Most North Americans and Europeans wouldn’t buy a dog from a puppy-mill knowing as they do that dogs suffer terribly in puppy-mills.

But even though most North Americans and Europeans know know that pig-mills are as terrible as puppy-mills, they eat pig with no moral misgivings.

Would you eat a friendly, intelligent, affectionate dog? If no, then why would you would eat a friendly, intelligent, affectionate pig?

Pigs suffer with no hope of rescue because they are not our pets. Rescue is for those who we have decided are pets.

There is almost universal hypocrisy about meat-eating. Beatrix Potter, the author of so many children’s books which always featured cute animals, was ruthlessly indifferent to the suffering of the animals she wrote about. In fact she could be smugly proud of her indifference.

“Pigling Bland” was one of Potter’s money-making little books. Potter lived much of her life on her farm in England’s Lake District. “The National Trust – The First Hundred Years”, quotes her saying about her sociable pig, who cheerfully (and unsuspectingly), invited her attention:

“I had lately a pig that continually stood on its hind legs leaning over the pig sty, but it’s hanging up and cured now”.

Pigs are perhaps the smartest, cleanest domestic animals known – more so than cats and dogs, according to some experts. A sign of their cleverness came from experiments in the 1990s. Pigs were trained to move a cursor on a video screen with their snouts and used the cursor to distinguish between scribbles they knew and those they were seeing for the first time. They learned the task as quickly as chimpanzees. http://nbcnews.to/V0Bpsa

Do you still want to eat them? Or are you okay that they suffer in the millions so that you can?

- Judy Stone, Vancouver, BC