“The Blood of Every Beast”: Mormonism and the Question of the Animal

1. Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo. Vegetarian America: A History (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), 61.

2. Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 215.

3. Terry Tempest Williams, William B. Smart, and Gibbs M. Smith, eds., New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1998), ii; George B. Handley, Terry B. Ball, and Steven L. Peck, eds., Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2006).

4. Brigham Young reassured his followers in 1851: “When the Saints in Zion are sowing and reaping, and building according to counsel, they are causing the light to shine, as emphatically as though they were abroad in foreign nations, preaching and baptizing for remission of sins. All things needful to be done, are but parts of the great whole, which must be accomplished before men will be prepared to be restored back again into the presence of the Father.” Quoted in Jeanne Kay and Craig J. Brown, “Mormon Beliefs about Land and Natural Resources, 1847-1877,” Journal of Historical Geography 11, no. 3 (1985): 257. As I will stress later, the operative phrase in my sentence is “challenged . . . anthropocentrism” rather than “dismantled” it. Thomas G. Alexander, offers one of the most thorough and perceptive explanations of the origins and development of the gap between stewardship-oriented doctrine and economics-driven behavior in his essay “Stewardship and Enterprise: The LDS Church and the Wasatch Oasis Environment, 1847-1930,” in Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment, 15-32.

5. “Billions” may sound like an overstatement, but leading scholars in the British Animal Studies Group remind us that several billion chickens and turkeys alone are raised and killed for human consumption in the United States each year, in addition to tens of millions of pigs, cows, sheep, and goats. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has put the tally at nine billion animals per year or more since 2001. Humane Society of the United States, “Farm Animal Statistics: Slaughter Totals.” Factory Farming Campaign, March 4, 2011, http://www.humanesociety.org/news/resources/research/stats_slaughter_totals.html (accessed March 14, 2011). These numbers do not include the many animals that are driven extinct, “gassed, electrocuted, exterminated, hunted . . . vivisected, shot, trapped, snared, run over, lethally injected, culled, sacrificed . . . executed, euthanized, destroyed, put down, put to sleep, and even, perhaps, murdered.” Animal Studies Group, Killing Animals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 1-3.

6. Mary Sayre Haverstock, An American Bestiary (New York: Abrams, 1979), 19-33.

7. Hel. 7:19. The full verse reads, “And behold, instead of gathering you, except ye will repent, behold, he shall scatter you forth that ye shall become meat for dogs and wild beasts.” Doctrine and Covenants 29:18-20 foretells a similarly horrible fate for the wicked at the time of Christ’s second coming. Val Plumwood’s essay, “Being Prey,” details a violent encounter in Australia’s Kakadu National Park with a crocodile that attacked and nearly killed her. While (or perhaps because) Plumwood’s essay challenges conventional Christian spirit/nature dualism, her thoughts on the “forbidden boundary breakdowns” represented by “death in the jaws of a crocodile” are well worth quoting in this context. The “ultimate horror” involved in this kind of death comes, she writes, from the combination of “decomposition of the victim’s body with the overturning of the victory over nature and materiality that Christian death represents. Crocodile predation on humans threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery of the planet in which we are predators but can never ourselves be prey. We may daily consume other animals in their billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles.” Quoted in David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 315. At the time of the first publication of the Book of Mormon, of course, the fear of “being prey” or “becoming meat” in the wilderness of the United States was much greater than it is now, even if (then as now) wolves, bears, and other large predators normally avoided contact with humans.

8. This rhetorical device lived on in the Mormon revenge narratives that emerged from the killings of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. N. B. Lundwall, The Fate of the Persecutors of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1952), compiles several earlier accounts of Missouri and Illinois “mobocrats” who “rotted alive” (297) or were eaten by maggots as a result of a “Mormon curse” (296) supposedly put on them by Joseph Smith or Brigham Young. Many of the stories clearly display the influence of Doctrine and Covenants 29, with its threats of maggots and rotting flesh. Others, such as the story of mob leader James Campbell, bear a stronger debt to Book of Mormon rhetoric. After “the angel of God saw fit to sink the boat” in which Campbell and other mobocrats were crossing the Missouri River on their way to attack the Saints, Lundwall reports that Campbell’s body “floated down the [Missouri River]… and lodged upon a pile of driftwood, where the eagles, buzzards, ravens, crows and wild animals ate his flesh from his bones . . . and left him a horrible looking skeleton of God’s vengeance” (353). Brigham Young referred to these accounts as “facts” in an 1860 address: “The bones of those who drove the Saints from Independence, from Jackson County, then from Clay and Dav[iess] Counties, and last of all from Caldwell County, from whence they fled into Illinois, have been scattered over the Plains—gnawed and broken by wild beasts, and are there bleaching to this day, while the Saints who have died on the Plains have, without an exception, had a decent burial where they have died.” Brigham Young, January 5, 1860, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London and Liverpool: LDS Booksellers Depot, 1855-86), 9:101.

9. It would require another essay to unpack some of the problems involved in the Book of Mormon’s treatment of unrepentant American Indians/Lamanites as subhuman “wild men” and to place these descriptions in the context of early nineteenth-century thought. For now, it is worth noting that the Book of Mormon approaches human-animal boundaries in a dynamic way, showing that just as Lamanites—and Nephites—risk growing more animal-like the more wicked they become, they can become more human in sync with their growing righteousness (even if, as we would now say, characterizing bad human behavior as “animal-like,” or judging nonhuman animal behavior “good” or “evil,” anthropomorphically fails to recognize the otherness of nonhuman psychologies and ways of being).

10. For instance, Alma 25:12 recalls Abinadi’s dying words: “And he said unto the priests of Noah that their seed should cause many to be put to death, in the like manner as he was, and that they should be scattered abroad and slain, even as a sheep having no shepherd is driven and slain by wild beasts; and now behold, these words were verified, for they were driven by the Lamanites, and they were hunted, and they were smitten.”

11. Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 126.

12. Hyrum Smith, “The Word of Wisdom,” Times and Seasons, June 1, 1842, 799-800.

13. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 241.

14. Joseph Smith Jr. et al., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, edited by B. H. Roberts, 2d ed. rev. (6 vols., 1902-12, Vol. 7, 1932), 2:71-72.

15. Joseph F. Smith, quoted in Gerald E. Jones, Animals and the Church (Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2003), 92.

16. History of the Church, 2:72.

17. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” translated by Gary Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369-418; and “‘Eating Well,‘ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Who Comes after the Subject? edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96-119.

18. Jones, Animals and the Church, 24-25, mentions several examples involving snakes. President James E. Faust, “’By What Power . . . Have Ye Done This?’” Ensign, November 1998, http://lds.org/general-conference/1998/10/by-what-power-have-ye-done-this?lang=eng&query=faust+power (accessed March 4, 2011), cites a humorous rattlesnake episode from George A. Smith’s journal. When several of the Zion’s Camp men found a rattlesnake coiled up near the sleeping Solomon Humphrey’s head, Humphrey stopped them from killing it with the words “No! I’ll protect him, you shan[’]t hurt him for he and I have had a good nap together.”

19. “Let the people be holy,” Brigham Young preached on April 6, 1852, “and the earth under their feet will be holy. Let the people be holy, and filled with the Spirit of God, and every animal and creeping thing will be filled with peace; the soil of the earth will bring forth in its strength, and the fruits thereof will be meat [Gen. 1:29] for man. The more purity that exists, the less is the strife[;] the more kind we are to our animals, the more will peace increase, and the savage nature of the brute creation vanish away.” Journal of Discourses 1:203. On June 4, 1864, Young blamed human beings for the “savage and destructive nature” of animals, but also argued that humans, with the help of divine powers and through the “law of the Holy Priesthood,” had the capacity to “remove the curse and its consequences from earth,” to “say to the raging and contending elements, ‘peace, be still’ and extract the poison from the reptile’s tooth.” Young described this effort as “the great work of sanctifying [humankind] and the earth for final glorification in its paradisiacal state.” Journal of Discourses 10:301-2. He thus shifted the rhetorical (if not theological) focus of Joseph Smith’s Tenth Article of Faith (“We believe . . . that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory”), placing the emphasis as much on human effort as on Christ’s return and other forms of divine intervention.

20. For a very useful overview of George Q. Cannon’s efforts, see Aaron R. Kelson, “‘A Plea for the Horse’: George Q. Cannon’s Concern for Animal Welfare in Nineteenth-Century America,” BYU Studies 38, no. 3 (1999): 46-61.

21. Ibid., 57-58.

22. Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 387-88, notes that the reports of interspecies harmony coming back to Europe from places like New Zealand “corroborated the millennial fantasy” of animal advocates like Humphry Primatt. Primatt wrote in 1776 that, if humans obeyed the divine law of mercy, “all would be peace, harmony, and love. Men would become merciful; Savage Brutes, would become tame; and the tame Brutes would no more groan under the lash. … [A]ll, both Men and Brutes, would experience the blessing of the renovating change.”

23. Joseph F. Smith, quoted in Jones, Animals and the Church, 92-93.

24. Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution, 385.

25. Alice Wondrak Biel, Do (Not) Feed the Bears: The Fitful History of Wildlife and Tourists in Yellowstone (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 20.

26. Ibid., 148.

27. Ibid., 25.

28. Another Yellowstone example: In the same years in which the feeding of bears was becoming one of the defining features of the park, Yellowstone officials were busy exterminating members of a less “friendly” species: wolves. Clark S. Monson, “A House Divided: Utah and the Return of the Wolf,” in Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment, edited by George B. Handley, Terry B. Ball, and Steven L. Peck (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2006), 124, notes that this policy resulted not in an enhanced ecosystem but in a “cascade of ecological calamities”: overpopulated and starving elk, overgrazed vegetation, damaged riparian environments, fewer beavers and beaver ponds, accelerating erosion, dropping water tables, and a host of other unforeseen consequences. The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, observes Monson, has benefited everything from elk populations to grizzlies to aspen trees to songbirds to cutthroat trout (126, 135 note 40).

29. Ibid., 122-23.

30. For an LDS reference to Satan as the “destroyer,” see Doctrine and Covenants 61’s headnote, describing a dangerous 1831 canoe trip on the Missouri River. William Phelps, “in daylight vision, saw the destroyer riding in power upon the face of the waters.”

31. Charles Bergman, “Obits for the Fallen Hunter: Reading the Decline—and Death?—of Hunting in America,” American Literary History 17, no. 4 (2005): 829, writes that the Galápagos Islands “offer new lessons in human relations with animals” through the “intimacy with animals” that can be found there. He adds: “Darwin noted it. . . . Melville did as well. . . . Sea lions swim up to you in the sea or walk up to you on the beach. Mockingbirds land on you. Blue-footed boobies let you approach to within inches. Over five million years of evolution without predators gave the creatures this wonderful tameness.” Of course, while ecotourism presents numerous advantages over other land uses in places like the Galápagos, the 100,000 or so ecotourists who flock there every year in search of this “intimacy” pose serious threats of their own. Juliet Eilperin, “Despite Efforts, Some Tours Do Leave Footprints,” Washington Post, April 2, 2006, P1.

32. Bill McKibben, “Aldo Leopold,” in American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau, edited by McKibben (New York: Library of America, 2008), 265; Marybeth Lorbiecki, Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 42-43, 167; Aldo Leopold, “Conservation,” in Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold, edited by Luna B. Leopold (1953; Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1993), 146.

33. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 130-32.

34. Defenders of Wildlife, “Southwest Wolves Face Extinction in the Wild,” email to Bart Welling, October 18, 2007. Anti-wolf hysteria is based, in part, on the misguided notion that wolves frequently prey on humans. A 2002 Norwegian study of records of European wolf attacks dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries did find evidence of several hundred fatal or injurious wolf attacks, most of which involved children, but the majority of the attacks were carried out by wolves infected with rabies, which no longer poses the threat in Europe and North America that it once did. Habituation to humans, human provocation of wolves, and anthropogenic damage to wolf habitat were the three other major factors associated with wolf attacks. On the whole, the report’s authors note, fatal wolf attacks have been “extremely rare,” and wolves are “among the least dangerous species for their size and predatory potential.” John D. C. Linnell et al., The Fear of Wolves: A Review of Wolf Attacks on Humans, NINA Oppdragsmelding 731 (Trondheim, Norway: NINA-NIKU, 2002), 5.

35. Monson, “A House Divided,” 121-22.

36. George Q. Cannon, quoted in “A Plea for the Horse,” 52. Cannon’s editorial echoes the great conservationist John Muir’s argument in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1867): “Many good people believe that alligators were created by the Devil, thus accounting for their all-consuming appetite and ugliness. But doubtless these creatures are happy and fill the place assigned them by the great Creator of us all. Fierce and cruel they appear to us, but beautiful in the eyes of God. . . . The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.” John Muir, from A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, in American Earth, 86, 88.

37. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968; rpt., New York: Touchstone, 1990), 167. While President Cannon and “Brother” Abbey would probably roll their eyes at being mentioned in the same essay, and Abbey’s vision of Paradise obviously contradicts key Mormon doctrines of immortality, his books have much to offer when it comes to appreciating the paradisiacal aspects of the world as it is, rather than as we think it should be.

38. Heber C. Kimball, October 18, 1857, Journal of Discourses, 5:335.

39. Cannon, quoted in Jones, Animals and the Church, 45.

40. Jonathan Burt, “Conflicts around Slaughter in Modernity,” in Animal Studies Group, Killing Animals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 120-44.

41. Some of Cannon’s Juvenile Instructor editorials fall in the talionic tradition of William Hogarth’s 1751 engraving series The Four Stages of Cruelty, which explores the connections between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans. It traces the growth and downfall of an animal-abusing orphan named Tom Nero. In the first print, Nero is leading other boys in torturing a dog and other animals; in the final print (“The Reward of Cruelty”), an adult Nero—having been hanged for murdering his pregnant mistress—has been reduced to a corpse that is in the process of being probed and disemboweled by the sadistic anatomists of the Royal College of Physicians. Beneath the dissecting table the animal world exacts its revenge: a dog is about to eat Tom Nero’s heart. William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty: Engravings by Hogarth, 101 Prints, edited by Sean Shesgreen (New York: Dover Books, 1973), 77-80.

42. Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution, 340.

43. The only edition of Brothers’s Description of Jerusalem mentioned by WorldCat was printed in London; but given the dynamic nature of the transatlantic book trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is not impossible that Joseph Smith could have encountered the book. D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 14, found that Brothers’s most influential book, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, had made its way to “such hinterland towns as Hanover, New Hampshire, where Hyrum Smith attended school near the Joseph Smith family residence.” I have not been able to consult A Revealed Knowledge to see whether it contains similar teachings on animals.

44. Jones, Animals and the Church, 25.

45. Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution, 135-37.

46. Ibid., 83.

47. Sir Isaac Newton, quoted in ibid., 111.

48. Richard S. Westfall, quoted in ibid., 113.

49. Primatologist Frans de Waal coined “anthropodenial” to refer to human practices that frame human-animal differences as differences in kind rather than Darwinian differences in degree. Cited in Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 48. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), argues persuasively that speciesism should not be regarded as one more “-ism” to be added to the list of politically incorrect views; rather, speciesism’s rigid human-animal boundaries lie at the heart of sexism, racism, and even humanism.

50. According to Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 156-58, 305-6, vegetarianism among the Shakers in the 1830s was inspired by Sylvester Graham’s writings rather than by revelation and was the subject of intense debate—not a matter of settled doctrine. In 1841, Shakers were commanded by “divine revelation” from their central ministry to abstain from coffee, tea, and pork; and in 1845 they received word that “meat or fish” would be banned on the Sabbath “except in cases of ill health,” although Stein observes that not all Shaker believers were committed to observing the new “holy laws” (198). It would be interesting to know whether Parley P. Pratt and Sidney Rigdon understood the controversial nature of vegetarianism among the Shakers when, in 1831, they visited the United Society community at North Union, Ohio, with former Shaker Leman Copley to deliver the revelation that would become Doctrine and Covenants 49. The revelation includes an ambiguously worded reference to Shaker vegetarianism in verse 18 (“And whoso forbiddeth to abstain from meats, that man should not eat the same, is not ordained of God”) but follows up in verse 21 with a strong endorsement of the principle expressed in JST Genesis 9:11 (“And wo be unto man that sheddeth blood or that wasteth flesh and hath no need”). Bushman, Joseph Smith, 154, characterizes the 1831 meeting between the Mormons and the Shakers as a disaster, not because of disagreements over vegetarianism but because of the Mormon revelation’s affirmation of marriage (as opposed to celibacy) and to Pratt’s “lack of tact” in shaking the dust off his coattails (see Mark 6:11) when the Shakers rejected the revelation.

51. On Graham’s idiosyncratic but influential (as well as controversial) theories on the connections between diet and sexual desire, see Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform, Contributions in Medical History No. 4 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 32-36, 119-20. “The truth of the matter is simply this,” wrote Graham in A Lecture to Young Men, on Chastity . . . (1834): “A pure and well regulated vegetable diet, serves to take away or prevent all morbid or preternatural sexual lust . . . and thus enable [man] to be chaste in body and spirit.” Quoted in ibid., 120. The Word of Wisdom, of course, says nothing about chastity.

52. Ronald M. Deutsch, The New Nuts among the Berries (Palo Alto, Calif.: Bull, 1977), 23, claims that in August 1832, the Washington, D.C., Board of Health issued a ninety-day ban on the sale of practically every kind of fruit and vegetable except for potatoes, beets, tomatoes, and on-ions—“but even these they would admonish the country to be moderate in using.” A few weeks earlier, New York’s Special Medical Council had advised citizens to “avoid crude vegetables and fruits.” Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 30. Other prominent doctors recommended diets heavy in meat and port wine. Iacobbo and Iacobbo, Vegetarian America, 18. Many in the United States viewed excessive alcohol consumption as a leading cause of death. Sylvester Graham was one of them; he also warned his rapidly growing audience of readers and listeners against coffee, tea, opium, spices, excessive meat consumption, and too much sex. Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility, 86-104. These theories were wrong, of course, but it would be more than twenty years before the British physician John Snow made the necessary epidemiological link between cholera deaths and contaminated drinking water.

53. Frederick C. Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 190-91. In his 1836 book The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture, Bronson Alcott wrote: “It is the mission of this age … to reproduce Perfect Men. The faded image of Humanity is to be restored, and Man to reappear in his original brightness.” At Fruitlands, the foundations of an Edenic revolution in the natural world itself were to be laid. By abstaining from the use of manure for fertilizer and employing other enlightened farming techniques, Alcott wrote in a journal entry titled “Husbandry” that the Fruitlanders could ensure: “The soil, grateful thus for man’s generous usage, debauched no more by foul ordures, nor worn by cupidities, shall recover its primeval virginity.” Quoted in Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 156, 182. Given the ideological similarities between LDS and Transcendentalist utopian experiments, the community’s short life span (June 1843-January 1844) should not disqualify it from comparison with longer-lasting LDS (agri)cultural projects in Utah and elsewhere.

54. See, for instance, Carolyn J. Weekley with Laura Pass Barry, The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1999), 51-64, 92, and excerpts from a sermon Hicks delivered at Goose Creek, Virginia, in 1837 (223-32) in which he classifies different types of Quakers according to their dominant humors and compares each type to an animal. For instance, “phlegmatic” individuals are like bears: normally “dull, sluggish, inert creature[s],” but likely to reveal a “powerful, cruel and voracious” side when “agitated by some of the stronger passions” (228).

55. Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, and Anton H. Lund (First Presidency), “Gospel Classics: The Origin of Man,” 1909, edited version reprinted in Ensign, February 2002, 30; emphasis mine.

56. Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 259.

57. Sandra Bradford Packard, “Animals,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1:42.

58. Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 176.

59. Jim Catano, “The Word of Wisdom: The Forgotten Verses,” Vegsource.com, November 8, 1997, http://www.vegsource.com/articles/catano.htm (accessed October 26, 2007).

60. Humanity’s growing hunger for meat takes a terrible toll not just on the animals that are killed but on the larger biosphere, including our own bodies. Worldwatch Institute, Good Stuff?: A Behind-the-Scenes Guide to the Things We Buy, March 31, 2004, http://www.worldwatch.org/taxonomy/term/44 (accessed October 26, 2007), reports on some of meat’s not-so-hidden costs relating to oil, water, hormones, antibiotics, land use, methane, animal waste, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”), and so on. Researchers at the University of Chicago have reported that “the average American diet—including all food processing steps—results in the annual production of an extra 1.5 tons of [carbon dioxide]-equivalent (in the form of all greenhouse gases) compared to a no-meat diet.” If their findings are correct, going vegetarian would have a bigger impact on global warming than switching from a standard car to a hybrid. Brad Knickerbocker, “Humans’ Beef with Livestock: A Warmer Planet,” Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2007, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p03s01-ussc.html (accessed October 26, 2007). Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001; rpt., New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 149-90, follows Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) in documenting the meat industry’s scandalous mistreatment of its human workers.

61. Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), offers an excellent introduction both to problems like these and to the field of animal studies in general. She is a member of the Animal Studies Group.

62. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 14.

63. Hyrum Smith, “The Word of Wisdom,” 799.

64. Ibid., 800.