The smell of factory farms . . . many notice these places only when the odours reach their homes, affecting their own quality of life. We create these animals for our profit and pleasure, playing with their genes, violating their dignity as living creatures, forcing them to lie and live in their own urine and excrement, turning pens into penitentiaries and frustrating their every desire except what is needed to keep them breathing and breeding. And then we complain about the smell.
Matthew ScullySometimes 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.
Matthew ScullyTo 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.
Matthew ScullyWhen we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral reasoning.
Matthew ScullyMy point is that when you look at a rabbit and can see only a pest, or vermin, or a meal, or a commodity, or a laboratory subject, you aren't seeing the rabbit anymore. You are seeing only yourself and the schemes and appetites we bring to the world-seeing, come to think of it, like an animal instead of as a moral being with moral vision.
Matthew Scully