Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

The scientific study of human-animal interaction, pulling from psychology, anthropology, sociology, and ethology. Herzog is one of the researchers who helped establish it as a field, and the book is essentially a tour of what that discipline has found, written for readers who have never heard the word.

Herzog's term for where nearly everyone actually lives. Not animal-rights absolutists, and not people who think animals do not matter at all. The troubled middle eats meat and loves its dog, objects to some kinds of animal use and accepts others, and settles each case on instinct rather than on principle. He puts himself in it, which is what keeps the book from reading as a lecture.

Neither. Herzog is describing how people think, not prescribing what they should eat. He gives activists real space and takes their reasoning seriously, but he is just as interested in why moral consistency about animals is so hard to sustain, including for the activists themselves.

Herzog's answer is that it is mostly not about the animals. Facial proportions, the category your culture files a species into, and what the people around you do are doing most of the work. The reasons we give afterward tend to be justifications rather than causes, which is the uncomfortable finding at the center of the book.

It says the evidence is far weaker than the headlines. Herzog has spent years arguing that the pet effect is oversold. Studies point in every direction, including some that find pet owners worse off on particular measures, and the strongest public claims outrun the data behind them. It is one of the book's most useful correctives.

The publisher describes it as revised and updated throughout to reflect newer research and evolving attitudes toward animals, not a rewrite. The structure and argument of the 2010 original are intact while the studies, statistics, and cultural examples are refreshed. If you read the first edition, treat this as an update rather than a new book.

A psychology professor at Western Carolina University and one of the founding figures of anthrozoology. His fieldwork ranges from cockfighters in Appalachia to animal-rights activists to laboratory researchers, and he writes the long-running Animals and Us column for Psychology Today.