The Mistakes That Will Haunt Our Legacy

I believe that one will be our cruelty to animals. Modern society relies on factory farming to produce protein that is inexpensive and abundant. But it causes suffering to animals on an incalculable scale.

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Even when this system works perfectly, chickens sometimes have legs or wings broken as they are shackled. When the system fails, they are not stunned and struggle frantically as they are carried to the saw. The saw in turn misses many birds — the Agriculture Department says that 526,000 chickens were not slaughtered correctly last year — and some are boiled alive.

A child who plucks out a bird’s feathers may be punished, but corporate executives who torture birds by the billions are showered with stock options.

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I became a vegetarian almost two years ago (not a strict one, and I do eat fish) because my daughter nagged me (“provided moral guidance” would be a nicer spin), and I suspect that ethical and environmental considerations — and the increasing availability of tasty alternatives to meat — will lead our descendants to eat less meat, and be baffled at our casual acceptance of an industrial agricultural model built on large-scale cruelty.

“One day future generations will look back on our abuse of animals in factory farms with the same attitude that we have to the cruelties of the Roman ‘games’ at the Coliseum,” Peter Singer, a Princeton University philosopher, told me. “They will wonder how we could be blind to the suffering we are so needlessly inflicting on billions of animals.”

-  Nicholas Kristof