By Ashton Gunter, Alexandria (File photo)

To the editor:
Many of our highest grossing box office films are about animals, including “Finding Dory,” “The Jungle Book,”“Zootopia,”“The Secret Life of Pets,” and “Kung Fu Panda,” to name a few recent examples. Nearly half of our households include a dog and nearly 40 percent of households feature a cat. Two thirds of us view them as family members and cherish them accordingly. We love our animals to death.

Literally.

For every cat, dog, or other animal that we love and cherish, we put 500 through months of caging, crowding, deprivation, mutilation and starvation, before we take their very lives, cook them and eat them. And that doesn’t even include Dory and billions of other fish and seafood, because we haven’t figured out how to count individual aquatic animals that are used to feed humans or other animals.

The good news is that we have a choice every time we visit a restaurant or grocery store. We can choose live foods — yellow and green vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts, grains, as well as a rich variety of grain and nut-based products that approximate meat or dairy foods. Or, we can choose dead animals, their body parts, and other products of their abuse.

Which will it be?