Of Man and Manta

Back in the apartment she washed convulsively and in full view, as though her body had been soiled by flying blood. "Do you understand, now?" she asked as she toweled arms and breasts and donned a new bathrobe.
He stripped and washed, knowing that she would find him contaminated if he did not. "Why you have not eaten meat or eggs in several months? No," he said, giving her a chance to explain it herself. She needed a case to argue before she could settle down.
"If we can do this to our animals today, what will we be doing to ourselves tomorrow?" she demanded. Her voice was bitter, her eyes becoming red. "Don't you see how close we are already? This whole district—one mass of hutches for people, tier upon tier, each one fed by piped-in pellets called groceries and cleaned by communally flushing toilets. Every mind distracted by standard-formula canned entertainment that someone has programmed so there won't be too much fuss. They have to give tranquilizing drugs to the chickens so they won't turn to cannibalism when they get too crowded in their dark unnatural habitat—and we have drugs too, don't we, so we can stand it all alittle longer."
She walked jerkily to the kitchenette and brought out a quart bottle of gin. "Come, deaden your mind with me,"she invited, pouring two four-ounce portions.
"It is no kinder in nature," Subble pointed out. "What man does in the effort to feed himself is only a more disciplined extension of—"
"I know," she exclaimed. "I know, I know! It's absolutely logical, this terrible cruelty. So we have to starve the little calves of iron so their meat will be white, and force naturally cleanly pigs to wallow in filth to save a few pennies. There's reason to it all—but where is the heart in it? Isn't there some better way than this?"
"Emotionalism doesn't help."
"As chickens to the slaughter," she declaimed, brandishing her empty glass, "so mankind to the Bomb! I'm ready! Just water me and breed me and pluck me and—"
"If it is any consolation, I understand that intensive farming is on the decline," Subble said, disturbed by her attitude. "The need to rework the programs is evidence of that. Synthetics are more efficient."
"It doesn't matter," she said, collapsing into despair. "I still can't stand to be a member of a species that brutalizes this way. Veg is right. I'm an—an omnivore."
"All of us must be what we are—and it is not entirely evil. There are redemptions, even glories. You know that."
"My mind, not my heart," she said, sipping at another glass. "Ignorance is not bliss."