1) you can emit less green house gasses by going veggie than driving a prius

2) it takes a lot of fuel to raise beef. You get more calories by eating the grain in the first place.

3) The whole of agri-business is self defeatist and not sustainable. Go vegetarian.

4) Buy foods localy and from other markets. Just because it is local does not make it better for your local economy. Moreover you can be helping another/other than local economy with your purchase.

5) organic is largely a marketing tool, and is only slightly better than the large scale commercial method or raising chickens/eggs.

6) Think through you purchases. Often you are doing more harm.

Over all, this article has raised some hackles. Good. Perhaps people will think some things through in regaurds to the ideas presented.

Jeffrey Koetje, M.D.: Why are so many people so threatened by the mere suggestion that the Life that permeates all living things obligates us to act ethically, kindly, tenderly in our interactions with each other and with the natural world which is our home and family?

Guilt over all the lip service we pay to being the high-minded, "moral" humans as we go on acting, as a species, in many instances worse than, or at most little different than, the animals we proclaim ourselves to be superior to.

Krzmarzick: boy=rat?

Hmmm, did you read the same article the rest of us did?

Xanthro: chicken behavior is cruel?.

Nowhere near as cruel as ours. It isn't about chicken behavior. It's about ours.

Euaell Gibbons: justify beastiality?

He was trying to explain it, not justify it.

I have heard Peter Singer speak since he took his position at Princeton several years ago, and what strikes me about him most is the intensely passionate and irrational reactions that he evokes in people. So, even though I don't agree with everything he says, he always presents his arguments in such an articulate and thoughtful way that I find myself wanting to defend him to his hysterical detractors, because his arguments deserve, and are worth, some thought. (He has already been well represented in this letters section, so I don't have to reiterate the obvious points.)

As a side note, I think it is very bad form on the part of Oliver Broudy to throw out the two issues of bestiality and personhood of great apes without any context. Hasn't politics taught you that anything can be taken out of context to be made to sound ridiculous? The article on bestiality strikes me as a lighthearted, slightly facetious popular essay. (Read it, it's pretty funny.)

If there is any justice, both your letters will receive the coveted star in the morning.

EIther way, I applaud them. If time allowed I would attempt to take them further. As it is, being bound for bed, I simply thank you for your lucid distillation of the essence of Peter Singer and his arguments about food. It's not an easy position to attempt to live by, but nor are his arguments difficult to understand. We know them intuitively, even if we don't want to. It doesn't make every word that he writes right, but it does mean that he's tapping into a fundamental, simple truth about the basic set of moral rules we live by, one that competes with only a handful of similarly fundamental truths, and that he's an elegant spokesperson (on the whole) for his chosen perspective.

The point is not whether you eat a chicken tomorrow. A lot of chickens will be eaten tomorrow regardless of whether you do. The point is whether you (and by you I mean we, all of us) begin to wake up to the complex and quite painful ethical implications of nearly every little thing we do. It's quite a burden to bear. It's sometimes hard to justify, from certain ethical standpoints anyway, why it's worth it to attain such an understanding; what if the only effect of it is to increase the affliction of my own conscience? And like the early Neo in The Matrix, even when you're earnestly seeking after an explanation of the world you're living in, it's very tempting to hesitate -- even to refuse, at least for awhile -- before taking the red pill that strips away all the nearest, most ingrained illusions.

Slight snarkiness notwithstanding, I appreciated your labors in answering some of the issues raised by others, particularly with reference to the difficult question of professionalism and hockey.

Dear sycophant:

I'll bet he didn't. And I'll bet you didn't, either. But let's take you up on your snark passing as educated observation.

Did you attend Yale?

No? Then who are you to dare question the actions and motives of the President?

You're welcome.

You assert that any college other than Oxford is Clown College. So much for Princeton. A professional ethicist should be embarrassed to collect his pay from that "clown college." No?

Okay, I have to agree. Chickens have the natural tendency to want to spread their wings/fly, or any number of other behaviors. It is cruel to deny them that, and if we want to be humane we'll engineer a habitat that enables them these behaviors prior to slaughter.

This makes sense.

Humans have a natural tendency to eat meat. While Vegan/Vegetarian lifestyles may be morally appealing, all of the hardware and physiology contained in our bodies demonstrates that we are made to eat other animals...

It would be unfair to deny a tiger or a house cat it's natural tendency to eat meat... Why is it right to suggest that humans do it?

Recommending that "ethically" we switch to a meat free dietary society means that you're recommending denying people the option of exhibiting their own natural tendencies. Yeah, it might save oil, and that is a dubious claim, but there are lots of better ways to save oil. Further, why is it okay to "save oil" by denying people their natural diet, but wrong to "save oil" by making chicken cages too small?

There seems to be a logical disconnect between the value associated with denying "natural tendencies" to all of the animals that aren't human versus the value in denying humans anything.

It almost seems that since humans respond to logic, you may as well argue that they be constrained to exhibit any desired behavior. Using force to constrain behavior is bad, while using logic and regulations to constrain behavior is good? Why not: All methods of behavior constraint are bad?