Kristof: Future Generations Will Recoil at Factory Farming

Americans by and large love and pamper their dogs, and Nicholas Kristof is no exception. But in his latest New York Times column, Kristof wonders why many of these same dog lovers are so willing to ignore what he describes as the mass torture of pigs by the American agriculture system.

• "Just as today we wonder how people like Thomas Jefferson could have been so morally obtuse as to own and abuse slaves, our own descendants will look back at us and puzzle over how 21st-century humans could have tolerated factory farming and the systematic abuse of intelligent mammals, including hogs," he writes.

Kristof grew up on a farm and remembers how the hogs they raised had different personalities, much like humans. It's a big reason he has sworn off meat from animals raised in industrial-scaled versions of his boyhood farm, with females spending their adult lives confined to "coffin-sized pens," males brutally castrated, and slaughtering practices that amount to torture. "Someone mistreats a dog and we'll call 911," he writes. "But if a company tortures millions of hogs as a business model, we dine on its products, invest in its shares and honor its executives." (Read the full column, in which Kristof argues it's time for Americans to stop ignoring the issue.)