Dead Meat

Some of the pictures in this book will stay with you for a long time, some may even make meat-eaters turn vegetarian. But, even more so than the pictures, the description of the horror of factory farms - to the animals and the workers - will disgust anyone with a heart.I reccommend this book to longtime vegetarians, new vegetarians, and also to people who are just interested in maybe trying vegetarianism.(...)

If you are passionate about animals, you must read this book. The drawings alone tell the story. The introduction is very educational and will enlighten you. This book is very informative in the body and the drawings and a must read for anyone. It explains the horror that goes on in the slaughterhouses and even gives you a tour through them. I learned more from this book than any other in my personal library on this subject.

I received this book as a gift yesterday and stayed up all night reading it and finished it. Luckily, I did not have any nightmares about animals being treated in the way in which Sue Coe describes and paints in this revealing book. I recommend this book to the world; everyone should be aware of the way we treat animals, from pumping them with chemicals and slaughtering them with a knife as they hang from a back foot, to eating them on our dinner tables. The people of the world need to have this information so that they can consciously make a decision about how they can change their contibution regarding these crimes which occur on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis in every part of the world.

This book was the reason I became a vegetarian. While it's easy to skim lightly over even a well-presented and passionate text such as Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" without understanding the true horror of the meat that you eat, you can't so easily dismiss this book's drawings. They are blunt truths: rather than appealing to your reason, they speak directly to your decency. That makes their argument impossible to ignore. If you are a meat-eater, you should be afraid to read "Dead Meat," because it will force you to understand the horrible process that turns a life into the food on your plate. But don't let that fear stop you from reading it- you shouldn't fear the book, you should fear the facts that it presents but that tragically exist quite independently of it.

Another horrifying book, this time about the animal food industry. An excellent introduction by Tom Regan points out the effects of the meat industry and the killing of nonhuman animals on the environment, on the human psyche, on social settings. Meat metaphors shape us at the most subcellular level of our awareness of the world. Christians methaphorically eat the flesh of Christ. Nazis use animal methaphors in order to justify their oppression of the Jews and other groups. Men use animal imagery to objectify women. Sue's artwork is fairly stylized but disarming. If you can see it in person, you should. It's a nightmare. There's no way to justify the oppression of so many nonhuman animals, especially because alternatives exist to almost everything for which humans use animals. Imagine if her artwork were photographs instead. She shows us disemboweled pigs, de-beaked chickens, whipped horses. These are linked to our everyday reality, for instance in her painting McWorld. Another interesting theme, rendered less explicitly, is the connection between the interlocked oppression of nonhuman animals by humans and women by men. For instance, an advertisement on the side of a truck packed with hogs for slaughter parked at the Thorn Apple Valley Slaughterhouse in Detroit, Michigan shows dancing pigs in skirts and reads GO GO GIRL EXPRESS. This sexualization of animals for slaughter and the meatification of women for sex is everpresent.