Why farm animals at all?

• Author: Brook, Dan
• Position: From Readers - Letter to the Editor

Concluding a very interesting and informative article on some of the horrors of factory farming in the developing world (May/June), Danielle Nierenberg concludes: "Preserving prosperous family farms and their landscapes, and raising healthy, humanely treated animals, should also be viewed as a form of affluence." Though in some ways preferable to "factory farming," the small-scale farming of animals is only "humane" if we insist that humans are necessarily violent predators that cannot control their rapacious appetites. As humans, we should be able to do better than that.

While the article that followed (Brian Halweil's "The Argument for Local Food") was also interesting, it was similarly flawed. Perhaps, instead, there should have been an essay on "The Argument for Vegetarian Food." With such a horrifying cover illustration by Sue Coe accompanying an article that details many of those horrors, it...