Intensive factory farming means the use of the best machines pushed to the limit of their capacity through the period of their greatest usefulness, and then replaced by others.  Pushing to the limit of capacity is in no sense cruelty.  It is predicated on the perfect health of the animal, for without perfect condition, neither machine nor animal can do its best work.  It is simply encouraging to a high degree the special function for which generations of careful breeding have fitted the animal.

That there is gratification in giving milk, no well-bred cow or mother will deny.  It is a joyous function to eat large quantities of pleasant food and turn it into milk.  Heredity impels the cow to do this, and it would take generations of wild life to wean her from it.  As well say that the cataleptic trance of the pointer, when the game bird lies close and the delicate scent fills his nostrils, is not a joy to him, or that the Dalmatian at the heels of his horse, or the foxhound when Reynard’s trail is warm, receive no pleasure from their specialties.

Do these animals feel no joy in the performance of service which is bred into their bones and which it is unnatural or freakish for them to lack?  No one who has watched the “bred-for-milk” cow can doubt that the joys of her life are eating, drinking, sleeping, and giving milk.  Pushing her to the limit of her capacity is only intensifying her life, though, possibly, it may shorten it by a year or two.  While she lives she knows all the happiness of cow life, and knows it to the full.  What more can she ask?  She would starve on the buffalo grass which supports her half-wild sister, “northers” would freeze her, and the snow would bury her.  She is a product of high cow-civilization, and as such she must have the intelligent care of man or she cannot do her best.  With this care she is a marvellous machine for the making of the only article of food which in itself is competent to support life in man.  If my Holsteins are not machines, they resemble them so closely that I will not quarrel with the name.

What is true of the cow, is true also of the pork-making machine that we call the hog.  His wild and savage progenitor is lost, and we have in his place a sluggish animal that is a very model as a food producer.  His three pleasures are eating, sleeping, and growing fat.  He follows these pleasures with such persistence that 250 days are enough to perfect him.  It can certainly be no hardship to a pig to encourage him in a life of sloth and gluttony which appeals to his taste and to my profit.

Custom and interest make his life ephemeral; I make it comfortable.  From the day of his birth until we separate, I take watchful care of him.  During infancy he is protected from cold and wet, and his mother is coddled by the most nourishing foods, that she may not fail in her duty to him.  During childhood he is provided with a warm house, a clean bed, and a yard in which to disport himself, and is fed for growth and bone on skim-milk, oatmeal, and sweet alfalfa.  During his youth, corn meal is liberally added to his diet, also other dainties which he enjoys and makes much of; and during his whole life he has access to clean water, and to the only medicine which a pig needs,—­a mixture of ashes, charcoal, salt, and sulphur.