I have no doubt that President George W. Bush - a man, in my experience, of extremely kind and generous instincts, and back in Austin even a rescuer of stray animals - would be appalled by the conditions of a typical American factory farm or packing plant.

Veal, by definition, is the product of a sick, anemic, deliberately malnourished calf, a newborn dragged away from his mother in the first hours of life. Veal calves are dealt the harshest of punishments for the least essential of meats.

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are 'production units,' and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests.

Religious people... hold a kind and merciful view of life, the faith of the broken, the hounded, the hopeless. Yet too often, they will not extend that spirit to our fellow creatures.