"Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check, either on the sentiment of the brutality."

--People are disconnected from where their food comes from and therefore have no moral obligation to consider the life and death of their meat.

"The measure of their suffering is not their prior experiences, but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts."

--Life for an animal in an industrial farm is cruelest form imprisonment imaginable.

"A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency and the moral imperative of religion or community, which have historically served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is one of the cultural contradictions of capitalism"

--The tendency of the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy towards animals is one such casualty."

--My father is the perfect example of somebody who would trade animal suffering for saving a buck or two.

"For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character—its essential pig-ness or wolf-ness or chicken-ness."

--Therefore, farm animals would be happiest in farms and not in the wild or in an industrial factory.

"Humans provided the animals with food and protection, in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and flesh. Both parties were transformed by the relationship: animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves, and the humans gave up their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled life of agriculturists."

--A symbiosis where the animals are fed and reproduce as well as the human animals.

"To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm is to appreciate just how parochial and urban a ideology animal rights really is. It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world."

--Overstated, but I agree.

"The vegetarian utopia would make us even more dependent than we already are on an industrialized national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers, since food would need to travel further and manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do."

--Wow, he was doing good up to this point! Here our author gets to narrow-minded, becoming as extreme as those he criticizes do. Firstly, a better understanding of a food chain is necessary. If we are looking at the global distribution of the Sun’s energy, then we must notice that it dissipates with use. That is why if you look at a food chain there are ten times as many herbivores as there are carnivores. Imagine the number of elk in a herd as compared to the number of wolves in a pack. Therefore, we could feed ten times as many people with vegetable-based protein. Secondly, nature has little to do with this if we define nature as land untouched by human’s hand. Nature has plenty of problems and we have plenty of farms and farms aren’t nature. Thirdly, if you ask your average vegetarian about the food they eat, you will most likely find out they eat organic food, which is far better for nature anyway.

"There is, too, the fact that we human’s have been eating meat animals as long as we have lived on this earth."

--True, but, our ancestors, like modern bears, which are also omnivores, ate only 20% meat in their diet. (Note for you Chris: somewhere in the old testament, in Genesis, I’m fairly certain, it says that God started we humans out as vegetarians and then God told them they could eat meat. I would look it up for you, but right now I’m too tired to! –Love, Mom.)

"The world is full of places where the best, if not only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it—especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein…"

--True again, but again overstated. Grazing animals transforms cellulose into protein, and sure enough we cannot do that ourselves. But, because of the larger demand of meat, beef cattle are fed grains that would be better off fed to people.

"Under the pressure of the hunt, humans brain grew in size and complexity."

--Great, I agree fully. But, how many meat eaters actually hunt for meat for their food nowadays? Not nearly enough. I believe people should have to earn the right to eat meat, and that should be done by hunting, even if it is only once in their lifetime.

"The industrialization—and dehumanization—of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way. Tail docking and sow crates and back clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end. For who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve."

--I agree fully.