1) "You would think that competition among individuals would threaten the tranquillity of such a crowded metropolis, yet the modern field of corn forms a most orderly mob. This is because every plant in it, being an F-1 hybrid, is genetically identical to every other. Since no individual plant has inherited any competitive edge over any other, precious resources like sunlight, water, and soil nutrients are shared equitably. There are no alpha corn plants to hog the light or fertilizer. The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants."

2) "I was curious to know what feedlot beef would taste like now, if I could taste the corn or even, since taste is as much a matter of what's in the head as it is about molecules dancing on the tongue, some hint of the petroleum. 'You are what you eat' is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil."

3) "Tail docking is the USDA's recommended solution to the porcine 'vice' of tail chewing. Using a pair of pliers and no anesthetic, most---but not quite all---of the tail is snipped off. Why leave the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now a bite to the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will struggle to resist it. Horrible as it is to contemplate, it's not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency."

4) "I looked into the black eye of the chicken and, thankfully, saw nothing, not a flicker of fear. Holding his head in my right hand, I drew the knife down the left side of the chicken's neck. I worried about not cutting hard enough, which would have prolonged the bird's suffering, but needn't have: The blade was sharp and sliced easily through the white feathers covering the bird's neck, which promptly blossomed a brilliant red. Before I could let go of the bird's suddenly limp head my hand was painted in a gush of warm blood. Somehow, an errant droplet spattered the lens of my glasses, leaving a tiny, fogged red blot in my field of vision for the rest of the morning."

5) "The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever. (It is no accident that the nonunion workers in these factories receive little more consideration than the animals in their care.) Here in these wretched places life itself is redefined---as "protein production"---and with it "suffering." That venerable word becomes "stress," an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution such as clipping the beaks of chickens or docking the tails of pigs or, in the industry's latest initiative, simply engineering the "stress gene" out of pigs and chickens. It all sounds very much like our worst nightmares of confinement and torture, and it is that, but it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath those grim sheet-metal roofs into the brief, pitiless life of a production unit in the days before the suffering gene was found."