can obstruct personal psychological growth.

Witnessing our resistance

Despite witnessing’s transformative power, many hesitate to witness and testify to carnism’s reality. Overcoming resistance requires understanding its origins by witnessing our own resistance.

The author identifies several reasons:

Conforming is easiest (Chapter 5); witnessing departs from that path.
Witnessing hidden truth hurts.
Enormous suffering induces helplessness, though witnessing also empowers by producing immediate change.
Most importantly, it challenges belief in humanity’s dominant position in nature. Ultimately, however, witnessing liberates by recognizing ourselves as interconnected parts of the world.

(To know is to be wounded. —ak)

Witnessing contains a paradox: the reason we hesitate is the very reason we yearn to witness—because we care. We care. This is the greatest truth.

Witnessing the zeitgeist

Carnism remains pervasive, but there are reasons to believe collapse is near. Now is the moment for the final blow. Evidence:

Growing awareness of the environmental crisis
Growing concern for animal welfare
Growing trust in and popularity of vegetarianism
Vast information on both carnism and vegetarianism

Internet-driven information growth is especially devastating to carnism, which resembles the Wizard of Oz. Carnism’s power depends entirely on hiding behind a curtain; remove it and the power effectively disappears.

Witnessing through action: What we can do

Three important steps in beginning action:

Eliminate or reduce animal-product consumption.
Support relevant organizations.
Keep informing yourself and others: make witnessing your credo.

Beyond carnism

Carnism’s mechanisms are shared by all violent ideologies. Understanding it therefore helps us understand and resist other ideologies of domination. In every case, violence is denied, justified, or distorted.

The same applies to witnessing. Rather than an isolated practice, it connects individuals to the world. Our capacity is unlimited: the more we witness, the better we become. Like compassion, witnessing improves with practice.

The courage to witness

Witnessing opens our hearts to others’ suffering and requires courage. Following carnism is in some ways like Emily queuing at the slaughterhouse awaiting death. Stepping off that path to witness and testify resembles her escape to make her own life.

Witnessing draws out our best qualities: conviction, integrity, empathy, compassion. The author wrote this book believing everyone desires to become the best person they can be.

Ultimately witnessing and testifying require courage to take sides. Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel reportedly said:

Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.