Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them.

Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes--not often, but sometimes--the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

We live in an age when you can prowl the streets of major cities and find human beings offering themselves in store windows, or just reach for the yellow pages and have them delivered. It is the same mindset at work, spreading in our world, and after a while this attitude can find nothing very special about anything or anybody, let alone whales.

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

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.

Animals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions - about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul - forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world.

When we call something unfair or indecent or unconscionable or evil, when we speak of mercy and pity and compassion, those words have meaning, regardless of our particular faith or moral philosophy. They appeal to common standards we all are expected to understand and accept, standards without which we could not live any common life at all.