Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Carnivore Andrew Heaton.

Omnivore, I'm an omnivore, Andrew Heaton, either way, I don't want to brag, but I eat nearly every day, mostly food.

And I'm beginning to wonder how much of this stuff that I shovel down my maw while watching Star Trek suffered before it arrived in my

refrigerator. Now what I mean is I don't have a problem with eating animals in general. Some animals yes I wouldn't eat a dog

or a chimp, but I have no qualms about eating whatever animal hamburgers come from.

Burger animals, fine, I think they're cows.

I worked on a cattle ranch, a first job out of college,

and not once did I ever feel guilty strutting around those future hamburgers. But that said, if you tortured

the cow beforehand, then I wouldn't eat it. And then I start kind of thinking about that in a broader sense and go, I have no idea how bad the lives of cows are,

or how grisly their deaths are. I don't even know how we kill him. I'm pretty sure we don't drown

them or hang them. I've never seen any dangling bovine corpses anywhere in Oklahoma, but I don't really know. I assume we put a guillotine at the

end of one of those moving sidewalks at the airport or something. I'm getting off topic,

how about this? If you accidentally hit a deer with your car and you took it

cooked it invited me over. I'd eat that deer chili. But if you told me that

you chased the deer down on the highway and then just kind of smacked it around with your car over an hour or two.

I wouldn't eat that. I'd feel pretty bad about that. You see what I'm getting at here?

How cruel the lives and deaths of farm animals are has a direct effect on whether I feel ethically

permitted to consume them.

It's not the act of eating that bothers me.

It's not that I think there's anything inherent to meet. It's how much suffering took place over the life and death of the animal that I'm eating that bothers me.

So here shortly, we will speak with an agricultural animal welfare specialist about

...