After eating a nice veggie burger with extra pickles (for the low price of $2.26; thank you Burger King) I feel moved to address the posts by Matt, Tia, Scott, and Matt again about how we should respond to the cruelty of factory farming. Says Tia, addressing the response to Michael Vick's crimes:
I, too, find silly the spectacle of someone who is not in anydiscernible way opposed to factory farming practices fulminating aboutdogfighting, and there's just as much a cultural diversity argumentagainst a prohibition of dogfighting as there is against a prohibitionof any kind of law against animal cruelty. It's much easier tojustify encroachments on someone else's cultural practices if they'rebased on some kind of gesture towards a coherent ethical scheme;"factory farmed meat for me, but no dogfighting for thee" strikes me asthe most baseless sort of imperialism.
As a statement about the badness of the practices involved, that seems right. And as Tia says, the mere fact that we have entrenched social practices of treating different animals differently doesn't make any moral difference -- entrenched social practices of treating different races or genders differently, for example, don't justify themselves. There's some difference in the way we should regard the agents, though. One has to be quite cruel to make a leisure activity out of watching animals suffer terribly. By contrast, the distance between a diner and the sow that spent her entire life squeezed into a gestation crate is large enough that one can understand how kind-hearted people ignore the suffering and order the pork chops.
