From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

Re "It Died for Us," by Frank Bruni (Critic's Notebook, Week in Review, June 25):

There is no ethical difference between eating a dog, cat, chicken, pig or fish. If anything, eating your dogs or cats would be morally preferable, since they would have led a good life until you killed them.

According to a 2003 Gallup Poll, 96 percent of Americans believe that animals deserve some legal protection from harm. Yet the almost 40 land animals each American eats every year have their bodies mutilated without pain relief. They're given growth-promoting drugs that often cripple them and are cooped up in their own waste for their entire lives, denied even a modicum of pleasure. They're slaughtered in ways that would be illegal in the European Union.

Every stage of the process would warrant felony cruelty charges were dogs or cats so abused.

If you oppose cruelty, try vegetarianism.

Bruce G. Friedrich
Norfolk, Va., June 25, 2006
The writer is vice president for international grass-roots campaigns, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

To the Editor:

If we lived in the land of the Houyhnhnms as imagined by Jonathan Swift, the horses would be in charge and we poor Yahoos would be a lower order under them.

But we live in a world where Homo sapiens is in charge, and other orders are subject to our whims and rules. And so, as long as animals are treated with a measure of respect, we need them to satisfy our hunger. We also use them as sled dogs, racehorses, pets and draft animals. Is that cruel? Humane treatment means what humans decide.

I, for one, will continue to enjoy lobster and beefsteaks. Others choose to fight against their definition of cruelty by committing cruel acts.

Carl Gutman
Albuquerque, June 26, 2006

To the Editor:

Perhaps Whole Foods should consider no longer selling processed lobster meat as well as live lobsters. Processed lobster comes from lobsters that die inside enormous automated crushing machines. They are loaded alive into a cylinder, and the water around them is compressed to several times the pressure found in the deepest trenches of the ocean.

Tests by animal-welfare experts are under way, but it is not yet clear how long the lobsters suffer inside these high-pressure processors before they die.

While perhaps more humane than boiling alive, it is certainly not more humane than pithing a lobster with a kitchen knife before you put it in the pot.

Trevor Corson
Washington, June 25, 2006
The writer is the author of a book about the biology of lobsters.

To the Editor:

Frank Bruni's Critic's Notebook raises the fundamental question underlying every consumer and lifestyle choice we make: What is our purpose in this life?

If our purpose is to maximize our own pleasure or convenience, we are likely to allow all kinds of suffering in the name of our palate, our taste in clothing and our desire for the highest return on our investments. Any consequences of those decisions are a kind of collateral damage.

But if our purpose is to reduce suffering whenever we can, we derive happiness from the knowledge that our choices are minimizing the collateral damage, while raising the consciousness of the collective.

Mary Martin
Jupiter, Fla., June 25, 2006

To the Editor:

Frank Bruni's essay illustrates the frustration I'm feeling in regard to, well, just about everything.

I volunteer at an animal shelter. The question I hear is, "Well, what about the animals you don't have room for?" I also mentor a child, and I hear, "Well, what about all the other children at her school?"

I stopped eating chicken when I learned about the torture they endure at factory farms, and the question is: "Well, what about cows? Don't you care about them?"

I care about cows, and about homeless animals, and tortured prisoners, and our soldiers dying in Iraq, and children growing up in poverty, and rapes in Congo, and our national debt, and North Korean missiles. What can I do?

With that said, I will not eat chicken or foie gras, and I will not drop a live lobster into a pot of boiling water.

Celia Ballew Jones
Richmond, Va., June 25, 2006