1. Most people will agree that to live a short happy life is better than not to live at all. Most will also agree that not to live at all is better than to live an extremely miserable or tortured life of any duration. If these two ideas are justly extrapolated and applied to the treatment of animals which people breed and slaughter for food, then there does seem to some reasonable justification for this consumption, the greater sensitivity of the vegetarian position notwithstanding. In a truly free society however, all species must be treated humanely. Animals and birds raised for food must be given free range out of doors, good food, good treatment, and painless unanticipated slaughter. Egg production or birthrates must not be stimulated with hormones and the normal sleep cycle must not be altered with drugs. In a Libertarian society ranchers and farmers will prosper far beyond what they do now even with these concessions to simple decency in place. If food animals give us their lives in the end, the least we can do is to make their lives joyful while they live. We owe them this. Anyone so cold-hearted that they don't care about how these animals feel should try to visualize himself being denied the same things he would deny to animals. These principles must be enforced by law and any society which does not do this is to that extent an unjust society.

 

2. Humans have no moral right to keep animals in cages. Animals are not criminals, and they do not belong in jail. Try a little empathy. You are a bird who can fly and live a normal life, but you are kept in a small cage year after year after year until you die. You never experience the joy of fulfilling your just destiny as a bird. Every day someone comes in to feed you with the usual "Pritee Bird. Pritee Bird." The permanent caging of animals as pets or in traditional crowded zoo environments must be illegal in a free society. Free-range situations, as in the bio-park type of zoo, are the only just way that man should be able to maintain a guaranteed view of animals.