You won’t like it, but you should read Abusing Chickens We Eat, by Nicholas Kristof for the New York Times. It’s the story of the conditions under which chickens are raised (at one farm in North Carolina) for the massive chicken processing company Perdue. The picture it paints is not pretty. Nor is the video accompanying it. “Most shocking is that the bellies of nearly all the chickens have lost their feathers and are raw, angry, red flesh. The entire underside of almost every chicken is a huge, continuous bedsore.”

These chickens are emblematic of the the internally-inconsistent views most of us have with regard to animal welfare. As Kristof puts it: “Torture a single chicken and you risk arrest. Abuse hundreds of thousands of chickens for their entire lives? That’s agribusiness.”