Is It Morally Wrong to Eat Animals?

By Andrea Useem

At an annual conference for religion journalists last month, I saw a film that radically altered the way I look at eating meat. At the end of a long and boring speech, which I mostly ignored, Wayne Pacelle, the president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), showed the film Eating Mercifully, which snapped me right to attention.

The clips of pregnant pigs confined to iron cages, a cow being pushed off the back of a truck, and male chicks suffocated to death by the thousands made me feel sick; something about the animals’ helpless dependence reminded me of my own children.

What really affected me, however, was the portrait of Elaine West, a conservative Christian who runs a farm-animal sanctuary in Florida. When she first learned how animals are treated on factory farms, West said she was “so ashamed as a Christian [that] I was supporting that kind of horrific abuse and cruelty.” Read More