Stories about “de-barked” dogs and the like catch us with our guard down, allowing for unreserved condemnation. Much as we might admire and love dogs, however, it’s make-believe to act as though abusing them is an outrage while the massive, standardized, and carefully concealed abuse of other animals is an acceptable fact of life, just the way things are. We don’t need to run them through an NIMH lab to prove that pigs, cows, lambs, fowl, and all other farmed animals also suffer. They have minds, emotions, and needs. They’re not nothing. If most humans feel no special connection to them, that is no verdict on these creatures and their worthiness. They can hardly be expected to attract our sympathy from across a chasm of willful ignorance between the animal products we use and the factory farms, which themselves resemble an elaborate torture experiment.

Here too our major media rarely dig deep into the issue, perhaps mindful of advertisers, or else too caught up in their easy and overwrought climate coverage to focus on a moral calamity in the here and now. So it was again Greenwald who, last year in the Intercept, captured the extreme torment inflicted by industrial-scale farming, with an account of the pandemic-driven “depopulation” and mass burial of pigs, some of them while still alive. Video and audio recorders had been hidden at one farm in Iowa. As “ventilation shutdown” begins, we hear “the piercing cries of pigs as they succumb.” No less sensitive and smart than dogs, these creatures were “suffocated and roasted to death,” by the millions, across Iowa and other states. Ruthless measures, taken in an emergency, to remind us of ruthless measures taken every day as the norm. New horrors, as he writes, “in an industry that was already suffused with them.” That exposé can be read as a companion piece with Greenwald’s work investigating the breeding, agonies, and disposal of dogs and other laboratory animals. Fundamentally, it’s all the same story. It’s the same problem, the same deep moral disorder, complete with the same sort of people who won’t take it seriously and who resent those who do.

As Camosy points out, some conservatives meet the issue with habitual contempt, brushing it off with their boorish “bacon” talk and the like. But the cruelty problem and its remedies do not follow any narratives of the Left or of the Right. We can leave animals and efforts to protect them out of our culture wars.