IRC-Galleria

“It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think. It’s often said that nature, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ is cruel. I heard this again and again from ranchers, who tried to persuade me that they were protecting their animals from that lay outside the enclosures.

Nature is no picnic, true. (Picnics are rarely picnics.) And it’s also true that animals on the very best farms often have better lives than they would in the wild. But nature isn’t cruel. And neither are the animals in nature that kill and occasionally even torture one another. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.”