> If you want people, who have never stepped foot in an office and have never turned on a computer, to believe that programmers are treated horribly because they have to type "gobilty-gook" all day long, it would be a pretty easy sell. Likewise, you can easily make the optimum care we can give an animal given our current understanding look like the worst treatment possible to an outsider without domain-specific understanding.

Not that it really matters, but I think this is a bad analogy. Code looks technical and mysterious to most people, not inane. You might be able to quote, say, code style guides that impose rigorous rules about formatting and make people think that the owners of those guides have rigid practices, but that would be nowhere near enough to convince people that programmers themselves are treated horribly, especially since you would have a hard time getting any of the programmers in question to agree.

(Now, if you look at working conditions, unpaid overtime, and the like, in environments like the game industry, you might be able to convince people quite correctly that some programmers are treated horribly...)