When you consider the hundreds of people entertained by the torture of a single animal in a circus compared to the single person enjoying eating the flesh of the innocent, meat eating is much worse for animals than circus animal cruelty.

Stark tortured a dozen or so animals continuously over the course of her life.

Assuming the average meat eater eats the equivalent of 2 chickens per week^1^, and given chickens are tortured for 8 weeks before being slaughtered, the average meat eater is torturing 16 animals continuously over the course of their life, solely for their own pleasure.

This does not excuse Stark's torture of animals, nor does it speak against Stark's cruelty as a person that embraces the torture rather than leaving it to factories. But if you're eating meat, you're closer to her than you'll probably like to admit.

^1^: very rough equivocation of a lot of systemic animal cruelty. For every chicken raised, one is thrown in the meat grinder without anesthesia for having the wrong sex. Every farm animal needs to eat, which requires tilling more land than in a vegan diet, which destroys ecosystems, killing the local wildlife. But there are also animals that give more protein per day that they are tortured, diets vary, and they also get a lot of protein from vegetarian products which torture less per gram of protein.