Lastly, none of my outside-the-mainstream positions on wildlife need distract from the very real problem of factory farming. I think that case should be dealt with first.

I could not agree more! But it does sound like we have very different ideas about what 'dealing with it' means.

I'd like all farms to be like the farm I grew up next to. I was much more of an animal lover as a child than I am now, but even then I thought that the animals next door seemed happy.

Ironically I used to worry about the morality of killing them for food, but it never occurred to me that their lives were so bad that they should be killed and then not eaten.