Roger Pulvers' March 7 Counterpoint article, For humanity's sake, let's tie whaling in with animal welfare as a whole," was excellent! I have had many years' experience working with farm livestock. For 10 years in my youth I reared calves on a commercial dairy farm, and I knew and loved those animals as individual personalities. Now I am old and unwell, but greatly comforted by a little robin who visits me several times a day for food. Our human life is infinitely richer if we live in harmony with the other animal life on this planet. If we start by saying it doesn't matter — they're only animals — we risk proceeding along a continuum of cruelty through slavery, child labor and persecution until we have total hell on earth.