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The Nonessential Whooping Crane

10,000 Birds

And fun and food are, I’d submit, not enough reason to fell a bird in which only one in three pairs manages to raise a single chick each season; a bird that has captured the imagination and hearts of tens of thousands of people, whose sonorous purr floats down from on high like the voice of a pterosaur. Thank you for your efforts.

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From Today's New York Times

Animal Ethics

But the method she advocates for reaching those goals—raising grass-eating, pasture-foraging farm animals—would appear to be notoriously difficult to reproduce on a scale large enough to harvest enough meat, at a reasonable cost, for all the people wanting to eat meat in this country, let alone the world. James Siegel Portland, Me.,

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Prima Facie vs. Ultima Facie Wrongness

Animal Ethics

But the wrongness and vileness of factory farming does not show that eating meat is morally wrong, because it is theoretically possible to raise animals outdoors in idyllic settings, to give them wonderful, enjoyable, rich lives, and then after 6 months to a year of such blissful existence, to kill them entirely painlessly.