I have to agree, for the most part

Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

It’s time to take a look at the line between “pet” and “animal.” When the ASPCA sends an agent to the home of a Brooklyn family to arrest one of its members for allegedly killing a hamster, something is wrong.

That “something” is this: we protect “companion animals” like hamsters while largely ignoring what amounts to the torture of chickens and cows and pigs. In short, if I keep a pig as a pet, I can’t kick it. If I keep a pig I intend to sell for food, I can pretty much torture it. State laws known as “Common Farming Exemptions” allow industry — rather than lawmakers — to make any practice legal as long as it’s common. “In other words,” as Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of “Eating Animals,” wrote me via e-mail, “the industry has the power to define cruelty. It’s every bit as crazy as giving burglars the power to define trespassing.”

I don't expect everyone in the world to turn vegetarian, but there a lot more ethical and humane ways to raise food animals than in today's megafarming production and processing. People just look the other way and there are folks who have never been on a farm who don't even know where that wrapped piece of meat came from--and even those who have grown up on farms would be shocked at how the megaproducers keep and slaughter animals. If I did eat meat, for example, I'd rather eat a deer that had a good chance to get away than a veal calf or debeaked caged chicken.

As far as animals, I eat the one thing I feel I can kill--fish. I do eat eggs, cheese, and drink milk, but I try to get the majority of that from free-range, organic sources when possible.

Contrary to many people's opinions, we don't need to eat animals to live. But, at the very least, can't we try to lessen their suffering?