Letters to the Editor: Allegedly staging dog killings is no more scandalous than routine factory farming

To the editor: It’s hard to endorse the priorities and emphasis of your investigation of animal activist Marc Ching. He is accused of dishonesty and instigating animal torture — this receives pages of L.A. Times coverage.

The underlying fact that the “methods used to round up and kill the animals — packing them into cages, drowning them, clubbing them on the head and, in some cases, hanging them — are uniformly inhumane� receives a short paragraph.

Dozens of animal organizations have documented barbarically cruel practices in the dog-meat trade. More to the point for Americans, these organizations have documented equally abhorrent cruelties inflicted on equally sentient beings in U.S. factory farms.

Pigs, cows and chickens are boiled to death, suffocated, hung upside-down to bleed out and (in the case of male chicks, who will not lay eggs for profit) ground up alive in giant blenders. These facts are amply documented in video footage and in the words of the slaughterhouse workers themselves.

When is it that mainstream media and the consumers of meat will seriously confront our routine cruelty right here at home?

Kathie Jenni, Beaumont

The author is a professor of philosophy and director of human-animal studies at the University of Redlands.

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To the editor: I have donated to Ching’s Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation. If this story is true, then the man is a monster in too many ways to count.

We should look at all “superheroes� under a highly magnified glass before buying their stories.

Nancy Goodman Lawrence, Mar Vista

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To the editor: The print edition that carried this investigation should have come with a warning label.

That there is much cruelty toward animals all over the world is no surprise to me, but that anyone would go to the lengths that Ching is accused of having done to confirm that it exists is beyond belief.

The images of horrific animal suffering that this article imprinted on my mind will haunt me for a long time.

Anneke Mendiola, Santa Ana