Op-Ed: 'Cult of Efficiency' Results in Cruelty for Pigs

Ezra Klein takes the pork industry to task in a New York Times column on animal cruelty. The background is that voters in California and Massachusetts approved measures requiring that breeding pigs have at least enough space to turn around and lie down, impossible for them to do in what are known as "gestation crates." The rules likely nudged pork prices up by 5% to 20%, but voters backed them anyway. Klein quotes Times colleague Nicholas Kristof on what's at stake for the pigs: "Think of your dog enduring what pigs face, and you realize that the moral cost is incalculable."

The industry opposed these measures but lost at the ballot box and then at the Supreme Court. Now it's pushing Congress to undo the state rules through the so-called Save Our Bacon Act, folded into the House farm bill. Klein's take:

• "That would not just inflict harm on sows. It would inflict harm on us. Compassion is a form of attention. Like any other form of attention, it can be strengthened or left to atrophy. To force states and people to participate in practices they find morally objectionable is to deny them the exercise of their moral judgments." Read the full column, in which Klein places industrial pig-breeding practices in the context of our "cult of efficiency."