"Nobody would have mistaken Brunhilda for a saint, but nobody could forget her, either. Exasperating as she was, I would never had punished her by locking her in a cage so small, she couldn't turn around. That sounds like torture to me."
--Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, May 31, 2026
Growing up a suburban kid the closest I ever got to farm animals was saran wrapped steaks and pork chops at the Giant Food store in Bethesda, Maryland, except for one summer when I got sent to a day camp on a farm where I saw them giving a horse some sort of injection and the horse bled at the injection site, a rill running down its hip, and he reared up, and had to be restrained by a farmhand pulling on its harness, and I refused to return to the camp, refused to say why, until my parents finally figured out what it was that had so disturbed me, and the farmer/camp owner explained to me the horse was unharmed and, in fact, benefited from his injection just as I had benefited from injections.
Twenty years later, I wound up living for a year on a potato farm, and my neighbors all raised animals--chickens mostly--but also pigs, goats, some cows on what would now be called "free range" farms and as I went jogging down those country roads, I saw them killing animals daily.
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| Barber's Pond |
In fact, fifty feet off my front door was a small pond, and one day I awoke to see ten empty plastic milk bottles bobbing up and down in the pond and going out in my rowboat, I discovered they were tethered to cinderblocks at the bottom and I commenced pulling them up. A neighbor had set traps for the turtles in the pond, and he complained to the owner of the farm about my depredation of his attempts to catch himself turtle soup.
The owner of the farm backed me, mostly because the neighbor had never asked his permission.
My girlfriend and I would sit on the porch at night and listen to the sounds emanating from the pond. "That frog," she said, "Must weight fifteen pounds." The frogs, with the deep bull frog bass, and the soprano frogs could have made a great Doo-Wop group, but the turtles were silent, now safe at whatever depths turtles hung out.
That was my first venture into animal rights.
I had just moved to that farm after eight years on Manhattan's Upper East side, and that guy in the movie "Martian" had nothing on me for mood shift.
Today, I live a mile from a farm which raises pigs, cows, goats, and starting each July, turkeys. Every week I bicycle past the pig sty, and one day it struck me that the little piglets I saw suckling grew over the months to the size of a Boston Terrier, but they never seemed to get any larger and then disappeared. When I mentioned that to my neighbors, they rolled their eyes and told me I could find them at the local Hannaford's, in the meat department.
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| Obadiah Youngblood, "Covered Bridge" |
The turkeys arrive as small fluffy things and are consigned to Camp Turkey, where as Mary, my local native guide to things Hampton, calls them, "Death Row Turkeys."
The farm sells them each November the week before Thanksgiving, and that whole story has been told in The Phantom Speaks Blog as "Game of Bones," so I'll not elaborate on it now, other than to say these turkeys at least are about as "free range" as white turkeys can be, with a football field sized enclosure, screened off from the wild turkeys who sometimes gawk at the white turkeys as if viewing captive animals at a zoo.
None of the farms I've just mentioned are anything like the huge industrialized protein factories Kristoff was talking about, where pigs are kept in cages so small they cannot turn around, where profit motive and industry mission statements dictate these sentient beings be treated as a protein source to be raised as cheaply as possible to be sure the overhead side of the ledger is small as possible.
Wild pigs, or boars, are, of course, destructive of farm crops and they are dangerous animals, and youtube is full of channels showing men hunting them with AK-15 attack rifles on foot, from helicopters or from trucks. The creepy thing about these videos is all the delighted whooping and squeals, when one of these hunters fells a desperate fleeing pig, who collapses and his legs jerk in what looks like a seizure, and the glee from the unseen, off screen hunter is unnerving.
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| Killing This Looks Justified |
If you saw a small boy sitting, grinning, as he pulled the legs off a praying mantis, or locking a kitten into a microwave and gleefully hit the cook button, or tying a brick around a puppy and heaving it into a lake, you would cringe and call the psychiatrist. But the delighted squeals from the boar hunters as they blast the panicked boars is just boys having fun.
When the railroad cars at Auschwitz were thrown open and an arm, tattooed with a number flopped out into view, American GI's reacted in horror: "Like cattle!" they gasped.
To treat them like cattle was horrible.
To treat cattle or pigs like cattle is not.
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| Charnel House |
When I was 19, my parents got me a plum job working in a lab at the National Institutes of Health, which was just a short drive from my home. In those days, there were no fences or walls around the campus, which really looked like a big college, with gracious green sun lit lawns and red brick three story buildings.
I worked in three different labs over the course of three summers there. These jobs were something I could put on my applications to medical school to make me look like a more promising applicant.
The first summer, I worked in a lab which studied the evolution of sleep, which meant various electrical devices got implanted through the skulls and into the brains of various animals from possums to spiny anteaters to frogs. Turns out, most animals sleep and they may even dream, although what they dream about was beyond the purview of the guy who ran the lab and who published many papers about sleep in "lower forms" of animals.
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| Spiny Anteater |
To wonder about what a frog dreams about gets you thinking. But I am sure animals do dream, ("to sleep; perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub" as the Bard said) having watched my dog sleep, his back legs moving as if running, and listening to his grunts and whimpers: He is either chasing or being chased, but he is clearly dreaming. You don't need an implanted electroencephalogram to know that.
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| Annoying, Undistractable Goat |
The lab had a farm in rural Maryland and one day we went out to plant a radio transmitter in the stall of a goat who had an electroencephalogram device implanted in his brain, through his skull, sticking out of his skull. My job was to distract the goat so the lab technician could sneak in and plant the transmitting device in the back of the stall without the goat noticing it. The goat had found and destroyed every previous monitor the lab had tried to install.
"Goats are uncanny," the lab guy told me. "You can turn cartwheels in front of the cage, play a trombone but if I try to creep into the back of the stall from the back door, you'll see him looking over his shoulder and he turns around and ignores you and pays full attention to me, because he knows you're just the hired fool. How does he know that? Really annoying."
So, was that goat really a "lower form" of animal?
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| Unfortunate Possum |
As a side gig, the guy who ran the sleep lab did the favor of testing various drugs in possums, for someone studying some drugs, to see if those drugs lowered their seizure thresholds. If a new sleep medication lowered the seizure threshold in a possum, it might not be the best choice for human beings. The way you discovered whether the drug lowered the possum's seizure threshold was to grab its tail and whip the possum up and down, its head whapping the hard concrete floor of the lab--I'll never forget the sound their jaws made hitting that floor--and you had to do it thirty times. If the possum went into a grand mal convulsion, that was not a good drug for people. If not, well, the possum had had a bad morning, but it could have been worse, considering what was done to other lab animals, and if the possum did not convulse, the drug might be safe.
I could only bring myself to do three possums before I managed to find other tasks to do around the lab so I didn't have to whip possums by their tails. This was a lot worse than watching a horse get an injection, but I was older by then and maybe my medical school admission depended on my beating up on helpless possums. (As it turned out, medical school admission officers were uninterested in my cosmetic lab experience--the only summer job they asked me about was working as a lifeguard and swim team coach, which I loved because the kids were so great, and you could see the smiles on the interviewers who were sick of hearing about how many test tubes applicants had rattled during summer vacations.)
The next summer I worked in a biochemistry lab which was trying to delineate various pathways in the metabolism of glucose in the liver. To do this, white lab rats were splayed out, as if on a rack, each limb pulled taut by a plastic manacle and a midline chest to abdomen incision made, and the exposed liver was catheterized with a plastic tube. After about three hours on the rack, the rat was "sacrificed."
I don't know how important figuring out those particular glycosylation pathways in the rat really was. I'm not sure that knowing what was happening in a rat's liver actually tells you what is happening in a human liver, but I do know I had dreams every night about those rats, and I lost a lot of sleep that summer.
Walking into the building where we were working on those rats, sometimes I'd see a line of six or seven people holding up signs from a group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) which said, "Animals Have Feelings, Too," and "Is It Really Worth It?" And, "We Treat Lab Animals Badly."
I thought, "Oh, you have no idea what an understatement that is."
Tough Guy Carnivore
Obviously, I was not the only person thinking what I was thinking: Years later I discovered a wonderful animated movie called "The Secret of NIMH," which my sons loved, and it was about rats at the National Institute of Mental Health, and their escape from torture chambers there. This was based on a book by Robert Conly, a journalist not an NIH employee. His book, "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" won lots of awards, but I had never heard of it, or I surely would have read it to my sons, but we were lucky to have the film. The book was published in 1971, when I was in medical school, so it's development likely took place during the years when I worked summers at the NIH torturing rats.
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| No Mercy Kid |
Of course, I wanted to show the movie to my grand daughters but their mother, a pediatrician, would not allow it because it was too likely to upset them. Thus are we protected in American life from thinking about what we do to animals. I take her point, though. Still, I raised boys, and they were not mentally traumatized by considering the fate of lab rats and Jeremy the Crow (voiced by Dom Deloise) is worth the cost of the DVD.
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| Robert Conley |
Throughout medical school and post graduate training, I always ran the other way when asked to participate in studies involving animals. Those rats and nude mice and spiny anteaters may have contributed some small bit to a sea of knowledge, but what it seemed to me was what they were really sacrificing for was the publication list of some lab director, toward tenure or career advancement, but not so much toward human health.
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| Banting, Best & Lab Dog |
Which is not to say animal studies are never necessary. Without animal studies the polio vaccine would not have been possible and insulin would not have been discovered in 1921.
But I preferred other kinds of research. I came to think there are lots of ways to achieve your goals without torturing animals and that ought to be a last resort.
And if your goal is to get cows to produce the maximum gallons of milk, maybe there's a way to do that without locking them into stalls. Looking at those cows who are standing in their own excrement on industrial farms, being fed tons of antibiotics--which is the real source of drug resistant bacteria, not promiscuous use in human patients, I would bet--and pigs trapped in metal cages for whatever short life they may have before the slaughterhouse, I wonder if the industrialized engineering of animal protein could not be achieved some other way.
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| Samantha and the Pig, Obadiah Youngblood |
Efficiency experts maximize things to achieve goals. If the goal, the mission statement, is to produce animal protein at the lowest cost and greatest pound per dollar, then you would keep pigs penned mercilessly, and the pork farmer's lobby, "Big Pork," has got Republicans on board with a law called the "Save Our Bacon," law. (Republicans are always so good at creating names for laws, much better than Democrats.) So these pigs are just "bacon," and don't we all love bacon?
The same thing happens when efficiency experts apply their skills to medical practice, where electronic medical records have allowed doctors to see more and more patients every day because record keeping, which is essential in medical practice, takes a long time to produce when written by hand, and new computer programs, "electronic medical records" or EMR's, vastly increase the speed with which records can be generated.
Of course, the EMR drives faster appointments while it delivers bigger bills for the hospital, but the patients often feel they are not seeing a doctor but a data entry clerk who isn't really listening but simply filling in the blanks. The patients get to feel like the pig in the steel cage: hemmed in.
In 2008 I read Michael Pollan's wonderful, "Omnivore's Dilemma" which traced the sources of the food an American finds on his dinner plate, and that turned out to be, overwhelmingly, corn. Even the steak was corn, when you got right down to it, in the most cost effective efficient sense. Turning the last page, I thought, "You know, I really don't need to eat farmyard animals." Pollan was not writing a Vegan screed and he finished his book with his wild boar hunt, and the meal he made from it, but I was not persuaded.
I would have no trouble existing on cereal, breads, vegetables, I thought. Why not try it? Would I really miss chicken, beef or pork?
Later, watching nature shows on Youtube, I decided salmon are okay to eat because they just swim upstream and those not taken by bears turn all red, go belly up, and die after spawning, so they are suicidal fish and their protein would be wasted anyway, so I'll eat salmon.
I am also willing to rationalize lobsters, who are like giant ants with no facial expressions, and anyway I live in New Hampshire, where lobsters are inexpensive and called "New Hampshire chicken." And the lobster rolls at the Beach Plum down the street on the North Hampton ocean front are pretty wonderful.
But I still cannot bring myself to plop a lobster into a boiling pot of water and listen to the hissing and think about that living creature trying to escape. So, yes, you are correct, I am not rational about this.
I certainly do not believe myself to be righteous in not eating meat or pork. I do eat this stuff occasionally, and I would never feel morally superior to meat eaters, which I was, shamelessly, until 20 years ago.
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| "Save Our Bacon" |
But, just speaking for me, I'd rather not eat things that show me they really want to live, and maybe they even dream.
