Excerpt from “Eating Animals”

Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept tonight if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.” He did not make (though he might have) a case for the moral value of birds, their worth to themselves or the ecosystem of God. Instead he observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He  could not be himself if he walked away. Lincoln was a hugely inconsistent personality, and of course he ate birds far more often than he aided them. But presented with the suffering of a fellow creature, he responded.