When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?

Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest stall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at, morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky.

Perhaps that is part of the animals' role among us, to awaken humility, to turn our minds back to the mystery of things, and open our hearts to that most impractical of hopes in which all creation speaks as one.

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are production units, and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests.

Religious people ... hold a kind and merciful view of life, the faith of the broken, the hounded, the hopeless. Yet too often, they will not extend that spirit to our fellow creatures.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

The factory farm is . . . an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous. . . All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog.