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.

Factory farming isn’t just killing: It is a negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature... It confronts us with the animal equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s condemnation of human slavery: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

The elephants we have seen taunted and tormented and slaughtered by the likes of Safari Club do not have time to wait while the world’s ethicists work out some centuries-long paradigm shift in moral thought.

Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal – not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

Philosophical theories can in this way become a destructive venture, confusing matters with false choices and sterile power schemes the cruel are only too happy to accept. In hostile hands, they become a pretext for doing nothing, for brushing off real and urgent moral duties in the care of animals.

As sentimentality towards animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it’s sad about the farms but that’s just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

If animals are just commodities, then we are just consumers, with no greater good than material pleasure and no higher law than appetite.

Animals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions – about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul – forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world.