Eating Animals

Having little exposure to animals makes it easier to push aside questions about how our actions might influence their treatment. The problem posed by meat has become an abstract one:
there is no individual animal, no singular look of joy or suffering, no wagging tail, and no scream.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular."
Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.




Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals, pg 102