An Animal's Place

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   ...More than any other institution, the American industrial 
animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look 
like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these 
places life itself is redefined -- as protein production -- and with 
it suffering. That venerable word becomes ''stress,'' an economic 
problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or 
beak-clipping or, in the industry's latest plan, by simply 
engineering the ''stress gene'' out of pigs and chickens. ''Our own 
worst nightmare'' such a place may well be; it is also real life for 
the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath 
these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a 
''production unit'' in the days before the suffering gene was 
found....

Michael Pollan, "An Animal's Place," 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/10ANIMAL.html>   *****
-- 
Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>