A conference of animal lovers had just heard how even chickens feel pleasure and have a life worth living.
Delegates had also adjusted to the uncomfortable information that 300 chickens are killed for food every second in America - and 90 million a year in New Zealand.
So when Agriculture Minister David Carter urged people not to let emotion get in the way of science in the battery hen debate there was some eye-rolling and head-shaking, though the mood remained polite, as it had throughout the conference.
Mr Carter, a farmer, was fronting for what is called the Great Debate, held at the end of the 22nd annual Companion Animal Conference (this year's theme was The Joyous World of Animals) and sat alongside some of the lawyers who fight animal abuse cases free for the SPCA.
One of them, John Haigh, QC, wasn't having the minister's comments.
"How can you remove the emotional issue when you're dealing with animals who are confined in this way?" he asked.
And keynote speaker Dr Jonathan Balcombe, an American biologist who lived in New Zealand as a child, and who has written books about the inner lives of animals, stood to tell Mr Carter the science is already clear.
"I would reiterate my phrase, sentience [the capacity to feel, from pleasure and joy to pain] is the bedrock of ethics and the science does show now that animals have rich emotional and cognitive lives and therefore they ought to be accorded the kind of considerations that we accord our own species, and that's what's relevant.
