At that point we might finally acknowledge that raising, killing and eating animals must be done differently.
To the Editor: Thank you for your courageous article today on the raising, killing and cooking of rabbit.
"Human beings raise animals to feed themselves… In the years after the war, when there was a shortage of food, people were used to raising, killing, bleeding, skinning, plucking and cooking an animal.
Smithfield Foods, which raises, kills and processes more pigs than any company on earth, does not like some of the things a union has been saying about conditions at its giant slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, N.C., where 4,650 people work and 32,000 hogs die every day.
In New York City, the passion from teachers unions is all aimed at pay raises, killing charter schools and keeping rules that make it harder to get rid of incompetents, criminals and even, occasionally, sexual predators.
Critics of the wage increase said that the raise would kill jobs, particularly for younger workers.
And it's because these connections make so much sense that we should look more carefully at how we raise and kill animals.
I can understand why a chef and farmer like Dan Barber believes that we ought to raise animals, kill them humanely, and eat them.
But aside from all the obvious health benefits, for me, the way we raise and kill more than one billion land animals and fish for food each year in the UK was reason enough to make me go vegetarian many years ago.
In fact, only if meat were produced at no or little expense to the environment, public health or animal welfare (as, arguably, some of it is), would our decisions about whether to raise and kill animals for food come down to ethics.
