| Just when it seemed that U.S. politics couldn’t get weirder, the country spent the second half of this past week arguing about cats and dogs. Or, more precisely, Americans found themselves battling over whether immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs, a false and dangerous claim made by Donald Trump at Tuesday’s Presidential debate. Although the allegation has been debunked repeatedly, it continues to proliferate online; following the debate, Springfield’s City Hall and several schools were evacuated or closed due to bomb threats. While the human targets of Trump’s slander have, understandably, been the focus of the uproar, the accusation has also highlighted a contradiction in how we talk and think about eating meat. Why is it outrageous that some people might (theoretically) ingest house pets, but we take for granted that many millions happily feast on cows, chickens, and pigs every day? In 2009, The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert surveyed notable books about meat consumption and pointed out the paradox. “Americans love animals,” she wrote, but they also love eating them, spending tens of billions of dollars annually on household animals while simultaneously consuming more than thirty-five million cows and nine billion birds each year. How we justify these choices—and whether they can be justified—remains the subject of emotional debate. Among the famous thinkers who struggled with these ideas was Franz Kafka—who, according to his biographer, shared his solution directly with some fish. “Now at last I can look at you in peace,” he told them. “I don’t eat you anymore.” | 
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