On another note, my High Plains Journal column has generated some interesting reader feedback this week. Thought I would share that with you as well:

"The point of the animal rights argument is that factory farmers have created freaks: biogenetically engineered livestock fashioned to human tastes, just so humans can eat them, wear them, drink them, and exploit them in rodeos, cockfights, bullfights, etc. - and then imprison them for life. Today's cows and chickens and turkeys and pigs and sheep do not exist in nature. The fact that some of these animals - who are trapped in small pens and cages, unable to go outdoors and have any kind of normal life, or crowded into filthy feedlots, or stuck as milking machines or egg laying machines or breeding machines - will sometimes fight with and kill each other, can hardly be surprising under the circumstances. Humans in similar crowded conditions do the the same thing, e.g., in prisons. That's why you farmers cruelly debeak chickens, castrate cows and horses, and cut off pigs' tails (without anesthesia, of course). How you can flatter yourself that you're being kind to animals, while fully supporting all the horrors of factory farming, is astounding to me. Reminds me of the slaveowners who used to claim they were kind to their slaves and they couldn't figure out why the abolitionists wanted them freed." ...

Ardeth Baxter
http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/73235/ardeth_baxter.html