…if you want to know why I still read Easterbrook given his complete weird fact-free animosity towards Oklahoma, read the current column starting at "Atlanta Falcons" and going on for several paragraphs. It's right on the money, and in no defense of Michael Vick.

Don't say "eew, gross" about how meat animals are butchered, then return to denouncing Vick. If you're eating a cheeseburger or BLT or steak or pot roast today, there's a good chance you are dining on an animal that was shot or electrocuted. You are complicit. You freely bought the meat, you did not demand Congress strengthen the Humane Slaughter Act. Livestock can be calmed and drugged before being slain. A few slaughterhouses do this, but most don't because it raises costs, and you, the consumer, demand the lowest possible price for your meal. Now about your turkey sub or coq au vin. Federal slaughter regulations apply mainly to large animals, leaving considerable freedom in the killing of fowl. Many poultry slaughterhouses kill chickens by slashing their throats rather than snapping their necks. Snapping the neck kills the bird quickly, ending suffering, but then the heart dies quickly, too. Slashing the throat causes the bird to live in agony for several minutes, heart still beating and pumping blood out of the slash -- and consumers prefer bloodless chicken meat.

Further, the Humane Slaughter Act exempts kosher and halal slaughter. In both traditions, the cow or lamb must be conscious when killed by having its carotid artery, or esophagus and trachea, slashed. The animal bleeds to death, convulsing in agony, as its heart pumps blood, which is viewed as unclean, out of the slashed openings. The delicious pastrami we consumed at a kosher deli, or the wonderfully good beef we could buy at a halal butcher, comes from an animal that suffered as it died.

There are far more cases in society where the torturous death of an animal is both legal and regularly practiced than there are where it's illegal. My family has rasied cattle for most of my life, even though I spent a decade as a mostly-vegetarian and still eat less meat than most people I know, but I hold no illusions about where it comes from. I know the livestock industry could, on a whole, be doing things much better, especially in the huge plants where people lose fingers and chickens get salmonella to save two cents per pound on the finished product. And no one is exempt from the law.

But pretending that what Michael Vick did is beyond the pale, or something that society never tolerates, for food or for sport, is just wishful thinking. From hunting to livestock, humans legally torture and kill tens of thousands of animals every day, and they do so because you vote with your pocketbooks to allow it. That they were not pets, or not your animals, doesn't make it any different.

There is some kind of mass neurosis at work in the rush to denounce Vick, wag fingers and say he deserved even worse. Society wants to scapegoat Vick to avoid contemplating its own routine, systematic killing of animals. We couldn't all become vegetarians tomorrow: that is not practical. But American society is not even attempting to make the handling of meat animals less brutal, let alone working to transition away from a food-production order in which huge numbers of animals are systematically mistreated, then killed in ways that inflict terror and pain. We won't lift a finger to change the way animals die for us. But we will demand Michael Vick serve prison time to atone for our sins.

Michael Vick did not need to be cruel to animals for economic reasons; he did it for sport in ways proscribed by law, and he will pay for that. The same things happen at greyhound tracks and even in animal shelters across the US every day, just not prohibited by law. If you turn your head and cough at that, you don't get to be pious about Michael Vick's pit bulls.

Me? I don't like animals suffering, even when butchered for meat, but I too want bloodless chicken and pre-butchered meat. If I could pay $0.15 more per pound for meat and know that the animals were treated well and killed humanely (not just by the standards Easterbrook mentions), I would. I might even pay $0.50 more per pound, because I don't eat that much meat. Would I pay $20 more per week? $30? Probably not. To do without meat altogether now would represent a cost of about 12 more hours per week, since I can't use nearly as many pre-prepared "vegetarian" products as before (too much sodium). But I'd love to have more options.