we had several pig pens, and a few head of cattle, in pens against one of the hills surrounding the school itself. The water pipe ran from atop the hill, where the reservoir was maintained, with wooden stakes sustaining the whole proposition. A long thick pipe ran down from the hill, sustaining the whole station, school, rest home and all. An ingenious and obvious proposition.

The school milk was procured from local dairy. The specific gravity of the milk was weighed by the woman in charge of the kitchens. She would reject watered-down milk and supervise the pasteurization of the milk thus provided. It was terrible stuff, but tolerable. We were obliged to drink a glassful of it a day.

Ever and anon, a pig would be brought forth from his pen, to be slaughtered. The school discouraged us from watching the killing, but it was an event of horrid fascination. The pig would be tied up by one leg, shrieking and protesting, on a pulley, centered on a pyramid of steel pipe, above a concrete slab and a steel drum.

His throat would be slit, his last aria sung in a dying, thrilling crescendo as his trachea was cut. Bled out into the barrel, his guts cut loose, his head removed, he at last became cuts of meat.

I have lived with butchery all my life, and insisted my children live with it as well. I am no vegetarian: our teeth are evenly divided between carnivore and omnivore. Most Sundays, coming home from church, I would stop in at the meat store at the end of Summit Street, the Evanston to Elgin Road, to get a catfish for Sunday dinner. My kids would watch the fish come out of the galvanized steel tank, hung on a hook, killed, gutted, skinned and chopped into steaks. I would take the meat home, in a plastic bag, along with a container of Nona Belle's seasoned cornmeal, in which to coat the catfish.

I would put the sections of catfish to fry in a hot cast iron frypan, the pan my Uncle Dick and Aunt Adalene had bought me as a wedding present. So fresh was the fish, my daughter came out screaming from the kitchen: a section of tail was still flapping in the hot oil of the frypan.

All life forms on this planet exist in a state of eatability. Storks descend in their multitudes to devour the baby turtles, emerging from their sandy nests on the coast of Texas. The corals give birth to eggs and sperm in prodigious multitudes: the spawn of thousands of species depend on the moment of their release. Pitiless foxes eat the chicks of ducks and geese on the windblown grasslands of Canada and Russia. Snakes devour monkey babies, bears migrate to elk calving grounds, ants invade the termite mound. Around us, at scales both great and small, the young of every species are subjected to Darwinian pressures. And every shoat or calf in Iowa is no less Darwinian in its survival.

I would not willingly subject any living creature to a life of torment, no more than I would my own children. Yet I wonder at turns if one life or death matters more than another. We tolerate Bangla Desh and North Korea, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, where political madness dooms millions to lives of horrific suffering.

Why does this stuff matter to us?

And the Lovely Deanna's too (don't get her started on corn syrup; seriously, don't)...

But I'm still eatin' 'em.

To think is not enough; you must think of something -- Jules Renard

you can draw consistent parameters. I grew up on a 20 acre horse farm and personally I think owning a dog larger than a German Sheppard within city limits is cruel, let alone stuffing one into a one bedroom apartment. I also have a distaste for people who pen up 3 horses on a half an acre of land. But these are my own procivilities and I couldn’t imagine them as laws used to seize pets. And what about parakeets or fish? How big should their cages or aquariums be? And as Scott mentioned what about monkeys, rats, or mice raised to be test animals? How much space should they be given before they are injected with something, guillotined, and dissected? Absent some type of agreed upon ratio which figures in the mass of the animal to the minimum amount of space it is allowed you’re left a Potter Stewart ‘I know it when I see it’ standard for animal cruelty here. So while the sentiments motivating this may be noble, it has all the hallmarks of becoming a bad law, at least to me.

"That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am!"- Dr. Seuss

Hadn't heard about the California Proposition, and missed the Kristof piece. Sounds like it would a positive step toward ameliorating these animals' suffering.

Don't have time to get into it at the moment, but maybe this would be an interesting direction to take the conversation - I don't think that either a utilitarian (lessen suffering for the greatest number) or rights-based moral framework is especially promising as a way to ground efforts to improve the lot of farm (or lab) animals; I'm not entirely sure what the best replacement is, but I find some of the right-environmentalist arguments (from, say, Roger Scruton) worth serious consideration.

This is not to say that utilitarian and rights-based pleas aren't rhetorically effective - they probably are.

Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.

I agree wholeheartedly with George F. Will and BBR. These things don't happen often, and should be noted, as when the sky turns purple and trees hang with loaves and fishes.

As for animal experimentation: It's necessary, but the avoidance of needless suffering is a noble goal, is it not?

They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist...
-- General John B. Sedgwick, 1864

. . .what's your position on experimentation on animals for medical research?