Correspondence

...In this instance the United States can't go after North Korea, in part because Washington has to be skeptical of the admission...

...Smith's analysis is insightful, and he's on the money about the author, too—Matthew Scully...

...People forget that the period of detente with the Soviets, ushered in by Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik and highlighted by the Helsinki Accords, helped soften the Soviets up and make them more susceptible to the Thatcher-Reagan approach of later years...

...He also fails to consider the very significant contributions that animal-based agriculture makes to air and water pollution, soil erosion and depletion, species extinction, the destruction of tropical rain forests and other vital ecosystems, and global warming...

...But I absolutely disagree with his arguments on animal welfare...

...and almost 40 percent of the grain produced worldwide to farmed animals contributes to the death of an estimated 20 million people worldwide annually from hunger and its effects...

...DAVE JUDAY Berryville, VA WESLEY SMITH'S REVIEW of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy is flawed because it assumes that animal rights activists don't care about human welfare and that improved conditions for animals have negative effects on people...

...JAMES FAUZEY, MSGT USAF (RET...

...The more individual Americans (and South Koreans and Japanese and Taiwanese) can interact with individual North Koreans, the more North Koreans have a chance to see the outside world and communicate with people from it, the weaker the Pyongyang government will eventually become...

...This shouldn't even be an American issue except maybe to broker another deal whereby China, Russia, and Japan divvy up responsibility and bribes for the new, nuclear North Korea...

...Throughout history, many of the leading vegetarians and animal rights activists, such as Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Plutarch, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, were also outstanding humanitarians...

...I pray that history is not kind to Bill Clinton—too many good Americans have shed their blood and lost their lives on his watch for him to be praised as a peacemaker...

...DON GREEN Dunkirk, MD...

...28), but I do worry that people will get the idea that there's something wrong with engagement per se...

...Unfortunately, however, even Smith falls into this trap, granting the premise that so-called "factory farming" is cruel to animals...

...Chickens are nervous and suspicious creatures...

...Kristol and Schmitt make a poor choice of words when they write: "But now, with the North Koreans having been caught in violation of the 1994 Agreed Framework...

...And they are right...

...i understand that in North Korea people compete for such jobs, sign on for a given period of time, and then rotate home...

...And sure enough, the analogy extends to the "peace processors" of the world...

...North Korea is looking for a bribe, and will probably get it . . . from someone else...

...Which is more humane treatment of cows, artificial insemination which animal rightists decry, or live cover, where aggressive and heavier bulls frequently injure the young heifers they breed...

...Quite simply, every farmer knows that stressed and mistreated animals don't gain weight and aren't healthy...

...Additionally, most of the "aid" given to North Korea after the 1994 agreement came from Japan, which therefore has a greater vested interest in keeping North Korea happy...

...If Smith had considered these and other negative effects of our extensive mistreatment of animals, he might recognize that we must start applying the true biblical meaning of "dominion," responsible guardianship and stewardship, for the benefit of both human and non-human animals...

...He ignores the tremendous governmental subsidies that the meat industry receives, and, more important, the epidemic of heart disease, cancer, and other degenerative diseases that have been conclusively linked to the consumption of animal products...

...it's important to keep the lines of communication open, especially to the people of North Korea...

...RICHARD H. SCHWARTZ Staten Island, NY PEACE PROCESSORS AS A RETIRED U.S...

...The Bush administration most likely assumed that North Korea would lie about the bombs and everyone could go his separate way...

...Skyler: Why is it called that...

...We have to look at every possible way to erode that government's ability to rule, and engagement in its many forms is one important way...

...There is a fundamental contradiction in the argument used by the animal rights crowd...

...The phrase brings to mind the old Shoe cartoon by Jeff MacNelly: Skyler: Where's your typewriter...

...Shoe: I don't use a typewriter, I use a "word processor...

...While Clinton-style engagement was counterproductive, engagement itself is necessary and beneficial as long as relations are governed by principles that make sense...

...Indeed, even those like Smith who "get it" about animal welfare needing to be put in context of human welfare— "access to such nutritious, inexpensive food provides tremendous human good to people on limited budgets," he writes, "which may be sufficient to justify this form of animal husbandry"—are still products of a society so removed from animal husbandry that we can no longer relate to the underlying meaning of terms like "pecking order" and stories like Chicken Little...

...The issues Americans and the world are facing today can be laid directly at the feet of Clinton and his administration...

...Where the animal rights crowd is wrong, however, is in arguing that this system is cruel and stressful for the animals...

...And underweight, unhealthy animals create more overhead and production costs...

...Air Force master sergeant, I spent my last eight years under Bill Clinton, and Max Boot's "The Consequences of Clintonism" (Oct...

...If the '70s had been different, and the Soviet leadership had seen the need to bring up some Russian version of Deng Xiaoping instead of guys like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, we might be living in a different world today...

...Being in an enclosed or covered area gives chickens a sense of security...

...But when chickens aren't kept in cages, they violently peck at each other—hence the term "pecking order...

...their natural impulse is to seek protection from predators, especially hawks overhead—that's the premise behind the children's story of Chicken Little...

...We should always be ready to apply the stick or the carrot at the right moment to get the best results...

...His inept attempts at securing peace and his direct misuse of military power have caused his administration's so-called accomplishments to fall apart...

...On the one hand they assert that the impetus for intensified livestock operations is economic, i.e., bring as many animals to market weight as quickly as possible...

...Other factors that Smith might have considered are the many times that animal experimentation has given misleading results because of species differences and differences between artificially induced diseases and naturally occurring diseases, and the high spousal abuse rates in areas where hunting is prevalent...

...Scully is indeed "a powerful and sometimes even inspired writer," and he is "an intelligent man" with a "big heart" for animals...

...Furthermore, the country can barely afford a war on terrorism and a war on Iraq, let alone adding a third front to an already taxed economy...

...Smith indicates that factory farming, while very cruel to animals, provides inexpensive nutritious food for poor people...

...i just hope that in the future everybody on our side has better sense than to trust Pyongyang enough to let it have a couple of nuclear carrots...

...Or, as Smith himself writes, we are "so far removed from the struggle for daily survival that we have the luxury of caring about animals and their suffering...

...The more traditional practice of tethering and nose rings...

...In addition, Smith ignores how the feeding of over 70 percent of the grain produced in the U.S...

...The production of animal products also uses enormous amounts of increasingly scarce water and gasoline...

...Smith puts it best when he says Scully's arguments are based on anthropomorphizing animals...

...The situation over there is hairy indeed: The United States has approximately 37,000 troops south of the DMZ, whereas North Korea has about 1,000,000 men poised to attack...

...28) rings more true than even he could imagine...

...North Korea wasn't caught, it divulged that information a day after being presented with some evidence that it had been building bombs...

...As for swine, what's more cruel, a modern farrowing crate for the sow, or a baby pig crushed and suffocated by its mother...

...Thus our challenge as true stewards is to avoid anthropomorphizing animals into something they are not, at any level...

...MITCH SOBEL Jersey City, NJ VEGANS ARE PEOPLE, TOO CONGRATULATIONS to Wesley J. Smith for his review of the book Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy ("Man and Beast," Oct...

...Shoe: Well, you've seen what a food processor does to food, right...

...Korean-language radio and television should be broadcast not only into North Korea itself but also into Siberia, where a lot of North Korean guest workers are employed doing work that gulag prisoners used to do in the same places gulag prisoners used to do it...

...These work camps sound like a good target audience for whatever broadcast and print media we can get in there...

...The fact missed by this premise is that "factory farming" wouldn't work if the animals were completely miserable...

...Indeed Scully, who in his research for Dominion asked me for a copy of a paper on the ethics of intensified farming that I delivered to the World Conference on Animal Production in 1998, is a friend of mine...

...For example, Smith writes, "I prefer to purchase eggs that were obtained from chickens not kept in cages because I deem such husbandry to be more humane...

...What is better than a "factory farm...

...Fairborn, OH MAX BOOT'S ARTICLE contains the wonderful alliterative phrase, "professional peace processors...

...JIM MCDONNELL Baton Rouge, LA A FEW POINTS SEEM TO BE LEFT OUT of "Lessons of a Nuclear North Korea...