Blog Post 2

In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer makes use of most, if not all, of the rhetorical virtues that Heinrichs brings up in Chapter 6 of Thank You For Arguing. The sneakiest technique I see him use is his attempt at disinterest, and it would make sense for him to be sneaky about his true purpose considering the stigma that ‘vegetarians with a mission’ have. PETA, through radical means in my eyes, has effectively made the thought of a vegetarian who tries to convert others to vegetarianism into something I don’t want to listen to. In order to be as convincing as possible and work around this sort of given setup, and ultimately curb the eating of animals, as is the conceivable end-goal for a vegetarian writing about eating animals, it is more rhetorically significant for the mindset while writing to be closer to ‘I have been there too.’ In this way, while reading, I have noticed Safran Foer constantly trying to make his argument seem less like ‘you should not eat meat because I think that you should not eat meat,’ and more like ‘this is my story and why I feel how I feel.’ In these first sections he brings a lot of his personal life into it. This is a big play on ethos; he is establishing that he is not some crazy herbivore. He brought up that he didn’t used to like dogs, but now he does. He brought up how his grandmother is not a vegetarian, nor was he as he was growing up. He does a lot of things to seem as unbiased as possible. He only breaks this moderate character in drastic changes of pace in order to make a point (however arguably effective making your audience uncomfortable is) such as when he writes about the dog recipe. Throughout, however, he does a great job at making sure he knows what he’s talking about, and talking about a lot of what he knows. It’s evident throughout the content as well as the huge section of ‘notes’ and references that takes up the entire end of the book.