If you raise beef cattle, you intend to have them killed for your own profit. You have roughly the relationship to them that Tony Soprano has to pretty much everyone in his life: I let you live as long as it serves my purposes. And it may look like cattle ranchers are various sorts of Tony Soprano monsters.
Beef cattle wouldn't exist if they didn't exist to be killed, and cattle ranchers would have no relationship to them at all, if they were not in the business of preparing them for slaughter. So how does one read this relationship? Can one have a sane and morally clean relationship to a creature one is also using without its consent? That question casts a broad shadow: over slavery, problematic marriages, corporate relations to workers. One needs to tread very carefully here.
I think that a great deal of the most important moral work will be available through thinking about animal relations.
Posted by shea0017 at July 18, 2004 9:41 AM