SOUL FOOD:

If you had to kill the cow yourself, would you still eat hamburgers? That was the question that dashed the big-money prospects of a contestant on Drew Carey’s “The Power of 10.”

On the game show, players must guess how a certain segment of the American public has responded to a particular poll — give or take a few percentage points. One survey put the above question to a group of men.

If we’re to believe the respondents, 79% said they would. Carey’s contestant guessed as few as 50% and not more than 70% and went home.

Since no one was asked to kill a cow, it’s hard to say how many really would.

But given the realities of factory farming, cows might be better off if those of us who do eat meat had to slaughter them ourselves.

It’s been more than a century since the publication of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s indictment of the meatpacking industry as both dehumanizing to workers and inhumane to animals. And while some things have changed, in far too many ways, much remains the same.

Industrial farms and slaughterhouses still ratchet up production and profit at worker and animal expense. At supermarkets, consumers pick up a pound of ground round or package of chops without giving much thought to where they came from.

If the industry is abhorrent — and it is — we choose to avert our gaze rather than to change our ways.

Or as Matthew Scully, author of “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy,” put it in an essay he wrote for “The American Conservative” and adapted for The Humane Society of the United States, we prefer to view factory farming as “a small wrong on the grand scale of good and evil.”

Four years have passed since Scully, who is now a vegan, wrote the book that changed his own mind.

After seeing “a few typical farms up close,” the view looked very different to him.

He now sees industrial farming as “a truly rotten business passed over in polite conversation.” He believes its abuses are “a serious moral problem.”

There has been a tendency among conservatives, perhaps especially religious conservatives, to consider the issue of animal rights as a liberal or secular cause. But as Scully has keenly pointed out, one is no more likely to see the issue raised in “The Nation” or “The New Republic” as in similar yet more conservative journals.

The polarization of the issue of animal cruelty, Scully ventures, is in the rhetoric. So from a religious and conservative perspective, he has endeavored to frame the issue in new ways.

“What moral standards should guide us in our treatment of animals?” he asks. “When must those standards be applied in law?”

Yet even with the revised presentation, the subject remains tough to broach. “I don’t want to know,” is how Scully describes the common, stubborn response.

On the last Sunday morning in September, as I flew home from San Antonio, I read a front-page story in the San Antonio Express-News that underscored his point. The piece, written by Lisa Sandberg and illustrated by Jerry Lara, told the complex story of some sad consequences of legislation that closed the last of three horse slaughterhouses in the United States last month.

Following the closure, horses are now being shipped across the border to Mexico for slaughter instead. There, confined to “killing boxes,” they are stabbed multiple times then hung to bleed to death.

Disturbing photos, taken by Lara, embodied Sandberg’s troubling narrative. I could see the reaction coming and so could the Express-News.

In its Metro section on the same day, its Public Editor Bob Richter took pains to defend “Horse Slaughter on the Border” as an “important story” and the newspaper as “justified in publishing it.”

“You might be wondering,” he wrote that Sunday, “what purpose is served by writing about a process that occurs, albeit under the radar, daily in U.S. meatpacking houses — where barnyard animals are butchered and processed to become main courses on U.S. dinner tables.”

I suspect few know the things that occur under the radar in our meatpacking plants. But in that context, Brett Thacker, managing editor of the Express-News, laid out the newspaper’s reasons for printing Sandberg’s story.

“We slaughter cows, pigs and chickens by the millions every year in this country,” he explained. But because horses hold a “special place in American lore” they have earned a status similar to dogs and cats.

In other words, we regard horses as “companion animals.” So, slaughtering them and eating them “induces [in us] a certain cringe factor.”

In the United States, killing companion animals for food is, in Thacker’s words, “socially unacceptable.” Which is why the government closed the nation’s horse slaughterhouses.

But if our treatment of animals is based on moral standards — as Scully believes it should be — sentimental categories such as “companion animal” should not be required to protect an animal from being brutally killed. Any animal, if it must be killed for food, should live and die humanely.

Since there are precedents for such notions in the sacred writings of nearly every faith tradition, The Humane Society of the United States last month launched an interfaith program — Animals and Religion — to this end. For 34 years, its chief executives were clergymen who came to The Humane Society after their pastoral careers.

This legacy has endowed the society with an appreciation of the power of religion in our personal lives and in our culture.

In announcing the Animals and Religion program Wayne Pacelle, current president and chief executive of The Humane Society wrote, “I encourage all people of faith to learn about the treatment of animals raised for food, to square their own consumption habits with religious principles, and to advocate for improved farm animal welfare policies at the local, state and national levels.”

As Scully realized while writing “Dominion,” “It’s only human caprice and economic convenience that say it should be otherwise.” In his book he called on us — and among us, especially conservative Christians — to reconsider our obligation to extend compassion to animals, not just to “companion animals” but to every creature of God.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].