Book Recommendations, Reviews and Author Interviews from All-Creatures.org

The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs By Hope Bohanec
Review By Karen Davis, UPC United Poultry Concerns
July 2023

[Read more REVIEWS of The Humane Hoax HERE.]

If I could (gently) shove this book down everyone’s throat, to read and digest the information in it, I would.

Each essay in The Humane Hoax provides information about a particular facet of “alternative” animal farming with an analysis of the behavior and attitudes toward the animals ranging from smarmy sentimentality to gleeful sadism. Contributors explain how farmers and advertisers manipulate language to reassure the public – and in some cases themselves – that they “care” about the animals and even “love” them as they cut their throats. Or, conversely, how much they despise their victims. There’s an audience for that, too.

I don’t know who are more repulsive: the sentimentalists who invoke “spirituality” to justify their violence, or the sadists who revel in the violence they inflict and not only the violence but the egotistical euphoria of turning their cruelty, betrayals and killings into narratives about themselves in their “authentic farmer” personas. The “spiritual” killers, including the "Do It Yourself” (DIY) coterie, employ “spiritual language to make killing seem compassionate or benevolent,” yet how often do they refer to the animal “being comforted and appreciated” as “it”? (p. 292). To wit, one of the books discussed is called Killing It.

Femivore Power!

There’s the school of suburban women, known as femivores who, bored with their comforts and resentful that men still dominate the workplace, are eager to show someone who’s boss.

To remedy their plight, these women decide to “authenticate” and empower themselves by leaving their cushy careers, often as journalists, to reinvent themselves as farmers on a farmstead mucking around in mud and manure after trading their high-heeled sneakers and jogging clothes for rubber work boots and overalls. One woman describes killing a possum with a shovel: “Caught up in protecting my babies, I had become a savage.” Later she carries a trusting white duck into her house, puts him in the bathtub, and decapitates him with pruning shears. “He quacked and swam around for a few minutes. . . . The duck went from being a happy camper to being a headless camper. I plucked and eviscerated him outside on a table” (p. 75).

Such tales, and worse, of female “self-empowerment,” and “animal control” are regaled in giggly humor like pubescent girls vying for who can be the meanest bad girl in middle school. Pathology and a malevolent Will to Power abound in these women’s stories. But oh if they had suddenly to live alone on a farmstead with no audience, no lucrative book deals and publishing contracts, no opportunity to enthrall themselves and their readers with their “shocking” memoirs, their pleasure in hacking off the heads of baby animals, cutting throats, and “surprising the hell out of” unsuspecting victims and joking about the mothers’ display of grief – if all of these down and dirty delights were all they had, day in, day out, their enthusiasm would wane pretty fast. Telling their stories is the thing. The animals, their subjugation, bewilderment and defeat, are the instruments of the femivore’s celebrity fulfillment. Moreover, these women’s vengeful treatment and mockery of the animals suggest a projection of personal self-hatred onto their victims and a displacement of “getting even” with men by punishing the animals – at last, some justice!

False Love

Femivores parade their contempt for the animals. By contrast, the “spiritual” slaughterers or “honor killers,” employ a rhetoric of “love” and “sacrifice” and “respect.” In one reverential neighbor’s account, a DIY herbalist “sings” to her sheep “and straddles them like she’s riding them and then cuts their throat.* [This killing ploy is reminiscent of Temple Grandin’s support in Animals in Translation for having sex with pigs for business purposes. In the section, “How to Make a Pig Fall in Love,” she describes men masturbating captive pigs – getting sows to “stand for the man” – and concludes that these pig breeders “respect the animals’ nature, and they do a good job with their animals.” (p.104).]

"She calls it ‘giving death.’ I haven’t seen her do it,” the neighbor admits, “but she says they’re always calm and accepting of their fate. She’s very clear that it’s a gift.”

Plenty more of this schlock is quoted in the essay, a key point of which is that these DIY honor killers first absorb the animals into their egocentric abusiveness before absorbing them into their stomachs. In their telling, the victims have no subjective experiences of their own, no agency except that they are “always calm and accepting of their fate” and willing sacrifices. This “spiritual bypass” form of self-confirmation uses language as “an instrument of one’s selfish pursuit rather than a means of overcoming self-centered egotism” (p. 296).

Together, the femivores, the honor killers, and all manner of animal-based locavorism and foodie culture rob the animals of agency, a fact among many others that is “unacknowledged” (p. 252).

Sick Sadism

The snarling hatred unleashed by three male foodie celebrities toward animals and animal rights advocates, as depicted in one essay, is so intense as to seem almost a caricature of malevolence. Together, these three men, including the late Anthony Bourdain, sit at a round table at a writers’ festival in 2011 mocking and excoriating animal advocates for perpetrating a “false morality” and misanthropy:

“Well, I don’t care if it’s a false morality, I just don’t agree with it. I also don’t really care if animals suffer. If I’m perfectly honest, I don’t give a shit!”

Environmental Rubbish

Contributors to The Humane Hoax have much to say about the primacy of advertising language in persuading the public to believe that pasture-grazing of chickens, pigs, cows and sheep is environmentally “sustainable” and beneficent. The greenwashing of animal farming presents a false public image of the well-being of animals on pasture and the fraudulent notion that, somehow magically, billions of animals can occupy enormous tracts of land to feed billions of animal-product consumers with no down side.

In reality, pasture-raised animals require far more land than factory-farmed animals require. Also pointed out is the fact that the typical pasture does not provide sufficient nourishment for the animals who, without concentrated feed supplements, are more likely to be malnourished than factory-farmed animals. This is not intended as a defense of factory farming. Rather, the point is that neither pasture-raising nor factory farming benefits the environment or the animals. And many birds sold to upscale consumers, who alone can afford the high cost of pastured-chickens and eggs, are actually raised in “stationary barns on over-grazed feed lots,” just as hens kept for “free-range” eggs are more often than not confined to sheds with maybe an enclosed porch, a “winter garden” – which I witnessed directly and describe in my own essay in this book.

We need to understand that these linguistically-inflated products – “so costly and scarce that they are not even available in the typical grocery store, let alone cafeterias, stadiums, and hospitals – are not ‘sustainable’ compared to consuming plants directly” (p. 127). Nor is it only farmed animals whose real life, and death, is hidden:

In fact, the powerful ranching and farming industries successfully lobby our government to brutally exterminate tens of millions of wild animals every year. None are safe, be they wild horses and donkeys who are “competing” for grazing land and water, or predators such as wolves and foxes who are a threat to livestock. This taxpayer expense is in addition to the billions of dollars of tax-funded subsidies and bailouts that farmers and ranchers receive. [Writing this review I’m delighted to note that this year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) will for the first time, at the repeated behest of environmental and animal activists, consider animal agriculture’s adverse impact on the climate by serving mostly vegan food throughout the conference. It’s a start.]

Pastures of Pain

In a profound contrast to the portrayal of farmed animals by their abusers, The Humane Hoax includes moving stories of roosters and hens rescued from backyard-chicken keepers and abandonment. One essay provides a penetrating look at the backyard-chicken industry and its victims. And then there’s the story of a pig named Silver who was betrayed by a farm family who chose to raise her as part of their family and then stuck her out to pasture with the other pigs they were raising for slaughter. The storyteller, a veterinarian, became vegan, in part, to atone for “the suffering I’d taken part in” (p. 42).

When she was moved to the outside pasture and barn, she became a solitary pig. Dislocated abruptly from her human family, the only family she’d known, Silver had no idea how to interact with other pigs. My father wanted to breed her – she refused to even consider it and would fight off the boars and run from the other pigs. If my mother, brother, or I came out to the pasture, she sprinted at breakneck pace to the fence for a glimpse of us, sometimes trying to push her face between the slats, and other times rearing up with her front legs on the fence as she tried to reach us. . . . [I]t took me years to realize how deep our betrayal had been of her love and trust (p. 22).

The Humane Hoax is filled with evidence and details of the human betrayal of animals cajoled into trusting relationships with us only to be savagely turned upon like Silver, whose spirit was broken long before she ended up in the slaughterhouse, never understanding why these terrible things had been done to her. It is excruciating to read this and realize that there is currently an effort underway to defund farmed animal sanctuaries – more betrayal of individuals like Silver.

Focus on Consumers

It is also dispiriting to see certain animal “liberationists” telling the media that the animal consumer is “not the problem,” only the industry is, as if these two were not joined at the hip; or that as long as the animals have a “happy” life and “painless” killing, it is all right to commodify, enslave, and kill them. Adult consumers of animal products are complicit: we bear responsibility for what farmed animal producers, under whatever label, do to these innocent victims for palate and profit. Consumers engage destructively in a “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to absolve themselves of guilt – if they even care enough to do that.

Even the Jains and the Hindus, who claim compassion for cows, milk them, and if they themselves don’t butcher the cows for whom they proclaim their compassion, Hindus will sell them to those who do the killing. We might well ask what it is in the human psyche that goes to such elaborate trouble to protect ourselves from the ugly facts when we can nourish ourselves wonderfully without twisting the truth into pretzels.

Editor Hope Bohanec says in her concluding essay that “If the consumers lead, the leaders will follow.” For the animals, we who actively care about them must lead consumers to want to take the path of nonviolence and compassion, and then take it.

[Read more REVIEWS of The Humane Hoax HERE.]

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