Abuse and torture is part of American life

Last week, three adolescent girls in Louisiana poured gasoline on a dog and set it on fire, not once but twice. Needless to say, people are sickened and outraged that anyone could commit such a horrific and cruel act.

Their outrage is justified, but here is another way to look at it: Most of the people discussing the atrocity are probably doing so over a meal of grocery store scrambled eggs, baked chicken, or hamburger.

The things that are done to chickens, hogs, and cows in America's factory farms are as obscene as what those girls did to the dog: Chickens are packed into crates so tight that they can't move, and their beaks are cut off. Cows and hogs are similarly crowded onto exposed trucks, regardless of the weather, and this crowding often causes injuries. There have been numerous instances of live hogs' legs being pulled off, and injured hogs and cows left to die in a heap. During slaughter, still-conscious animals sometimes get their throats slit, and are dropped into a vat of boiling water. Veal calves are crowded into crates and force-fed, as are geese who will become foie gras. Recently, one of the nation's largest chicken processing plant's employees admitted to splattering live chickens against the wall "to relieve stress."

Not only are Americans eating millions of factory farm animals, but also using products that were tested on animals in ways that cause a great deal of suffering. Again and again, the discovery is made that labs are not bothering to use more humane methods of testing, and even those that do keep the animals confined and alone for their entire lives. (At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil, for example, investigators found routine abuse of animals in 2002. The school promised to practice strict humane methods, but when a follow-up investigation was done this year, the animals were being abused as much as ever.)

It is not popular to point out that as a nation, we are constantly commiting acts of torture on defenseless creatures, just as once, it wasn't popular to point out that we were treating non-whites as sub-human, or children as property. In the 19th Century, scientists went out of their way to "prove" that animals could not feel physical pain so that people would not object to their being butchered and experimented on without anesthesia. Today, we know that animals feel physical pain just as we do, but this knowledge seems to have done us no good in terms of stimulating our compassion and sense of decency.