Dominion Matthew Scully Quotes

When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?

Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us.

Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes--not often, but sometimes--the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.

Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them.

When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral reasoning.

Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

Intellectuals are a pretty unique species all by themselves, given to advocating things out of sheer brazenness that they could not themselves stomach if they were ushered in to witness the scene.

Animals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions - about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul - forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world.

Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.

Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the market. Animals such as deer, we are told, have no predators in many areas, and therefore need systematic culling. Yet when attempts are made to reintroduce natural predators such as wolves and coyotes into these very areas, sport hunters themselves are the first to resist it. Weaker animals in the wild, we hear, will only die miserable deaths by starvation and exposure without sport hunters to control their population. Yet it's the bigger, stronger animals they're killing and wounding--the very opposite of natural selection--often with bows and pistols that only compound and prolong the victim's suffering.

The elephants we have seen taunted and tormented and slaughtered by the likes of Safari Club do not have time to wait while the world's ethicists work out some centuries-long paradigm shift in moral thought.

It is true, as we are often reminded, that kindness to animals is among the humbler duties of human charity--though for just that reason among the more easily neglected. And it is true that there will always be enough injustice and human suffering in the world to make the wrongs done to animals seem small and secondary. The answer is that justice is not a finite commodity, nor are kindness and love. Where we find wrongs done to animals, it is no excuse to say that more important wrongs are done to human beings, and let us concentrate on those. A wrong is a wrong, and often the little ones, when they are shrugged off as nothing, spread and do the gravest harm to ourselves and others.

As sentimentality towards animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves.

Where we find wrongs done to animals, it is no excuse to say that more important wrongs are done to human beings, and let us concentrate on those. A wrong is a wrong, and often the little ones, when they are shrugged off as nothing, spread and do the gravest harm to ourselves and others.

In any case I just cannot imagine attaching so much importance to any food or treat that I would grow irate or bitter at the mention of the suffering of animals. A pig to me will always seem more important than a pork rind. There is the risk here of confusing realism with cynicism, moral stoicism with moral sloth, of letting oneself become jaded and lazy and self-satisfied--what used to be called an 'appetitive' person.

When a man’s love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice.

My earliest recollection is of coming upon some rabbit tracks in the backyard snow. I must have been three or so, but I had never seen a rabbit and can still recall the feeling of being completely captivated by the tracks: Someone had been here. And he left these prints. And he was alive. And he lived somewhere nearby, maybe even watching me at this very moment. Four decades later, I do not need to be reminded that rabbits are often a nuisance to farmers and gardeners. My point is that when you look at a rabbit and can see only a pest, or vermin, or a meal, or a commodity, or a laboratory subject, you aren't seeing the rabbit anymore. You are seeing only yourself and the schemes and appetites we bring to the world--seeing, come to think of it, like an animal instead of as a moral being with moral vision.

I know many people far more upright and conscientous than I am who disagree, who think nothing of it. I know that vegetarianism runs against mankind's most casual assumptions about the world and our place within it. And I know that factory farming is an economic inevitability, not likely to end anytime soon. But I don't answer to inevitabilities, and neither do you. I don't answer to the economy. I don't answer to tradition and I don't answer to Everyone. For me, it comes down to a question of whether I am a man or just a consumer. Whether to reason or just to rationalize. Whether to heed my conscience or my every craving, to assert my free will or just my will. Whether to side with the powerful and comfortable or with the weak, afflicted, and forgotten.

If animals are just commodities, then we are just consumers, with no greater good than material pleasure and no higher law than appetite.

I know a 'crime against nature' when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory. I also know phony arguments when I hear them--unbridled appetite passing itself off as altruism, and human arrogance in the guise of solemn 'duty.' We must, as C.S. Lewis advises, 'reject with detestation that covert propoganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as 'Humanitarianism' and 'Sentimentality.

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal--not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescapable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is our fellow creatures' lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man. And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth's happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man's attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational, or wicked.

Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind’s capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don’t; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us. Animals are so easily overlooked, their interests so easily brushed aside.

Though reason must guide us in laying down standards and laws regarding animals, and in examining the arguments of those who reject such standards, it is usually best in any moral inquiry to start with the original motivation, which in the case of animals we may without embarrassment call love. Human beings love animals as only the higher love the lower, the knowing love the innocent, and the strong love the vulnerable. When we wince at the suffering of animals, that feeling speaks well of us even when we ignore it, and those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity.

An author describing the methods of intensive farming, or the excesses of sport hunting, or even the harsher uses of animals in science writes with confidence that most readers will share his sense of concern and indignation. Sounding the call to action--convincing people that change is not only necessary, but actually possible--is more problematic. In protecting animals from cruelty, it is always just one step from the mainstream to the fringe. To condemn the wrong is obvious, to suggest its abolition radical.

I think he overlook a phase: that empathy stage in our lives when we may begin to see even the commonest animals on their own terms, fellow creatures with their own needs to meet and hardships to bear, joined with us in the mystery of life and death--and frankly, for all of our more exalted endowments, not all that much less enlightened than the sagest of naked apes about the meaning of it all. That kinship is to me reason enough to go about my own way in the world showing each one as much courtesy as I can, refraining from things that bring animals needless harm. They all seem to have enough dangers coming at them as it is. Whenever human beings with our loftier gifts and grander calling in the world can stop to think on their well-being, if only by withdrawing to let them be, it need not be a recognition of 'rights.' It is just a gracious thing, an act of clemency only more to our credit because the animals themselves cannot ask for it, or rebuke us when we transgress against them, or even repay our kindness.

Philosophical theories can in this way become a destructive venture, confusing matters with false choices and sterile power schemes the cruel are only too happy to accept. In hostile hands, they become a pretext for doing nothing, for brushing off real and urgent moral duties in the care of animals.

lives when we may begin to see even the commonest animals on their own terms, fellow creatures with their own needs to meet and hardships to bear, joined with us in the mystery of life and death—and frankly, for all of our more exalted endowments, not all that much less enlightened than the sagest of naked apes about the meaning of it all.

The fact that creatures cannot act morally toward us in no way diminishes our ability to act morally toward them.

There is something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power." -Cardinal John Henry Newman

at their disposal. So they assemble in protests to convey their objections. What’s wrong with that? A similar outpouring came recently from American Walter Williams, one of my favorite columnists and a conservative economist known

The corporate farmer is the absent farmer, the stranger on his own property, too important to worry about little details like whether a pig has room to turn or straw to sleep on. He is our modern hireling, too busy with bigger business than the care of his own animals, and we were warned about him long ago: The hired hand—who is no shepherd nor owner of the sheep— catches sight of the wolf coming and runs away, leaving the sheep to be snatched and scattered by the wolf. That is because he works for pay; he has no concern for the sheep.

Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest stall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at, morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky.

Now what is it that moves our very hearts and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? … They have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings so especially touching. Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God…. There is something so very dreadful, so Satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.21

It is the old practice of bear-baiting, new and improved by modern innovation. A company in Maine makes a similar device called the “Phantom Whitetail,” digitally reproducing “12 different sounds proven to arouse the curiosity of Whitetail Deer,” including the “estrus bleat” and “fawn distress.’’35 And here again every free-market justification can be found for such products. People freely buy and sell them. Government should stay out of it. The manufacturer needs to make a living. They’re a time-saver, and on and on. But we’re left with the same moral question. What sort of dominion is that? What kind of person would use such a thing, drawing in animals by the sounds of their helpless young?

Here is a creature, one little pig, who came into the world as livestock, wrung from creation in a vast godlike system of inscrutable darkness and clattering machinery infinitely beyond his understanding. Yet even he, who has never known the warmth of the sun and the breeze and the cool water, yearns for them. He liveth, yearning for the things of life. He was deprived of companionship, sunlight, a name, any concern whatsoever as a fellow creature, allowed only the breath of life until that, too, would be abruptly withdrawn. Then the moment came and he was herded out into the somber procession, poked with electric prods, hit, yelled at, driven toward the devilish clattering and godawful squealing, losing control of his bladder from the horror of it, everywhere around him the smell of death and panic and, as even an uncomprehending little pig or calf or lamb must feel it—utter damnation.

For me it was a simple moral step of extending that vision out into the world, for what are dogs but affable emissaries from the animal kingdom?

What gifts they all are if our hearts are inclined in the right way and our vision to the right angle - seeing animals as they are apart from our designs upon them, as fellow creatures on their own terms, some glorious and mighty like the elephant, some fearful and lethal like the tiger, some joyful and gentle like the dolphin, some lowly and unprepossessing like the pig, but not a one of them, however removed from our exalted world, hidden from its Maker's sight.

We can challenge farming practices today without passing judgement on the whole of human experience.

So too have many other animals served us well over the ages. It was the use of livesock that first freed us from the chase, allowed man to settle and civilize himself, slowly rendering the hunter a useless and ever more ridiculous figures so engaged in what the name itself, "game," implies.

When substitute products are found, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. The warrant expires. The divine mandate is used up. What were once "necessary evils" become just evils.

Compassion for animals doesn’t drain away some finite reserve of moral energy and idealism, to the detriment of human welfare, but surely adds to the supply.

Why just say grace when you can show it?

Mr Wallace is sitting beside a dying elk. "If elk could scream," he reflects, the woods would have fewer hunters.

I shot him at the base of the brain. He quivered, looking ahead wide-eyed, straining, then slowly all the life force slid from those eyes and his muscles lost their tension. He took one last, long, slow breath and died. I cried inside and out. I want to sit here for another half hour with the elk, as if at the bedside of an old friend. Just sit as I have done before and try to figure out why it is I do this. Kill and then mourn." There is a whole genre of this stuff, always with the same theme of killing and bereavement, killing and self-revulsion, killing and emptiness. The idea that just maybe killing is the problem, and it might be best to work it all out at home, take a little break from the blood sports to "figure out why it is I do this," never seems to occur to them.

Granting Digby that one can be too emotional about animals, it seems fair to ask if one cannot also be a little to emotional about food. Why is it excessive sentimentality to see rabbits as our harmless fluffy tailed friends, but not excessive sentimentality to go on and on about rabbits soaked in rich gravy with the parsley and Dijon mustard and stock from the paws and head and old England and all the rest?

Defended over the ages as necessary to human survival, now all of a sudden hunting is necessary to the animals' survival, at least those favored species deigned fit to exist. But think about what he is saying. What a jaded, selfish view of the world and our place within it - a kind of reverse Genesis in which every species shall now be summoned before almighty man to justify their existence or be banished from creation, man the Unmaker of all things.

In the same way, one might well ask what good it does to keep the elephants alive at all if their sole value on earth is a hunter's fee. Why even bother if we think so little of these creatures, after all that they have endured at the hands of man, that we are now willing to let them be farmed and administered in this nice, systematic way by the very people who have already done them so much evil?

Few adults have any illusions about modern factory farms and packing plants, or about the tender mercies accorded the creatures that creepeth therein: the bright, sensitive pig dangling by a rear hoof as he or she is processed along, squealing in horror; the veal calf taken from his mother, tethered and locked away in a tiny dark stall for all of his brief, wretched existence. If you could walk all of humanity through one of these places, 90 percent would never touch meat again. We would leave the place retching and gasping for air. We cringe at the thought of it, and that cringe is to our credit.

The more we understand about life, in general, the more we value the lives of all creatures." -Paul Johnson, British historian

All predators are limited in the kind and duration of suffering they can inflict and in the level of moral degradation of which they are capable. We are not.

We may not know or agree upon moral truths. But we do know that opposite things cannot at the same time ne true: identical creatures at the same time capable of suffering and incapable of suffering, worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of such concern, within the reach of God's love and beneath it.

Just as in logic a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, in moral reasoning identical creatures cannot be worthy of moral consideration and unworthy of moral consideration; this dog or dolphin or elephant morally significant and those others are not.

There are truths greater than our own wishes.

The biological and moral realities - to say nothing of Go's own plan, whatever it may be - do not change with our own wishes.... a person is a person just as a dog is a dog, a deer a deer, a pig a pig, and so on through the animal kingdom. And either they suffer or they do not suffer.

When we assert our reason as our authority for dominion, we must use that authority reasonably. When we assert free will as our distinctive human quality, we must use our free will not only in acts of self-interest but in acts of self-restraint.

When we call something a "necessary evil," something requiring the suffering or death of a fellow creature, the evil is real and it had better be necessary.

It would be enough if more of us would simply compare our own principles, our own vision of life and nature, whether secular or religious or somewhere in between, wit the reality of how animals are actually treated, often in our name. If such things cannot be justified, if the great majority of us find them reprehensible and wrong and unworthy of humanity, then why on earth are they all permitted? Why do we tolerate them, in our lives and in our laws?

We do not, in thinking about our own lives, simply ask what minimum effort is required of us and then content ourselves with that. In our better moments we try to go beyond that, to exceed the standard, to stretch ourselves and thereby become better people. We do this as fathers and husbands and mothers and wives. We do this as CHristians and Jews and Moslems and Buddhists and Hindus, in our duties to one another and to conscience. We do it in our work and careers, whatever that calling may be. We do it as friends and neighbors. We do it simply as human beings trying to leave our mark in the world, to spread a little love and goodwill where we can. Why should we not also do it as stewards of the earth, the caretakers of creation?

For my part, even if it were demonstrated to me that these poor beasts have no rights at all while I have every right to subject the to such privation and torment, and to delegate that authority to the gentlemen of Smithfield, it is a right I do not want, a power I gladly surrender.

That is the whole idea o mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely undeserved.... There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us.

History is full of other "hidden foundations" too long unexamined, old ways tat people could not part with, practices about which they were proud ad sure and defiant when they should have been ashamed.

Every age, as Allan Bloom observed, is blind to its own worst madness.

Self-actualization," for a man, is self-mastery, the strength to govern his appetites and passions and not be governed by them.

Somehow it has become mawkish and weak to dwell upon the details of animal suffering, and strong and sensible to ignore them - to disregard "the sentimental maunderings of animal rights extremists," as Larry Katz, Safari Club's president for the year 2000 puts it. This is a twisting of plain words , of excuse ad evasion. A realist is someone who wants to know the realities, the facts of the case, what is actually taking place and how it feels to the victim. A sentimental person is one who follows desire, emotion, and impulse, often in disregard of the facts.

We are constantly told that concern over the "supposed cruelties of farming," as Stephen Budiansky puts it in "The Covenant of the Wild," is a product of the soft "urban" mind-set, unaccustomed to the harsh realities of rural life. Another way of looking at this is that the "urban" types are not steeped in the ways of blood spilling and have no financial and emotional attachments to the practices in question. In other contexts, that's usually called objectivity.

I know a "crime against nature" when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory.

I know many people far more upright and conscientious than I am who disagree, who think nothing of it. I know that vegetarianism runs agains mankind's most casual assumptions about the world and our place within it. And I now that factory farming is an economic inevitability, not likely to end anytime soon. But I don't answer to inevitabilities, and neither do you. I don't answer to tradition and I don't answer to Everyone. For me, it comes down to a question of whether I am a man or just a consumer. Whether to reason or just to rationalize. Whether to heed my conscience or my every craving, to assert my free will or just my will. Whether to side with the powerful and comfortable or with the weak, afflicted, and forgotten. Whether, as an economic actor in a free market, I answer to the god of money or to the God of mercy.

It is a terrible thing that religious people today can be so indifferent to the cruelty of the farms, shrugging it off as so much secular, animal rights foolishness. They above all should hear the call to mercy. They above all should have some kindness to spare.

Harsher methods of producing animal commodities are always more cost-efficient than kinder ones - in the space and type of food and degree of human care afforded to them - just as harsher labor conditions are often the most economical. When no country is willing to make concessions, and thereby risk losing a market, the only alternative is to drop the subject of animal welfare entirely, and exactly this is happening.

Confronted with each nation's own questionable products and practices, we have two choices. We can say, as Mr. Komatsu hopes, "Well they do X but we do Y, so who are we to judge?" We then end up with no standard at all, instead using other people's cruelties as an excuse for our own.

Even if our dealings with the lowly animals, this sort of relativism works its evils. What makes Mr. Komatsu's argument so insidious is its denial that there are realities about animals, that these realities are in crucial respects knowable, and that once known, we are morally obliged to accept and to act upon them regardless of culture or personal preference.

Why do any animals scream when they are wounded or killed, even when those screams can have no possible utility? Why do we scream, and why has evolution designed us to consciously experience our physical pain, but not them?

Why are the central nervous systems of mammals so much alike, and wouldn't it stand to reason that they serve precisely the same evolutionary purpose, motivating each creature to flee bodily harm and thereby perpetuate the species? If the purpose of pain is the same for us as for other animals, if the internal mechanisms of pain are the same, if the outward expressions of pain are the same, and if the medical treatments for pain are the same, why wouldn't the physical experience of pain be the same - and for that matter, the psychological experience of it as well?

Most vertebrates and all of our fellow mammals have similar chemical and neurological mechanisms that transmit and control pain. Under stress or trauma, they display physiological reactions identical to ours - increased heartbeat and perspiration, higher cortisone levels in the blood, a release of endorphins, serotonin, and other natural opiates. Their bodies respond to anesthesia just as our bodies do, and of course they display vocalizations, defensive behavior, and bodily contortions similar to ours. We may add to this physical evidence the fact that veterinarians today routinely prescribe exactly the same antidepressant drugs to dogs, cats, pigs, horses and other animals, including Prozac, Ritalin, Xanax, and beta-blockers, and these drugs have exactly the same soothing effects on them as on us.

Another determined skeptic of animal awarenss write that "the definition of consciousness has eluded us for over a century." But this isn't the problem at all. The problem is that as animals meet the old definitions, like conscious pain and deliberate communication, the experts keep making up new definitions.

We tend to assume, moreover, that instinct, even when it is clearly at work, means there can be no accompanying thought or feeling - as if a doe when she caresses her fawn, or lions when they hunt, or your cat when he or she kneads on you, can have no awareness or pleasure in that instinctive experience. We certainly don't assume that about ourselves when we feel the tug of instinct, in avoiding danger or safeguarding our young or seeking potential mates. On the contrary, the thoughts and emotions accompanying instinctive desires are usually the most vivid. The most earthy, ordinary human experiences - coupling, birthing, dying - are, in fact, the most deeply experienced. Instinctive desire and action in our own case does not always mean blind, unfeeling reflex, and there is no reason to suppose it is any different for them.

The difference is that whereas hey defer to common sense, empathy, and decency in the case of human consciousness, in the case of animals they do the opposite. The creatures are held to an impossible standard of evidence, an ever receding empirical horizon, allowing us to declare in theory that since we can never really know how they think and feel, we may safely conclude that they do not and act accordingly.

The shallow and self-centered view that sees what is worthy in nature as that which resembles us seems vapid and petty by comparison. We try so hard to show that chimpanzees, or monkeys, or dogs, or cats, or rats, or chickens, or fish, or frogs are like us in their thoughts and feelings; in doing so we do nothing but denigrate what they really are. We define true intelligence and true feeling in human terms, and in so doing blind ourselves to the wonder of life's diversity that evolution has bequeathed earth." -Mr. Budiansky

For here we have the livestock industry and its best minds admitting that the production units suffer. They now concede, in theory and practice, that the animals are feeling pain, and not just physical pain either but emotional torment.

Dr. Grandin herself, even in these otherwise dry and clinical reports, uses the words "stress," "pain," "fear," and "suffering" interchangeably. The creatures she describes are sensitive, sociable, communicative, alert beings who form images in their minds, think in pictures, respond to gentleness, fear harsh treatment, act by conscious intention, anticipate danger, make choices, and dread slaughter so much that their emotional terror can trigger traumatic physiological reactions affecting meat quality. Most notable of all, they display individual differences in temperament and personality. As she describes the pig playing with the toy: "Like a dog.

What exactly is the difference between "stress" and "suffering"? From the industry's standpoint, all the difference in the world. "Stress" is a scientific and economic problem. Stress is a defect in the product, a correctable "syndrome." Stress is holding things up at the packing plant. Stress is requiring too much input in the care of the production units. Stress is costing good money, and we've got to make 'em pay. Talk to these same folks about the pain and suffering and terror and loneliness of the creatures raised in these squalid factories, never seeing the light of day, denied company or recreation, denied the least bit of human warmth for all of Dr. Grandin's touching advice - and no, that just doesn't make sense to them. That's a lot of moralistic, anthropomorphic nonsense.

A moment later a stillness fills the barn. You can hear the breathing of five hundred animals as slowly they begin pressing forward. Those in the nearest pen edge up for a sniff. Eyes appear between the slats of the fences. Heads pop up in the back, then more, and more, until there is an audible press forward, two thousand hooves on concrete, everybody now rising and jostling and straining to see the god. Some are up on their hind legs, forelegs curled over the fences of their pens, ears half-erect, eyes filled with fear and life and what any man with eyes of his own to see will know as intelligence. Temple Grandin's words come to mind. They are just like puppies.

We create these animals for our profit and pleasure, playing with their genes, violating their dignity as living creatures, forcing them to lie and live in their own urine and excrement, turning pens into penitentiaries and frustrating their every desire except what i needed to keep them breathing and breeding. And then we complain about the smell. But no one who has seen the inside of a modern hog farm will find comfort in these assurances of their happiness. And no one who has seen how they are treated will ever again dare to use "pig" as a synonym for filth and greed and ugliness.

I ask about Temple Grandin, since she understands modern agriculture and Smithfield has hired her for consultation. She advices extra space so the animals can turn around, "soft, pliable" objects to chew on, and toys so they can play. She's a Ph. D too. Yet to all appearances, Smithfield has put none of her recommendations into practice. "Temple, he replies, "is a person that we pay to come in and say, 'How is the best way to deal with these animals?' We seek that advice. We pay those people." Exactly. They pay animal-welfare consultants for the privilege of saying that they have paid for animal-welfare consultants, without actually heeding any of the recommendations.

Slaughtering swine," he writes, "is repetitive, brutish work..... Five thousand quit and five thousand are hired every year. You ear people say, 'They don't kill pigs in the plant, they kill people.

The present day mentality, more perhaps than that of people in the past, seems opposed to a God of mercy, and in fact tends to exclude from life and to remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy. The world and the concept of "mercy" seem to cause uneasiness in man, who, thanks to the enormous development of science and technology, never before known in history, has become master of the earth and has subdued and dominated it. This dominion over the earth, sometimes understood in a one-sided and superficial way, seems to leave no room for mercy.

Nature has its own hardships, but its own kindnesses, too, like straw and room to sleep and the are of a mother for her young.

Leave us to our whale," as the whalers say, "and we will leave you to your McDonalds and pork chops." They have a point. If you can have your favorites treats from the factory farm, why on earth can't others have their whale meal, or others their "racks" or ivory or fur coats or macaque brains or whatever? By what moral standard may we condemn any practice? The sole difference - that in the one case we are dealing wit wild animals, and in the other with animals bred and born just for our use - actually works to the favor of the killers. Their prey at least enjoyed some modicum of freedom. Their victims, at least, were not subjected to lives of unremitting pain and privation. And they, at least, were willing to do the job themselves.

Tolerance of the factory farms dictates a tolerance of just about everything else, in effect moving the ethical bar lower and lower until, after a while, the critical faculties break down and one cruelty is used to justify another - new "necessary evils" defended and permitted merely because the old ones still go on.... We cannot seriously question anything because we are not thinking seriously at all.

Why not start butchering and eating primates, too? Once accepted, the logic of the factory farm knows no limits. Indeed, every argument we have heard in defense of other cruelties is just as easily applied here. This will help us to conserve" primates, to keep up the stock. We need an "incentive" to keep primates alive, a little bonus for all our good works. Primates, too, must "pay their own way." Throughout Africa, chimpanzees, orangutans, and even gorillas are picked off anyway by poachers and hunters - who illegally ship at least a thousand tons of primate meat every year to Britain alone. Why not make the whole thing more orderly, systematic, and profitable with primate farms?

For many in the West, this idea of primate abattoirs may take some getting used to. Yet we are hardly in a position to object. We might recoil at the thought, believing that conscious, feeling creatures should not be treated that way, but we are well advised to keep our own counsel. We might say of those European consumers with a taste for primate flesh that they are thoughtless and decadent, indulging frivolous appetites at the cost of unspeakable cruelty. Since when did that become the standard? They have traditions and preferences of their own. They like their primate meat. And who are the customers of Smithfield to lecture them on the virtues of self-restraint?

Although one hesitates to put even the most maniacal trophy hunter into quite the same category as a crush-video enthusiast, rationally there is not all that much difference between crushing and filming a small animal for the thrill of it and hunting and filming a large one for the thrill of it. In the pain inflicted and the pleasures gained, there is no great moral distinction to be made between a crush video, now illegal and "With Deadly Intent, Double-Barreled Zambezi Adventure," and all the rest of that sadistic filth we saw in Reno being made and sold by perfectly legal means.

Our laws concerning animals are a system of inconsistencies, special privileges, and arbitrary dispensations best described as codified caprice.

Having granted some protections to some animals, we are constantly confronted with the logic of our own laws, troubled by perfectly rational connections etween the random or "wanton acts of cruelty the law forbids and the systematic, institutional cruelties it still permits.

If this animal is to be protected, why not that identical one, too? If it is cruelty to confine or mistreat a dog, a cat, or even a pet lamb or pig, why is it not cruelty to confine and mistreat millions of equally sensitive animals at Smithfield, IBP, ConAngra, and other such places? When we speak of the unavoidable severity of livestock production or laboratory experiments or trapping, and so on, just how rigorously are we defining "unavoidable"?

While we are dealing with different people, different cultures, and different standards, we are still dealing with the same whale.

When we condemn cruelty to animals, we don't call it un-American, or un-European, or un-Japanese. We call it inhumane.