If you really care about animals, stop eating them | Letters

Dean Weston says we are still killing animals by the billion, but praising ourselves for marginally reducing panic and pain, while Jo Barlow calls for transparency and truth about where our food comes from. Plus a letter from Scott Miller

Your editorial applauds the government for rearranging the furniture in a burning house (The Guardian view on animal welfare: a timely reminder that cruelty is wrong, 23 December). Fewer cages, gentler gas, a close season for hares. All very civilised. Yet the central obscenity remains untouched. We are still breeding, confining and killing animals by the billion, then praising ourselves for marginally reducing the panic and pain along the way.

This strategy treats animal suffering the way Victorian engineers treated cholera. Add a valve here, a filter there, and never question the sewer itself. One billion chickens a year is not an ethical problem that can be solved with better regulations. It is a moral failure so large it has become invisible, like traffic noise. The state recognises animals as “sentient beings” while organising their lives around maximised throughput and minimised cost. That is not compassion. It is bureaucratic anaesthesia.