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We Hate Animal Cruelty—Unless We're Eating the Animal

Pets, not farm animals, get all our respect

By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:27 AM CDT | Updated Mar 20, 2011 12:30 PM CDT

(Newser) – In America, a 19-year-old can be arrested for killing a hamster—yet we are allowed to inflict great cruelty on animals kept, not as pets, but for food. That’s because of state laws called “Common Farming Exemptions” that allow the industry, instead of lawmakers, to basically define cruelty by making any common practice legal. “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,” writes Mark Bittman in the New York Times.

“We ‘process’ (that means kill) nearly 10 billion animals annually in this country,” Bittman continues. Many of those animals are raised in conditions that have been compared to concentration camps. You can't kick a pet dog, but anyone who raises animals for food can legally castrate calves and piglets with no anesthetic, skin live animals, or put chicks through grinders. “It’s time to take a look at the line between ‘pet’ and ‘animal,’” Bittman writes. “We should be treating animals better and raising fewer of them; this would naturally reduce our consumption. All in all, a better situation for us, the animals, the world.”

Chickens huddle in their cages at an egg processing plant at the Dwight Bell Farm in Atwater, Calif., Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008.
Chickens huddle in their cages at an egg processing plant at the Dwight Bell Farm in Atwater, Calif., Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008.   (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
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The industry has the power to define cruelty. It’s every bit as crazy as giving burglars the power to define trespassing.
- Jonathan Safran Foer, author,
Eating Animals

In light of the way most animals are treated in this country, I’m pretty sure that ASPCA agents don’t need to spend their time in Brooklyn defending rodents.
- Mark Bittman

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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 60 comments
stormy7
Mar 21, 2011 9:13 AM CDT
Get your hands on a video of how the animals end up as our food source and you might think twice about what you are eating. The lives they live in factory farming. The fear while being led to slaughter and sounds of horror. And of the filth in the end product that you put on your table will turn your stomach. If you want to live longer and healthier stop eating animals.
Datazz
Mar 20, 2011 1:32 PM CDT
slow news week eh? 3rd time this article has been bumped up to the top again tldr; least i still have mah chicken
bananana
Mar 20, 2011 1:18 PM CDT
To paraphrase the arguments: "Who cares if it's wrong? It tastes good! We're smarter than they are, we're stronger than they are, so fuck animals! Why should we reduce our consumption, just because we can do so easily and it would be to our and everyone's benefit? That's life!" In other threads about class warfare, many people will decry the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy - the bankers are heartless psychopaths! They don't need to take our money or our lives, they have enough! Yet, they will fail to draw the parallel. How can we expect from the wealthy (empathy, imagining ourselves in others' circumstances, restraint) what most of us don't practice ourselves? That's what we are to the bankers - a distant abstraction worth exploiting (and barely worth thinking about) because, fuck it, we taste good. The lack of concern for animal wellbeing and the lack of concern for the poor are both symptoms of our narcissistic, selfish, and unimaginative culture.

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