Twenty-four hours of much-needed rain has relegated me to my study (my original plan for the day was early-spring gardening) where I've been reading articles online, covering subjects from recently-released biographies of Edna St. Vincent Millay; to John McCain's murky relationship with a female lobbyist; to who won the Democratic debate in Austin, Texas; to problems in the meat industry. In this casual browsing of information, I clicked on my bookmark for Atlantic.com and discovered that the online magazine has conveniently prepared for its readers links to previous articles written on "the decline of the meat industry" in America.
The opening article led me to a 2005 article by B. R. Myers, "If Pigs Could Swim." Myers describes how Europeans take much better care of their meat animals than Americans do. And why do they? He answers:
Livestock are treated better in Europe because Europeans want them treated better. They are treated worse here because we hardly think of them at all. It's as simple as that. . . [O]ur concern usually lasts only as long as it takes for an industry hack to express his.
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