Since no one was asked to kill a cow, it’s hard to say how many really would.
But given the realities of factory farming, cows might be better off if those of us who do eat meat had to slaughter them ourselves.
It’s been more than a century since the publication of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s indictment of the meatpacking industry as both dehumanizing to workers and inhumane to animals. And while some things have changed, in far too many ways, much remains the same.
Industrial farms and slaughterhouses still ratchet up production and profit at worker and animal expense. At supermarkets, consumers pick up a pound of ground round or package of chops without giving much thought to where they came from.
If the industry is abhorrent — and it is — we choose to avert our gaze rather than to change our ways.
Or as Matthew Scully, author of “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy,” put it in an essay he wrote for “The American Conservative” and adapted for The Humane Society of the United States, we prefer to view factory farming as “a small wrong on the grand scale of good and evil.”
Four years have passed since Scully, who is now a vegan, wrote the book that changed his own mind.
After seeing “a few typical farms up close,” the view looked very different to him.
He now sees industrial farming as “a truly rotten business passed over in polite conversation.” He believes its abuses are “a serious moral problem.”
There has been a tendency among conservatives, perhaps especially religious conservatives, to consider the issue of animal rights as a liberal or secular cause. But as Scully has keenly pointed out, one is no more likely to see the issue raised in “The Nation” or “The New Republic” as in similar yet more conservative journals.
