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While we witness the political slaughterhouse of the campaign trail, with candidate after candidate's campaign stunned and dismembered, a sinister slaughterhouse in Southern California tortures cows in the flesh. They prod them, jab them in the eyes, kick them, shock them, drag them by their legs across cement and ram them with forklifts. I write this, not as an article per se, not as a blog entry only, but as a lamentation of our depravity.

The cows cry, bellow, call, moan and husk as they experience the breach of trust that mankind has visited on them with increasingly demonic cruelty as the industrial nature of it all serves unnecessary consumption, that is, gluttony.

As I eat my cottage cheese I wonder now if the the dairy cow who gave of herself to supplement my life is now somewhere shivering in a stockyard smelling of fear and chemically tainted manure, turning weak and feeling sick from cattle car rides in the frigid, exhaust polluted winds of winter on tractor trailer rigs going 75 miles per hour.

Just being in the situation, if I were a cow, might make me a  "downer cow" that is, one of those that cannot bring herself to get up when the cutter comes calling. You see, in Chino, California's Hallmark Meat Packing plant, one that produced meat for the school lunch program in California, downer cows have apparently been condemned to torture before execution. Why? Because there is pressure to get them to walk into the slaughterhouse on their own power. By that simple act, USDA inspectors will apparently deem them "passed" to join the food supply.

What manner of chemical excretions must fill the weary muscles of these victim creatures as the bloodletting trolls torture them to get up so that they may "pass inspection."

Gracing the human race with calcium rich protein-power to help its members be healthy and work hard, this dairy cow gets no pension in a gentle pasture with animal loving tenders as gratitude for a life of service to mankind.

No sir, in Chino, California, she is given heavy metal fear to precede her slaughter. Her udders have worn out from mechanical jerking on an overcrowded production line, so here she is, with a mass of bovine innocents on death row, being pushed toward the stun gun and industrial slicer.

Money is offered men who do this job, and viola, wanting better pay, men and women oblige.

What is this all about? Gentle readers, it is about hamburgers and school lunch programs. It is one thing to subdue and kill for food, or employ in milk production. It is another to torture the servant animals. The former is a life cycle relationship, but the latter is the spiritual depravity of cruelty, murder and the ingestion of the victims.

Long ago in my college years at the University of Texas at San Antonio, philosophy professor Mark Bernstein (now author and distinguished applied ethics professor at Purdue) asked his students whether human beings could become kind to each other if they did not first master kindness to animals. His scholarship has made a difference in this area, and I hope it is through such thinking that Americans will reconsider what is permissible or not for us to eat.

When I consider what happens in modern war for resources, it occurs to me that we may be doing something similar to civilians caught in the crossfire of resource wars to what has been done to the Chino cows.