Small Isn't Always Better

There's a great post on the Walmart good/bad issue at Lone Prairie. Julie Neidlinger's comment stand out by their resolute determination to stay focused on what she knows personally to be the case. (Wow! What if we all confined our arguments to that? Well, we're all supposed to "Think globally, act locally" - - in other words, figure out how the world works on the basis of vast abstractions and fourth and fifth hand generalizations, and then impose that almost certainly WRONG understanding on the neighborhood you actually live in.) I love the quotation from the mom of a mom and pop store who works nights at Walmart because she enjoys it and that way she can get health insurance (!)

This goes the same way with animals too. I'm not a vegetarian, I believe that God has indeed given man dominion over the animal kingdom (Gen. 9:1-7). I won't call cruel or unclean what God has called clean (Acts 10:15, 1 Tim. 4:3). Still I've gotten a little bit more "pro-vegetarian" since learning about this, and one thing I hate is cruel practices in raising animals. I almost don't want to read books like this (written by a former speech writer for President Bush), it's so painful. Some friends of ours are big chicken raisers, and when I mentioned that I only buy eggs laid by cage-free organic chickens, they warned me that that's no guarantee the chickens are being raised humanely. Maybe they have no cages and no antibiotics, but they might have gross and painful medical conditions going untreated, etc. People on non-technological farms can make animals' lives as miserable as big operations - - and if the farms are small enough, they have a much better chance of slipping in under the radar of state inspection for sanitary and humane conditions. Small and organic isn't necessarily better.