Is Utopia a vegan paradise?

Or just a place where slaves do the killing for you?

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.  Besides, they don’t allow anything dirty or filthy to be brought into the city, lest the air become tainted by putrefaction and thus infectious.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516.

What pleasure can there be in listening to the barking and howling of dogs—isn’t that rather a disgusting noise?  Is any more pleasure felt when a dog chases a hare than when a dog chases a dog?  If what you like is fast running, there’s plenty of that in both cases; they’re just about the same.  But if what you really want is slaughter, if you want to see a creature torn apart under your eyes—you ought to feel nothing but pity when you see the little hare fleeing from the hound, the weak creature tormented by the stronger, the fearful and timid beast brutalized by the savage one, the harmless hare killed by the cruel hound.  Utopians, who regard this whole activity of hunting as unworthy of free men, have accordingly assigned it to their butchers, who, as I said before, are all slaves.  In their eyes, hunting is the lowest thing even butchers can do.  In the slaughterhouse, their work is more useful and honest, since there they kill animals only out of necessity; whereas the hunter seeks nothing but his own pleasure from killing and mutilating some poor little creature.  Taking such relish in the sight of slaughter, even if only of beasts, springs, in their opinion, from a cruel disposition, or else finally produces cruelty, through the constant practice of such brutal pleasured.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516.

Bailey's Radio Interview

My Agritalk radio interview this morning regarding the farm animal welfare debate.

Podcast interview on farm animal welfare

Here is a podcast interview with me regarding a paper I recently published in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy.

The Suffering of Cage-Free Eggs

There's a reason for cages By Anthony Rust, Rose Acres Farms  The chickens of California are the latest victims of Paul Shapiro and the Humane Society of the U.S Factory Farming Campaign. It is cruel to subject chickens to the less humane and substandard conditions the so-call animal rights people want. Hens die 2 to 3 times as fast under the cage-free conditions championed by the so-called animal rights people. This is a proven fact, and gathered data provides this. What looks good to humans does not work as well for chickens. Safety pens (cages) protect hens from killing one another, eating their own feces, big temperature changes and diseases caused by lack of protection other systems fail to provide. We quit using the systems wanted by the so-called animal rights people when we found that cages worked better for the hens. This was 40-50 years ago. We recently tried these systems again and they still don't work as well as cages for hens. Only those that are clueless, those that have been lied to or those who are misguided about hen welfare want to ban cages. Knowledgeable and caring people want to keep hens in cages until a better system is found because having hens in cages is the right thing to do for the chickens. It does seem to be true that cage-free eggs as we produce it in the U.S. is no better than caged eggs. However, there are cage-free methods that provide higher standards of care. These better methods are costly, which is why no one uses them.