VEGGIES

Those neat little plastic packages in the market used to have lives of their own.

Today’s intensive confinement systems reduce animals to “meat machines.” Pigs and cows are castrated without anesthesia and kept in overcrowded pens, unable to turn around or groom themselves.

Veal calves are separated from their mothers at birth, kept in total darkness and deprived of iron. Three billion chickens are debeaked with hot irons, then forced to live in a space the size of a record album until turned into soup and pot pies.

If this is “a little bit silly” or “the primal law of nature,” then go ahead, Mr. Andrews, and remain as ignorant as you are about the agony and torture that animals go through so you can have your steak.

Someday, Barbara Wong’s “dietary whims,” as you so sarcastically put it, hopefully, will be the norm in an enlightened society that realizes that animals have a right to life.

SHELLEY BUTLER

Los Angeles