Reader James wrote and asked me if I knew the source of a quote from the Pope at Andrew Sullivan’s site – he gets it from a PETA-related site

The new Pope has spoken movingly about the exploitation of all beings, particularly of farmed animals. When he was asked about the rights of animals in a 2002 interview, he said, "That is a very serious question. At any rate, we can see that they are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God’s creatures . . . Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible."

Well, I saw it identified elsewhere as from an "interview with Peter Seewald," so, if was 2002, I guess it must be from God and the World, but I’m not sure.

For your consideration on the topic: Matthew Scully, author of the book, Dominon: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals and the Call to Mercy

A recent article by Scully

We are told “they’re just pigs” or cows or chickens or whatever and that only urbanites worry about such things, estranged as they are from the realities of rural life. Actually, all of factory farming proceeds by a massive denial of reality—the reality that pigs and other animals are not just production units to be endlessly exploited but living creatures with natures and needs. The very modesty of those needs—their humble desires for straw, soil, sunshine—is the gravest indictment of the men who deny them.

Conservatives are supposed to revere tradition. Factory farming has no traditions, no rules, no codes of honor, no little decencies to spare for a fellow creature. The whole thing is an abandonment of rural values and a betrayal of honorable animal husbandry—to say nothing of veterinary medicine, with its sworn oath to “protect animal health” and to “relieve animal suffering.”