Robin wades in way over his head, flounders in the deep end, drowns.

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. . .

More here. . . We care far more about our pets than our food, even if they are very similar creatures. And we know deep down that the usual sorts of principles most folks endorse do not support this behavior. We are hypocrites.

Those with a strong self-image as a principled intellectual have two outs:

1. Become vegetarian, to make our acts match our words.
   
2. Change our principles, to make our words match our acts.

Rather than warring to the death for one side or the other to win such a conflict, I prefer to seek compromises between our near and far selves. Let us seek principles that can account for most of our acts, then try to change the other acts to conform with such easier principles. My tentative resolutions:

• We don’t care much about most animals, even smart ones.
• It is a bad sign about someone that they would be enjoy watching animals being tortured. We prohibit such watching to make our society look “civilized” to other societies.
• We are kind to our pets to show others we are loyal to those loyal to us. Fido has always been there for us, so we will be there for him – up to a point at least.
• We are willing to spend only modest sums to make food animal lives a bit more enjoyable. We should spend such sums, but not go overboard

We don't see pets as animals, at least not in the same sense as wild animals or domestic food animals. They are people in a generous sense, members of the family, us rather than them. That this inclusive behavior is also varibale across cultures and within cultures demonstrates that it isn't about animals, it's about people.

This isn't hypocrisy. It's the same mechanism of every in-group/out-group dynamic. Our sensibilites vary depending on in/out status, ranging from fierce protection to indifference to active loathing and animosity. This is not a fault that will be affected, much less cured, by food fetishes. Wrong species. Wrong universe.

A competent intellectual, then, can dismiss the muddled ruminations of those who have only a limited grasp of natural systems, though one might try to explain things a bit, out of kindness I suppose.

We eat animals since that is our nature. It has always been so and our existence depends on doing a competent job of it. As with many natural behaviors there are those who get squicked about gross bodily reality . . .eeeewwwwwwww. They are neurotic, maladjusted, and should have no impact on reasoned judgements. People poop, get horrific diseases and rot away, do ludicrous things to one another's bodies for pleasure, etc. etc. And, they eat.

In some future it is a certainty that we will develop more efficient, less costly ways to produce the nutrients that we require. Rather than ripping the breasts of Mother Earth with steel fingers to grow crops and steal from her what she would willingly give, we'll just perform some molecular kung-fu and make food out of air and rocks. It will have perfect proteins with all amino acids in proper proportion so that the unique contributions of animals will be of little intrinsic value. Eating them, or the fruit of earth rape, will be an atavistic vice of gourmets.

Robin selected some other grafs from the article without comment.

Foer’s villains include Smithfield, Tyson Foods, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and—rather more surprisingly—Michael Pollan. There is perhaps no more influential critic of the factory farm than Pollan, and Foer acknowledges that he “has written as thoughtfully about food as anyone.” But when Pollan looks at animals he doesn’t feel worried or guilty or embarrassed. He feels, well, hungry. …

Pollan says, it’s too late for people to start worrying about eating animals. The problem with factory-farmed meat isn’t the meat; it’s the factory. The solution is to return animals to the sorts of places where they can graze and root and fly—or at least flap around—before being dispatched. …

Pollan contends that “people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless.” Similarly, the author and livestock expert Temple Grandin, who designs what are often called “humane slaughterhouses,” argues, “We owe animals a decent life and a painless death.” We “forget that nature can be harsh,” she has written. “Death at the slaughter plant is quicker and less painful than death in the wild. Lions dining on the guts of a live animal is much worse in my opinion.” …

But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on other organisms without being sickened.

Pollan is a semi-literate journalist who is wrong more often than right, but Temple Grandin is a major thinker with myriad accomplishments who walks the talk and talks a lot. Those of us who live in semi-wild settings get it. It is perfectly obvious that our pampered animals have lives of luxury that wild animals do not enjoy. Indeed, the wild animals want nothing more than to join them and be cared for and protected too. Their fate is to die horribly, and soon. They live in visceral fear every moment of every day.

Those engaged in such debates seem to be impoverished intellectually and aesthetically. They have no useful grasp of natural systems, life in general, or even their own existence. They are the sort that vomit and faint at the sight of a natural birth rather than having the more natural reaction of being thrilled to the core at witnessing fundamental reality. So too they lack the maturity and integrity to face death. They live childish half-lives . . . like pets or domestic food animals.